Page 263 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

244 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
7 Khmyr is the name of the principal character in Happiness.
8 Eisenstein’s review, entitled ‘The Possessors’ [Styazhateli] (the working title of the
film, a reference to the seventeenth-century debate about monastic land-owning), was
written in February 1935 but remained unpublished until it appeared in the fifth
volume of his posthumous Izbrannye proizvedeniya [Selected Works] (Moscow:
1968), pp. 231—5.

10
MAKING SENSE OF EARLY SOVIET SOUND
Ian Christie

1 C.A.Lejeune, Cinema (London: 1931), p. 167.
2 J.Grierson, ‘Summary and Survey: 1935’, in: F.Hardy (ed.), Grierson on
Documentary (London: 1966), p. 182. The ambiguities of Grierson’s position on
Soviet cinema (as on much else) remain to be fully explored. Both in this article and
elsewhere he slips between admiration for ‘exciting cinema’ and contempt for the
‘airs and ribbons of art’ that have distracted Soviet film-makers from ‘coming to grips’
with the issues around them.
3 A.Bazin, ‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema’, (1955) in: What Is Cinema?
(Berkeley, Calif.: 1967), pp. 23—6.
4 As Peter Wollen termed it in the discussion following his paper ‘Cinema and
Technology: A Historical Overview’, in: T.de Lauretis and S.Heath (eds), The
Cinematic Apparatus (London: 1980), p. 24.
5 G.Nowell-Smith, ‘On the Writing of the History of Cinema: Some Problems’,
Edinburgh ’77 Magazine, p. 11.
6 See: N.Burch, To the Distant Observer (London: 1979), ch. 14. Burch makes a case
for regarding the five years after the commercial introduction of sound in 1927 as a
‘Golden Age’ for European cinema.
7 See, for instance: D.Robinson, World Cinema: A Short History (London: 1973), p.
175. Other ‘short histories’, such as G.Mast, A Short History of the Movies (New
York: 1971), omit even this cursory remark on the introduction of sound.
8 Ye.Gabrilovich, ‘Adventures and Encounters of a Scenarist’, in: L.Schnitzer, J.
Schnitzer and M.Martin (eds), Cinema in Revolution (trans. and ed. D.Robinson)
(French edn, Paris: 1966) (London: 1973), pp. 168—9.
9 First published in translation as Composing for the Films (New York: 1947), and
attributed to Eisler alone. The revised ‘original’ version, attributed to both authors,
appeared in West Germany in 1969; I have used the French translation of this:
Musique du cinéma (trans. J.-P.Hammer) (Paris: 1972), ch. 5.
10 Adorno and Eisler, pp. 85—6.
11 There is evidence of an interdisciplinary group which met in the early 1930s to
discuss topics such as ‘inner speech’; see: H.Deakin, ‘Linguistic Models in Early
Soviet Cinema’, Cinema Journal, vol. 17, no. 1 (Fall 1977), n. 11, referring to research
by Annette Michelson.
12 Paul Willemen extended his original discussion of ‘inner speech’, ‘Reflections on
Eikhenbaum’s Concept of Internal Speech in the Cinema’, Screen, vol. 15, no. 4 (Winter
1974—5), pp. 57—79, in: ‘Cinematic Discourse–The Problem of Inner Speech’, Screen,
vol. 22, no. 3 (1981), pp. 63—93.