Page 199 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

180 MAKING SENSE OF EARLY SOVIET SOUND
How elementary work on disjunctive sound/image relationships might develop to
the stage of ‘orchestral counterpoint’ is not explained and has received little
attention until recently, doubtless because there was so little evidence of it in early
Soviet sound cinema. However, Kristin Thompson has surveyed a group of early
sound films for instances of counterpoint and, perhaps not surprisingly, found
more traces than might have been expected from a reading of conventional
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histories. The potential value of this survey is, however, somewhat limited by its
narrow, Formalist terms of reference. Taking the proposal of the ‘Statement’ at
face value, ‘counterpoint’ is projected into the sound period in a classic example of
what Paul Willemen has termed the ‘audio-visual phantasy’, whereby ‘all relations
between the two blocks [sound and vision] become entirely external, formal,
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optional and ultimately dispensable’. Thus Thompson does not attempt to
correlate the political and wider cultural upheaval of the transition period with that
in cinema, while unfortunately categorising such otherwise innovative films as The
Great Consoler [Velikii uteshitel’] and Three Songs of Lenin [Tri pesni o o Lenine,
1934] as ‘close to Hollywood’ or ‘playing safe’, because they do not rely on
ostentatiously disjunctive sound-image relations. She finds Kozintsev and
Trauberg’s Alone [Odna, 1931] the most interesting specimen, though does not
mention that it was in fact shot as a silent film and experimentally post-
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synchronised, no doubt under the influence of the ‘Statement’. Above all, the
problem of spoken language–symptomatically treated in the ‘Statement’ as a
limitation–is not directly addressed. Such limitations in what was none the less a
pioneering study merely underline the problems that still persist in studies of
Soviet cinema which venture outside the canonic periods and personnel.
Given the lack of any significant sequel to the ‘Statement’s’ call for counterpoint,
it seems possible that this was little more than a tentative, theoretical move in
defence of montage–an estimate supported by Pudovkin’s collaborator, Anatoli
Golovnya, who attributed it to ‘imperfect knowledge of sound films’. Golovnya’s
claim that, when Pudovkin ‘had been able to digest the technique and prospects of
sound, it was quite clear that the ideas expounded [in the ‘Statement’] had no
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lasting significance for him’, is less plausible. This ignores Pudovkin’s almost
unique experiments in counterpoint and ‘asynchrony’, both in his delayed first
sound film The Deserter [1933] and in its predecessor A Simple Case [Prostoi
sluchai, 1932], originally planned as a sound film, although released silent, and still
showing signs of his somewhat doctrinaire attempt to use sound, evoking ‘definite
and exact associations’, as a basis for a non-diegetic ‘visual impression’. 26
Eisenstein, on the other hand, appears to have moved on rapidly from the
‘Statement’ programme, with its avoidance of speech, to a characteristically
ingenious (if implausible) position, influenced by his meeting with Joyce in Paris
and based directly upon ‘the syntax of inner speech as distinct from outer speech’:

And how obvious it is that the raw material of sound film is not dialogue.
The true material of sound film is, of course, monologue. 27