Early Sound Counterpoint

Early Sound CounterpointAuthor(s): Kristin ThompsonReviewed work(s):Source: Yale French Studies, No. 60, Cinema/Sound (1980), pp. 115-140Published by: Yale University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2930008 .

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Kristin Thompson

Early Sound Counterpoint

A. Defining Counterpoint

The American introduction of successful sound technology in the late 1920s brought forth considerable reaction from foreign theorists, critics, and filmmakers. While often cautiously admitting the aesthetic possibilities of the new filmic element, these people were almost universal in their fear of what the "talkie" might do to the newly developed silent film art. Among the early theoretical views of sound, the "Statement"' of Sergei Eisenstein, signed by Vsevolod Pudovkin and Gregori Alexandrov, has held an important place. These major Soviet filmmakers saw potential dangers in the new technique, but did not therefore reject it; they suggested instead a way sound could be used to greatest effect in film-in counterpoint to the image.

Eisenstein's hopes and fears for the sound cinema were necessarily based almost entirely upon his theoretical understanding of cinema and any reading he may have done of reports from abroad. The "Statement" appeared on August 5, 1928; up to that time, according to Jay Leyda,2 the only sound screenings in Russia had been demonstrations of the German Tri-Ergon system (in 1926) and the Soviet Tager system (1927 and 1928; later named Tagephon). Couched in rather general terms, the "Statement" tends to give the impression that the Soviet directors were calling for a more radical formal usage of sound than was in practice in any other country during the early sound period.

I Sergei Eisenstein, Vsvolod Pudovkin, and Gregori Alexandrov, "A Statement," trans. and ed., Jay Leyda, Film Form (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1949), pp. 257-259.

2Jay Leyda, Kino (New York: Collier Books, 1973), p. 278.

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Yet the unavailability of the early Soviet sound films has left this period a virtual blank in English-language histories. Factors like Eisenstein's absence from Russia during this crucial time, plus the late development of sound technology in the Soviet Union, plus the imposed doctrine of Socialist Realism from 1934 onward, have added up to create an impression of relative inactivity during the years 1931 to 1933. Our accounts of Soviet film history tend to place the end of the montage movement in 1930, then skip to Chapayev (1933) and other anti-montage films. The major filmmakers apparently spent their time planning sound films that could not be made for one reason or another (e.g., Pudovkin's fiasco with A Simple Case, finally made silent); alternatively, they made sound films which followed a safer, non-montage line. Leyda, our key source of information on Soviet films, fosters this view by dismissing the sound "Statement" as basically non-influential, calling it, "of historic interest but not of great help in the crises [i.e., presumably, technical problems and official strictures] to come."3 Enthusiasm and Deserter hold reputations as the rare exceptions, counterpoint films that actually did get made.

In fact, counterpoint films may have been rare, but not so much so as this view would suggest. I have surveyed eleven films, mostly made between 1930 and 1934 by the major directors from the silent period.4 Of these, two seem to me consistently to use some kinds of sound-image disjunction we may provisionally call "counterpoint": Alone and Deserter. Several others use occasional counterpoint:

3Ibid., p. 279. 4These are, in order of release: Romance sentimentale (Eisenstein and Alexandrov,

1930); Enthusiasm (Entuziazm, Vertov, 1931); The Road to Life (Putyovka v zhizn, Nikolai Ekk, 1931); Alone (Odna, Kozintsev and Trauberg, 1931); Golden Mountains (Zlatya gori, Sergei Yutkevich, 1931); Outskirts (Okraina, Boris Barnet, 1933); Deserter (Pudovkin, 1933); The Great Consoler (Velikii uteshitel, Kuleshov, 1933); Lieutenant Kizhe (Poruchik Kizhe, Alexandre Feinzimmer, 1934); Revolt of the Fishermen (Vostaniye rybakov, Erwin Piscator, 1934); Three Songs of Lenin (Tri pesni o Leninye, Vertov, 1934).

My thanks to Jacques Ledoux and the staff of the Royal Film Archive of Belgium, who permitted me to view and take stills from these films, as well as to the American Association of University Women, which supported this research.

I also appreciate the helpful comments on the manuscript given me by David Bordwell and Janet Staiger.

Several of these films are available for 16mm rental in the USA. Audio-Brandon distributes Romance sentimentale and The Road to Life. The Museum of Modem Art distributes Enthusiasm.

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Enthusiasm, The Road to Life, Outskirts, and Romance sentimentale. The rest have at most a couple of isolated disjunctive sound devices: The Great Consoler, Lieutenant Kizhe, Revolt of the Fishermen, and Three Songs of Lenin. I include Romance sentimentale here because, although a French film, it was the only work completed during this period by two of the "Statement"'s signers.

The existence of a body of early Soviet sound films offers the possibility of clarifying what the filmmakers may have meant by the term "counterpoint." A simple definition as a disjunction between sound and image will not do. First, it is vague; was counterpoint different from the stylized sound usage recommended by European writers? Second, the definition does not deal with the functions which counterpoint devices played in the films. Styles are defined not only by their typical devices, but also by those devices' typical functions.

Briefly, the "Statement" says that the early sound period in the Soviet Union would need two stages, one of experiment simply with non-synchronized sound and later one with counterpoint. The latter concept remains vague; the "Statement" never defines it. Its last two paragraphs do suggest that sound will be used to continue the tradition of silent montage, providing an additional material for the creation of ideas and feelings without an excess of words. Eisenstein indicates an avoidance of spoken language by his emphasis on the international character of the resulting films:

Such a method for constructing the sound-film will not confine it to a national market, as must happen with the photographing of plays, but will give a greater possibility than ever before for the circulation throughout the world of a filmically expressed idea.5

The Soviet filmmakers were largely prepared, through their deep grounding in film theory, to welcome sound as another montage element. They seem not to have considered it as a thing apart, requiring a whole new approach, as so many other filmmakers did; instead they were able to see it as a filmic device similar to the image devices of the silent period. In "A Dialectical Approach to Film Form" (1929), Eisenstein put conflict between optical and acoustical elements into his list of types of montage conflict; the list also

5Eisenstein et al., p. 259.

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includes conflict of light, tempo, graphics, and other image elements.6 The sound film was simply a major extension of the montage principle.

Eisenstein's writings of the period suggest that he did not conceive counterpoint as a radical and constant disjunction between sound and image. Like many of the contemporary European theorists, his main fear was the dominance of synchronized dialogue. When asked during his 1930 lecture at the Sorbonne what he thought of the talking films, he replied:

I think that the 100% talking film is a stupidity, and I believe that everyone is of my opinion.

But the sound film is a thing of great interest and the future belongs to it. In particular the films of Mickey.

The interest in these films is that the sound is not used as a naturalistic element.7

Elsewhere he explained his admiration for the Mickey Mouse films: "In these, for example, a graceful movement of the foot is accompanied by appropriate music, which is, as it were, the audible expres- sion of the mechanical action."8 For Eisenstein, synchronized sound was not unacceptable, as long as the synchronization was not of a naturalistic kind.

But this leaves the concept of counterpoint as unclear as before. If any non-naturalistic use of sound counts, then how may we distinguish Soviet audio usage from that of the other imaginative filmmakers like Clair, Hitchcock, and Gosho? Is there indeed any significant differ- ence? To further clarify what Soviet counterpoint was, we may exam- ine the types of non-naturalistic sound-image devices employed in these early Russian films; by analyzing the functions of these devices, we may see how they are specific to the montage movement.

To what extent are other directors' films relevant to the "State- ment" 's definition of counterpoint? After all, most of the filmmakers did not sign the essay, nor, as far as we know, did most of them write

6Sergei Eisenstein, "A Dialectical Approach to Film Form," Film Form, trans. and ed., Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1949), p. 54; see also his discussion of sound as part of a "monistic ensemble" in "The Unexpected," Film Form, pp. 20-21, 24, 26-27.

7Sergei Eisenstein, "Les Principes du nouveau cinema russe," La Revue du cinema, Vol. II, #9 (April 1, 1930), p. 24.

8Sergei Eisenstein, "The Future of the Film," interview with Mark Segal, Close Up, Vol. VII, #2 (August, 1930), p. 143.

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their own theoretical views. Certainly few were as daring in their uses of sound as one suspects Eisenstein would have been at this point in his career. Yet these early films display a considerable homogeneity in their consistent usage of certain sound devices and functions. If we may safely consider a number of silent Soviet films by different directors as belonging to a unified movement, then the montage principles which carried over into the sound period maintained this relative unity of approach. (By unity here I do not wish to imply that the Soviet directors did not have distinctive personal styles, but only that a significant stylistic overlap existed among their films.) Taken as a whole, the eleven films under consideration here demonstrate a relatively successful transition to sound by the Soviet cineastes, in the sense that they avoided almost entirely any period of "canned theatre."

Predictably Kuleshov, whose theory had always been more conservative than those of his contemporaries, created one of the sound films of this group with almost no stylization of sound. His silent work had been largely a series of attempts to systematize classical continuity usage. (The most famous of the "experiments" are based on such familiar continuity devices as the eye-line match and shot/reverse- shot.) The Great Consoler offers almost nothing we would consider montage; instead it reflects Kuleshov's main interests in acting and narrative construction. Similarly Erwin Piscator's Revolt of the Fisher- men contains almost no montage-influenced material. A visitor in Russia from Germany, Piscator must have been familiar with the "Statement," which had been published in Germany; only the first sequence of his film makes any sustained effort to utilize montage cutting and sound, however. Finally, Lieutenant Kizhe's director Feinzimmer creates a style more akin to the comic European tradition than to the montage movement.

All the other directors, however, were commited to some variant of the montage style and had made silent films using it. In spite of their dependence upon mise-en-scene stylization in their early films, Kozintsev and Trauberg picked up the prevailing Soviet fast cutting and dynamic compositions by the time they made New Babylon in 1929. Pudovkin and Vertov were of course two of the strongest members of the movement. Sergei Yutkevich and Boris Barnet made

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excellent, if less original, films in the twenties. Yutkevich was particularly eclectic, borrowing freely from the major European styles as well as from his fellow montage filmmakers. Barnet's films at times show strong touches of Vertov and Eisenstein. On the whole, we can assume that because these directors were all utilizing montage principles in their filmmaking, their sound practice would be likely to continue to display at least some stylistic overlap. In addition, by the end of the silent period, the montage style was so well established that virtually any Soviet film contained some example, however cliched and limited, of it. Such old-fashioned, conservative directors as Protazanov and Alexander Ivanovsky occasionally inserted a bit of fast cutting or dynamic low angles of statues against the sky. Thus we might expect to find sound counterpoint cropping up in otherwise conventional films; in fact, the only film of the eleven which contains no examples of it is Three Songs of Lenin.

In looking at sound functions in these early films, I will use a schema based on Eisenstein's early montage theory. For Eisenstein, montage was a way for the filmmaker to control audience response. This response occurred in a sort of chain reaction, beginning on the relatively simple level of perception, building up from perception to stimulate emotion, and finally, reaching the highest level, cognition. I emphasize that these three levels were not seen as separate processes, but as three stages, each increasing in the amount of stimulus needed, of the same fundamental response process. (This view is basic to Eisenstein's early theory; for a more detailed account, see David Bordwell's "Eisenstein's Epistemological Shift. "9) Since a film device in the montage style functions to stimulate the spectator to one of these levels of response, we should be able to classify individual examples from the films within these three categories. One general type of sound-image function, then, will be perceptual "roughening." This term implies that the film confronts the spectator with an unusual device which is difficult to perceive smoothly; the purpose, in the montage theory, is to stimulate the spectator to a more intense, active perception. In this heightened state, the spectator will be more

9David Bordwell, "Eisenstein's Epistemological Shift," Screen, Vol. 15, #4 (Win- ter 1974/5), pp. 32-46.

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susceptible to stimulation of the emotional and cognitive levels. My three categories will be perceptual roughening, emotional effect, and cognitive effect. In laying out the types of counterpoint devices, I will attempt to show which category of functions each performed within the films examined.

These examples will ultimately demonstrate, I believe, that the Soviet montage movement's sound distinguished itself largely by its use of the perceptual and cognitive functions. Virtually no films of this period outside the experimental movements used purely perceptual effects to any extent. Such devices depend upon calling attention to the material of the montage elements apart from any contribution to narrative; the strong narrative motivation of Hollywood and western European films almost inevitably suppressed such usage. These films did, of course, use ideas, both thematic and narrative; but more often psychological motivation (Hitchcock's famous "knife" scene in Black- mail) or genre conventions like comedy, musical numbers, and sus- pense (as in Le Million, The Love Parade, and M, respectively) seem to have provided the justification for stylized sound. But the Soviet montage movement, with its tradition of intellectual montage and propagandistic use of cinema, tended to use sound devices to convey abstract and rhetorical ideas quite frequently.

B. Types and Functions of Counterpoint Devices

1. Manipulations of Only the Sound Track

One might expect to find the Soviet directors using manipulation of sound quality to achieve a non-naturalistic relation of sound and image. But these eleven films contain only one such example. In Deserter, an interior dialogue scene is followed by a scene of the protagonist and his comrade on a tram; the sound track is dead during this scene. Suddenly a strange, reverberating clang occurs, and the people on the tram get up and jump out; a clash with police follows. The clang is cymbal sound run backward. It represents a diegetic sound, since the characters react to it, but the distortion of the sound itself has no apparent function beyond roughening perception.

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Extended silence is another relatively rare device. Once sound was introduced, the Soviet filmmakers seem to have been determined to fill much of the track. (By silence here I do not mean the usual pauses between distinct sounds, but stretches of dead track without even ambient noise.) Again, Deserter is an exception, with a number of entire sequences played mostly or entirely with a dead track. These scenes come at what appear to be arbitrary points; for example, while most scenes of strikers' demonstrations and battles are accompanied by appropriate crowd babble and shouts, one is played with no sound. Nothing cues us to feel or think differently about the strikers in this one scene; instead the effect on the audience is perceptual- the sudden switch to complete silence heightens and renews our perception of events. (This may be necessary because Deserter contains several similar strike scenes.)

Alone, on the other hand, uses a brief silent scene for an emotional function. After an extended cheerful opening scene of the heroine's breakfast and meeting with her fiance, accompanied by overly sweet Shostakovich, the image fades out on a high angle of the street as she leaves the frame. A fade-in reveals the same framing and the heroine enters, reading a letter; she learns that instead of receiving the teaching post in Leningrad she had requested, she has been assigned to Siberia. The music had faded with the image; after the fade-in there is silence, functioning here to stress her shock and disappoint- ment. Deserter and Alone contain the only major uses of silence in the eleven films examined; they also happen to be the two most extreme films of the set in their use of sound counterpoint.

In quite a number of cases, though, the films utilize non-fidelity of sound; that is, real, non-manipulated sound synchronized with inappropriate images. (This is the kind of thing that Clair uses at times, as in Le Million, when the hero's friend drops a plate and we hear a cymbal clang, or when two men run into each other and a bass drum sounds.)

The Great Consoler, generally remarkable for its lack of counterpoint, has one isolated instance when a prisoner in a jail cell hurls a stool across the room; the sound synchronized with its impact is a cymbal clash. No emotional effect is apparent (as, for example, with

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the humorous use of the same device in the Le Million example just cited), nor is there any conceptual motivation; again, the device simply roughens perception.

Several jokes in Outskirts depend on non-fidelity. In the first scene, various characters are loitering about a public park; among them is a cart-horse, who remarks wearily (with general lip synchronization), "Oh, my God, my God." Later, the townsfolk meet at the railroad station to send off the young men on their way to the front early in World War I; the blasts of steam from the engine are accompanied by synchronized shouts of "Hurrah!," echoing the cries of the people. The first scene ends in a clash between strikers and police, with machine guns turned against the workers and sympathizers; a final shot shows the heroine crouching in the park as a "machine gun" noise is heard off; then a child walks through the shot twirling a toy which is making the noise (a joke which perhaps only the Soviets could fully appreciate; see Fig. 1). In all cases comedy provides the

41.~~~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ t. Fig. 1

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motivation for the device; the non-faithful sound remains largely in the realm of emotional effects here.

Finally, non-fidelity can function for conceptual purposes. In Enthusiasm workers cut down church spires with saws; as these fall, their impact is synchronized with gun shots. A man in The Golden Mountains dreams of parading in fancy clothes before his fellow workers; in his dream, the men play humble accordions, but the accompanying sound is a pompous orchestral march. The heroine of Alone goes to the corrupt and lazy president of the local Soviet for help; images of her shouting to rouse him to action are synchronized with the sound of an alarm clock. Thus non-fidelity, although a device used in other countries as well, sometimes served a sort of "intellectual montage" purpose in the Soviet sound film.

The sound "Statement" warned against cuts on the sound track corresponding exactly with cuts on the image track; in other words, it deplored the possiblity of constantly employed on-screen diegetic sound. In fact most of these films use off-screen diegetic sound and sounds which overlap cuts. But we might also expect to find the filmmakers cutting their soundtracks with the rapidity and disjunc- tions they had developed in their image editing during the silent period. Two films do use abrupt, discontinuous editing of sound; these are again Deserter and Alone. Directly after the silent scene described above, where the heroine of Alone reads the letter assign- ing her to Siberia, the dead track cuts to barrel organ music; the effect is not of a barrel organ beginning to play, but of an abrupt cut- in to the middle of an ongoing sound. This music continues over several shots of the empty street as the heroine walks and stops before a china shop. As she stares blankly at the window display, the organ music cuts out, 19 frames of dead track follow, then a woman's voice begins a sad, non-diegetic song over. A more remarkable scene follows as the heroine goes to an office to complain about her assignment. She calls someone from a telephone booth there. The scene alternates a medium close-up framing of her taken from inside the booth and a medium shot of the booth from outside, with her back visible through the window (Figs. 2 and 3). A babble of voices mixed with music fades up inside the booth as she places the call; on

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Fig. 2

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the first cut outside the booth, this is replaced by a similar babble and clack of typewriters. The babble and music return on the cut-back into the booth; on the second cut outside, babble with no typewriters is heard. (In neither space do we hear the heroine's voice.) As she hangs up the phone in this shot, there is an abrupt cut on the track to silence. This whole alternation of sounds has apparently been moti- vated by the cuts to different spaces, yet the sounds are not consistent between spaces-if the sound of the office workers' voices can be heard in the booth, why not the typewriters? and why should the office sounds cut out when she hangs up?

Finally, at the end of this office scene, the heroine's appeal has been rejected; she must teach in Siberia or not at all. She stands undecided in the hallway, watched by an old man. Over a long shot of the two (Fig. 4) we hear a man's voice in a cheerful Shostakovich song. The old man's lips move, and a title is used to convey his dialogue, which declares that no one wants to go to "that hole." This series of shots follows the title:

0.-

Fig. 4

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MCU The old man. MCU Reverse shot, the heroine. Old man's voice, off: "Life will be beautiful for

you!" [i.e., if she gives up the teaching post and marries her fiance] MS The pair. Dead track as she rips up the official form in her hand. She looks

at him and shouts: "I'll go!" [lip synchronization] LS The pair. Dead track, pause, she leaves.

Here Kozintsev and Trauberg use a title, an off-screen voice, and an on-screen voice in quick succession, along with an ironically inappropriate, cheerful song and patches of dead track; this and the telephone and office scenes preceding it are the most varied, daring, and sustained use of contrapuntal sound in the eleven films examined. In all three examples of abrupt sound cutting from Alone, the narrative motivation is unclear. The cutting works primarily on the perceptual level (though the individual sounds, like the sad song in the first example, have emotional functions).

Deserter uses abrupt cutting of one musical passage for a more clearly emotional effect. Over a scene of the heroine selling a workers' newspaper on the street, passages of a non-diegetic, cheery waltz alternate with the woman's cries. These individual sounds are each relatively sustained at first; then the cutting becomes more rapid, until only a note or two of the music or a single word will occur in quick succession. After this Pudovkin presents the music by itself, but with sonic "jump cuts" which destroy the rhythm and melody of the piece, jumbling it randomly together. This corresponds with quicker cutting of the images, showing people walking by on the sidewalk; it leads up to the arrival of police who confiscate the papers. Unlike in Alone, the sound cutting here follows the emotional development of the scene, from the ironically serene images of bourgeois passers-by to the tension of the police raid.

2. Manipulation of Only the Image Track

In spite of these few very successful uses of disjunctive sound editing, most directors do not seem to have developed extensively their silent montage theories for sound. Instead, much of the sound-

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image counterpoint in these films results from a manipulation of the image with relatively extended passages of sound over it. Again, this manipulation may function perceptually; by breaking up the image in some way, the filmmaker discourages a fusion of sound and image for the spectator. Deserter contains many scenes in which Pudovkin inserts series of single frames of black leader into shots. This happens first in the opening scene, where four "shots" in a row show a chain falling; one passage of chain sound effects extends across the entire action. But one "shot" has a flickering appearance; it actually alternates single-frame shots of the chain with frames of black leader (see Fig. 5, a strip of the film itself). Numerous other scenes, particularly of fast action such as demonstrations and riots, use this same device. In some cases, the device arguably plays an emotional function; in others, like the chain example, the effect is purely perceptual.

In Outskirts, a factory boss throws down a seris of boots to accompanying diegetic thumps. But our view of the shoes landing in a heap is a series of jump cuts, which destroys the synchronization between the sound effects and the visuals. Again, no specific emotional or conceptual function motivates this device. Certainly in these examples, some sort of sound counterpoint exists, even though the sound itself is simply a single passage of onscreen diegetic effects.

More often, the manipulation of the image in relation to its accompanying sound has an emotional function. The opening scene of Revolt of the Fishermen uses fast cutting of shots of men chopping up fish on a boat at sea; the accompanying sound is a blend of non- diegetic music and non-synchronized shouts of the men. The rapid visual montage of fish, knives, and hands creates an atmosphere of confusion and tension, preparing the way for the moment when one of the men cuts his hand with a cleaver. Only after this action does the conceptual point of the scene come forward: that the owners have provided too few men per boat, causing a work speed-up and danger- ous conditions. The sound of the opening scene helps motivate the spectator's sympathy for the revolt which forms the main action of the film.

Similarly, Romance sentimentale begins with an extended fast-cut passage of leafless trees, with quick musical accompaniment. Parodying

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12~~~'1

Fig. 5

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current European avant-garde usage, Eisenstein and Alexandrov introduce canted framings, rolling movements in which the image goes upside-down (Fig. 6), static upside-down shots, fast motion, slow motion, backward motion, and tilts up and down. The combination of camera tricks, cutting, and music creates what Eisenstein would probably call a tonal effect of tension and bleakness; this prepares the way for the only narrative action of the film, a woman singing a sad song and remembering her past love.

1~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~1

Fig. 6 The Road to Life presents a dance in a tavern with diegetic dance

music and shouts; the images are handled in much the same way as they would have been in a silent film dance scene. The camera spins on its axis, creating a seris of extended whip pans. A number of shots are done through prisms, creating multiple images of the same figure in the frame. Here the emotional effect of the lively dance is the motivation. Lieutenant Kizhe also uses special photographic effects to

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create sound-image disjunction. A sprightly Prokofiev march for fifes, bugles, and drums plays diegetically as the film opens, accompanying a series of shots of soldiers drilling and servants cleaning. The cutting and gestures of all the men correspond to the beats of the music, so much so that the men move like mechanical toys. But most of these shots are done with split screen, and a second image of each man appears, slightly fuzzy, at the left half of the screen (Figs. 7 and 8). Thus each man or group's gestures match not only the music, but also the identical gestures of the duplicate image. This is not exactly counterpoint, but the treatment does destroy the naturalistic sync- sound relations which were Eisenstein's main targets in his writings. (In fact, Lieutenant Kizhe's comic opening captures something of the quality of the perfectly synchronized Mickey Mouse cartoons.) In general Kizhe is the closest of these Soviet films to the comic stylization of early Clair films. Its story and stylized images provide the main points of comparison, however; the sound-image play of the first scene virtually disappears subsequently.

I~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ _

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Fig. 8

Alone takes Pudovkin's perceptual device of blank leader inserts in this case white-and uses it in combination with sound for an emotional effect. In the final sequence, the heroine, who has become dangerously ill while teaching in Siberia, boards a plane which will take her to a Moscow hospital. As the villagers cheer her promise to return, the image cutting gradually accelerates. Triumphant Shosta- kovich music plays as the scene builds up to an emotional climax; finally single frames of a low-angle shot of the plane alternate with single frames of white leader for about 30 shots, ending as the plane pulls away to take off. The cutting and music combine to create an extreme moment of triumph as the film ends. (This moment may have been ideologically necessary, since Alone presents the bleakest portrayal of contemporary life I have encountered in a Soviet film.)

3. Conceptual Juxtaposition of Sound and Image

In no case did manipulations of the visuals to create a non- naturalistic sound-image relationship play a conceptual role in the films examined. Quite often, however, sound devices themselves

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functioned conceptually in relationship to images, affecting the meaning of the images considerably. Several films use music which is clearly inappropriate to the images. In some cases the effect is ironic. In Deserter, a starving striker tries to steal food from a table in an outdoor cafe. The scene begins with a long-held medium shot of a rich man apparently asleep at his table. (Fig. 9). There is no movement

Fig. 9 for about thirty seconds, then he wakes and orders his food; throughout this and the rest of the scene, loud, cheerful music plays. As the food arrives at the table, the music switches to a conga rhythm for the attempted theft and the expulsion of the worker. Throughout, the music is completely inappropriate, both to the slow rhythm of the gestures and to the implications of the action. The result is a bitter conceptual irony comparable to Eisenstein's visual treatment of Keren- sky in the Tsar's chambers in October.

Golden Mountains also uses music to undercut the most obvious line of action, in a factory scene. The manager tries to impress the

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discontented workers by presenting a gold watch to one of them. During the presentation, the manager is friendly and deferential; the workers stare in delighted astonishment as the watch is lifted from its box. Yet the music which accompanies the entire scene is overly sweet and triumphant; although we sympathize with the workers, we are cued not to share their delight at the management's generosity. A similar device occurs in the first sequence of Alone. As the heroine rises cheerfully in the morning, does her exercises, and gets breakfast, we hear birds singing, and exaggeratedly sweet music. This music continues through the scene, apparently matching shift in the smiling heroine's thoughts exactly. Yet the whole thing is so sweet and so cheerful that the spectator cannot but suspect an ironic implication. This exaggeration continues as the heroine and her fiance discuss their future together, repeatedly exclaiming, "How wonderful life will be!" This lengthy sequence leads directly into the silent scene on the street, described earlier, in which the heroine discovers she must go to Siberia. Much of Alone's subsequent bleakness derives from the action's contrast to this ebullient opening.

Beyond this negative function of ironically undercutting the apparent implications of the images, sound can function positively to control implications of a scene. In Outskirts, images of a shoe factory are intercut with shots of machine guns at the front during World War I. By continuing the sound effects of a machine gun over all these shots, Barnet suggests that the factory, with its contract to make soldiers' boots, is contributing to the war as much as does the actual fighting. In Deserter, the groans of an injured striker after a riot are heard first over a long shot of him lying in a deserted street; then they continue over shots in another locale of the factory owners looking on as other strikers are led away by soldiers. The continuing groans reveal the owners as the real causes of the man's injuries; the police we had seen in the previous sequence are only their agents.

In Alone, the heroine practices her lecture after arriving in Siberia. Insert shots show a local Shaman doing a ritual dance and other villagers working with primitive tools. The Shaman's drum and chant alternate with the cheerful waltz associated with the heroine; finally the two sounds merge and continue together. Here sound and image

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cutting do not coincide; instead, the independent shifts on each track combine to suggest what the heroine is up against in teaching about modem life in the primitive Siberian culture. Enthusiasm's first sequence contains a lengthy scene alternating shots of people praying before a Christ icon with shots of drunkards and vagrants in the streets. At first Vertov continues religious music from the church scenes over the vagrants; later he switches to tavern sounds, continuing these over the church images. By characterizing the two groups of people as similar in some way, Vertov prepares for a scene of the conversion of a church into a workers' club-a positive force which will then counter both of the problems shown earlier. All these examples, except the one from Deserter, depend on sound simply to strengthen a conceptual point made already by the intercutting of images. But sound need not play only a reinforcing role; it can act as an independent element to determine the implications of a scene.

In several films, music functions to suggest a meaning not necessarily present in a series of images. Pudovkin describes this function in his essay, "Asynchronism as a Principle of Sound Film"; in discus- sing the final sequence of Deserter he says: "Just as the image is an objective perception of events, so the music expresses the subjective appreciation of this objectivity."'10 Deserter's ending resembles that of Mother, in that the workers march with their flag and are ridden down by a group of police. In this case the hero holds the flag and struggles to keep it aloft to the end. Throughout the march, riot, and regrouping of the remaining workers, loud, triumphant music plays. During much of the scene, the music seems inappropriate to the brutal struggle, in which many workers are struck down. Yet it "rejoins" the image for the final defiant ending, suggesting that the workers' victory, despite temporary setbacks, is asured. (Pudovkin discusses this sequence at greater length in his essay.)

Much of the effectiveness of the conceptual use of music in these early films may be traced to the participation of Dmitri Shostakovich. Even in the silent period, he evidently tried to avoid simple

10V. I. Pudovkin, "Asynchronism as a Principle of Sound Film," Film Technique and Film Acting, trans. and ed., Ivor Montagu (New York: Grove Press, 1960), pp. 192-193.

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accompaniment in favor of meaningful disjunction; of his New Baby- lon score he wrote in 1929: "At the end of Reel 2, the important moment is the German cavalry's advance on Paris, but the reel ends in a deserted restaurant. Silence. But the music, in spite of the fact that the German cavalry is no longer on the screen, continues to remind the audience of the approach of that fierce power."" I Shosta- kovich was responsible for the music in the two heavily ironic scenes from Golden Mountains and Alone described above. The music of the opening sequence of Golden Mountains functions similarly to that of Deserter's final scene, but here more disparate visual elements are drawn together into a conceptual whole. Yutkevich intercuts relatively static shots of oil workers presenting a set of demands to their boss, quick shots of soldiers riding furiously along a road, a brief scene of an exhausted worker collapsing, and a series of shots taken from a moving train. Overall, the scene creates an extremely dynamic effect, yet the individual visual elements do not all seem to fit in with the music. The workers, though sympathetic, do not move dynamically at all; they suggest rather an extreme exhaustion resulting from oppres- sive conditions. The soldiers move quickly, yet they are certainly unsympathetic in this context; the train shots are also rhythmically appropriate to the music, yet their connection with the action is uncertain. Again the implication for a Soviet audience would probably be the inevitable conflict and triumph which would arise from the situation.

The Road to Life uses triumphant music similarly. A group of juvenile deliquents are being trained to make shoes. As their leader cuts a piece of leather, a flashback shows him as he had been, stealing cloth from a woman's coat. Over the images in the present as well as the flashback, a men's choir sings cheerfully. Clearly the music is appropriate not to the individual actions of cutting leather or of stealing, but to the successful change brought about in the boy.

These various scenes are complex in themselves, but the creation of meaning through apparent sound-image conflict presented a difficult problem. The filmmakers seem not to have been able to get

" Quoted in Leyda, p. 259, fn.

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past a certain conventionalized level, since all three films which contain the device use it to convey the same idea-the triumph of the Soviet struggle. Unfortunately the Soviet directors had little time to explore this new dimension of intellectual montage.

4. Temporal Disjunction

One final way the Soviet filmmakers separated sound and image was through temporal disjunction-having the sound occur at a different part of the plot time from the image. The most straightforward temporal usage was the sonic flashback, a device which has become familiar in even the most classical of filmmaking practices. At the end of Golden Mountains, a strike has been planned. Soldiers capture the main strikers, but one worker remembers their leader's order to blow the whistle at two o'clock, and he does so. Here the leader's voice is heard over, repeating a line given in an earlier scene. In Alone, the heroine tries to convince a bureaucrat not to assign her to Siberia; her words are conveyed by titles only, but the non-diegetic music of the earlier scene with the fiance plays over. A less conventional disjunction comes just after this, in Alone, as the heroine leaves the bureaucrat's office. The bouncy music cuts abruptly out over a medium shot of the heroine smiling, and a woman's voice and typewriter sounds begin off; the voice is dictating a letter telling the heroine she must teach in Siberia or give up her career. Although she does not leave her seat in this shot, a straight cut leads to a medium shot of her standing by the office door, then exiting. As she goes, another straight cut reveals her standing in long shot in the middle of the hallway outside. Each of these cuts involves an ellipsis, yet the diegetic off-screen voice and typewriter continue without interrup- tion. Moreover, the heroine exits carrying the sheet of paper with the bureaucrat's decision (which she has acquired during the ellipsis between the first and second shots)-a paper whose contents we continue to hear being dictated and typed on the soundtrack. While the sound flashbacks function primarily in a conceptual way, to recall events for the spectator, this Alone scene is an example of perceptual roughening. It is perhaps the most extremely disjunctive single device

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in all the films examined; most refrain from playing with the diegetic sound of a scene in such a confusing fashion.

5. Non-counterpoint Sound

The films of this early Soviet sound period were far from avoiding synchronous sound altogether. Deserter alternates its many experimental passages with pedestrian dialogue scenes shot in sound studios. The Great Consoler is mostly synchronized dialogue scenes and is probably the closest to early Hollywood usage of any of these films. Vertov went to great lengths to get portable microphones to film on- location sound effects in mines and factories for Enthusiasm, the last two-thirds of which has little if any counterpoint. After the adverse reception accorded this film in the Soviet Union, Vertov seems to have played it safe with Three Songs of Lenin, which contains virually no tension between sound and image; the sound consists entirely of reverent music and bits of on-screen diegetic voice. Only a few familiar Vertov camera tricks roughen the film's audio-visual relationships. The Road to Life and Lieutenant Kizhe, in spite of isolated counterpoint sequences (primarily in their brilliant opening scenes), use mostly synchronized dialogue and appropriate music.

C. Conclusions

The intense theoretical work in which Soviet cinematic practice was grounded probably helped the filmmakers make the transition to sound more successfully and immediately than other groups. But not all montage problems had been worked out by the end of the twenties. Viktor Shklovski pointed out in a discussion of October that its intellectual montage was still too new to be useful for all purposes:

A new formal means when it is created is always received as comic, by virtue of its novelty ....

A new form is therefore most suited to material where the comic sense is appropriate. This is how Eisenstein has used his innovation. His new formal device, which will no doubt become general cinematic usage, is only employed by him in the structuring of negative features, to show Kerensky, the Winter Palace, the advance of Kornilov, etc.

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To extend the device to the pathetic parts of the film would be a mistake, the new device is not yet appropriate to the treatment of heroism.12

Eisenstein, perhaps in response to this argument, went further in developing montage practice to cope with Revolutionary themes in Old and New. There, Marfa's dream of the future collective farm is strongly comic, but presents the positive forces of the narrative; the cream separator sequence is only incidentally comic.

But Eisenstein was not present to develop this work in the early sound period. And, while the other filmmakers carried on the tradition by using sound cognitively, most did little to explore further possibilities of this approach. They seem to have opted for the easier route of using stylized sound for certain conventionalized purposes-ridicul- ing bourgeois forces, expressing triumph for the proletarian struggle, and so on.

One problem that becomes increasingly apparent during this period is the conflict between the more extreme forms of montage and the Socialist Realist narratives which were becoming prominent. None of these early sound films uses counterpoint throughout. Deserter has its many dialogue scenes, Alone its extended scenes in Siberia with appropriate mood music; the other films use only isolated counterpoint passages. Counterpoint worked fine for setting up the reaction- ary forces against which the character would struggle; most of the best examples in these films occur early in the film, then dwindle or disappear. When counterpoint was used in relation to the positive elements, it tended to interfere with the clear progression of the narrative; such scenes, as the examples cited here may indicate, were likely to be pauses, plateaus in the ongoing action. A scene of triumph, a parade, a demonstration-all these actions could be drawn out considerably without adding to their narrative function.

This would have been fine had the relative freedom to experiment of the twenties persisted. But as aesthetic doctrines got tighter in the Soviet Union from 1930 on, the necessity for clear, even simplistic narrative progression became greater. Virtually all these films contain scenes which could fit comfortably into the principle of Socialist

'2Viktor Shklovski, "Eisenstein's October. Reasons for Failure," trans., Diana Matias, Screen, Vol. 12, #4 (Winter 1971/2), p. 90.

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Realism (with the possible exception of Lieutenant Kizhe, whose polished period comedy makes it atypical of Soviet filmmaking). So counterpoint filmmaking practice did exist, but only briefly. The fact that most of films contain counterpoint sequences only in their early portions suggests that the filmmakers may have tried to leave the officials in their audiences with the dominant impression of straightforward narrative style.

Nevertheless, these few films with their limited experiment are enough to indicate that Soviet filmmaking remained within the montage tradition into the sound period. Concentrating on perceptual and cognitive as well as emotional response, most of these Russian films follow an approach indistinguishable from early sound styles of America, Western Europe, or Japan. These last few years before Socialist Realism also produced at least one great film, Alone, and several others of considerable interest.

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Early Sound Counterpoint