Page 201 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

182 MAKING SENSE OF EARLY SOVIET SOUND
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made the United States as open to European and even Soviet films as Europe
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and the USSR were to American films –turned to one-way traffic from the United
States to the rest of the world. After a brief phase of dual and multi-language
production in Europe, foreign-language films met with increasing resistance in the
United States, while American films continued to increase their penetration of
foreign markets, generally in dubbed versions. For the still-young Soviet cinema,
which had achieved an extraordinary international prestige and corresponding
domestic privilege in the late 1920s, this was perhaps the most serious long-term
threat posed by sound. As the debate around ‘Socialism in one country’ was
resolved in Stalin’s favour, so the international propaganda role of Soviet cinema
dwindled in importance to the point where, by the time of Eisenstein’s return from
the United States in 1932, foreign travel and contacts were beginning to be
regarded as dangerous cosmopolitanism.

VERTOV: ENTHUSIASM FOR SOUND
Before considering the profound upheaval in Soviet life which was the background
to the introduction of sound, the views of Vertov on sound are worth noting,
especially since they directly challenged those of the ‘Statement’ and in fact closely
–if briefly–matched the new mood of the ‘construction’ period. In 1925 Vertov had
already anticipated the potential of sound reproduction as a mass medium with his
film Radio-Cine-Pravda [Radiokinopravda] and manifesto ‘Cine-Pravda and Radio-
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Pravda’. As early as 1923 he foresaw ‘radio newsreels’ linked with film
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newsreels and, with his background in Futurist ‘noise music’ experiments, he
experimented more fully than any of his contemporaries with ‘implied’ sound
through sequences of sound-related images in, for example, Forward, Soviet!
[Shagai, sovet!, 1926]. In 1930, when he was making one of the earliest full-length
Soviet ‘direct-sound’ films, Enthusiasm [Entuziasm, a.k.a. The Donbass
Symphony [Sinfoniya Donbassa]], he commented obliquely on the ‘Statement’ in a
question-and-answer article for the journal Kino-Front:

Declarations on the need for non-correspondence between the visible and the
audible, like declarations on the need to make only natural sound or talking
films, are, as they say, not worth tuppence. In sound, as in silent, cinema we
draw a clear distinction between only two types of film: documentaries (with
authentic dialogue and sound, etc.) and played films (with artificial dialogue
and sound, etc., specially created during the shooting).
Neither correspondence nor non-correspondence between the visible and
the audible is by any means obligatory for either documentaries or played
films. Sound and silent shots are both edited according to identical principles:
the montage may make them correspond or not, or interweave in whatever
combination is required. The important thing is to end the absurd confusion
caused by categorising films as talking, noise or sound films. 37