Page 209 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

190 MAKING SENSE OF EARLY SOVIET SOUND
Miscueing

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Several possibilities opened up by a limited form of ‘local’ asynchrony are explored
in Boris Barnet’s masterly first sound film, Outskirts [1933]. This opens with what
appears to be an explicit homage to the ‘talking horse’ of Dovzhenko’s The Arsenal
[1929], which alerts the spectator to a whole metaphoric level of sound use
throughout the film. Twice the sound of gunfire–the film is set during the First
World War in a small town–is transposed from its diegetic source to another,
purposefully ironic, source. Thus the sound of troops shooting to disperse crowds
gathered in the town square on the eve e ve of war is laid over the image of a boy
with a rattle; while the machines installed in the town’s boot factory, to step up
production after the 1917 February Revolution, also make a sound like gunfire,
signifying the continuation of the war by the Provisional Government. More than
any other film of this era, Outskirts showed how sound had indeed become, in
Jakobson’s term, the new ‘dominant’ or ‘focusing component’ of Soviet cinema s
expressive apparatus. 58

FROM ‘INNER SPEECH’ TO ‘OUTER SPEECH’
Instead of looking for evidence of the survival of montage procedures, such as
counterpoint or radical ‘asynchronism’ in the early sound period, it may in fact be
more productive to see this long transition as one of negotiation between two
distinct regimes of discourse. The montage regime, with its origins in the early
post-Revolutionary agitki and the analytical experiments of Kuleshov, Vertov and
Shub, had become increasingly formalised and intellectualised as an artistic system.
By contrast, the emergent Soviet ‘popular’ cinema remained highly eclectic and
pragmatic, drawing from a wide range of foreign examples and shamelessly
imitating them. ‘Inner speech’ was proposed first as the theoretical ‘guarantee’ of
montage’s coherence and was later taken up, notably by Eisenstein, as a model for
the further elaboration of the montage system.
The threat of the new sound regime lay in its apparent alliance with a series of
established ‘public discourses’–theoretical, literary, political–and the danger of the
cinema losing its hard-won specificity, identified with montage, by collapsing into
one or other of these. Outer speech appeared to threaten the sophisticated inner
speech model with banalisation and, indeed, with forms of censorship and
repression unknown in the silent period. But this is not to suggest that ‘inner
speech’ no longer played a part in the construction of sound cinema: on the
contrary, its role was to be redefined as spectators adjusted to the new address of
the talkies. The new situation can be characterised by reference to another strand
in Formalist theory, Voloshinov’s paper (from the Bakhtin school) on ‘Reported
Speech’, in which he defines the problem posed by dialogue: