There Is No Acoustic Relation

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There I N Acutc Ret

Considerations on Sound and Image in Post-Soviet Film

lilya kaganovsky

Kira Muratova’s 1992 film, Chuvstvitel’nyi militsioner (The Sen-

timental Policeman), opens with a close-up of a baby’s face.1 The

baby (Natasha) is lying in a purple and green cabbage patch, oc-casionally illuminated by a passing searchlight. Nearby, a police-

man (the “sentimental policeman” of the title) is playing with a

broken doll. Suddenly, as we see the mouth of the baby become

contorted in what we assume to be crying, the policeman jumps up

and begins to perform a series of theatrical movements: he spins

around, he covers his ears, he dances in circles, and we understand

from this exaggerated gestural language that he can hear the baby

crying, even if we can’t. Indeed, since the opening close-up of thebaby’s face, we have been hearing sound, but that sound has been

insistently extra-diegetic: the twelfth piece in Tchaikovsky’s piano

suite The Seasons, titled “Sviatki” (Noël/Christmas). Only at the

point when the sentimental policeman actually finds the baby and

both of them occupy the same frame does the film switch from

the extra-diegetic music to synchronized sound: finally, as he leans

over the baby, we hear her cry.

In this essay I want to use the opening of The Sentimental Police-man to think about the relation between sound and image, body

and voice in post-Soviet film—a context that, in a way, mirrors



qui parle fall/winter 2010 vol.19, no.166

that of the Soviet film industry’s initial transition to sound between

1928 and 1935, during the years of the First Five-Year Plan (1928–

32). Vance Kepley Jr., writing about the film industry’s restructur-

ing during these years, refers to it as the “first perestroika,” that isto say, the first instance of national reconstruction. During the First

Five-Year Plan, the cinema (along with all the other industries) was

centralized, with a new bureaucratic system created to oversee all

aspects of film production and distribution, from reviewing scripts,

to hiring actors and directors, to controlling the final theater re-

lease.2 This system brought new levels of control over the creative

process, a redundant oversight system, and a massively expanded

bureaucracy that added “a growing array of bodies that presumedto intervene in the creative decisions” (“FP,” 48). The result was

that film production dropped precipitously: from 109 feature re-

leases in 1928 to 70 in 1932, to 45 by 1934.

Though Soviet film production was eventually able to recover,

the effects of this centralization lasted well into the 1980s and

were one of the chief objects of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reconstruc-

tion campaign that called for glasnost and perestroika.3 In May

1986 the Union of Soviet Filmmakers established a Conflicts Com-

mission, designed to bring about the release of films that had been

forbidden, cut, or given extremely limited release over the previous

thirty years. Films made in the late 1980s and early 1990s reflected

the new atmosphere of “openness,” taking up subjects that had

previously been censored, such as sex and violence, the destruction

of the Soviet family, and the loss of the “bright future” so ardent-

ly promised by Soviet ideology.4

Control over the creative processwas relaxed and the redundant oversight system, with its massive

bureaucracy, significantly curtailed. And although this new recon-

struction (along with the end of the USSR) led to an almost total

collapse of the Soviet film industry, the few films made during that

period were some of most experimental in both form and content

since the 1920s, the heyday of the Soviet avant-garde.

But even among the avant-garde films of the late Soviet/post-

Soviet period, Muratova’s The Sentimental Policeman stands outas a uniquely strange film and Kira Muratova as a most unusual

filmmaker. The plot of the film is quite simple: Tolia, a young po-



Kaganovsky: There Is No Acoustic Relation 67

liceman (Nikolai Shatokhin), finds a baby in a cabbage patch and

carries her to a children’s home; but after a brief consideration,

he and his wife, Klava (Irina Kovalenko), decide to adopt her.

The court, however, rules in favor of another woman, Dr. ElenaZakharova (Natalya Ralleva), a middle-aged pediatrician who has

already raised one child successfully on her own. On the way back

from the court Klava reveals that she is pregnant. Yet, the film, in

many ways, is not about this. The basic story line is interrupted

by sequences of barking dogs and screaming neighbors; the visual

field is crowded to the point of incomprehensibility; the events take

place in the carceral spaces of a police station, a children’s home, a

zoo, and the court. A close-up of an unwatched television programshows a documentary of stray dogs being captured and carted off

to the pound. Everyone speaks at once, lines of dialogue are end-

lessly repeated, and the entire closing sequence is of a man (un-

known, unidentified) trying to put some groceries into a bag while

holding onto a squirming baby. The only break from the visual and

auditory chaos is two nearly identical sequences in Tolia and Kla-

va’s apartment, in which the couple goes about their daily routine

completely naked and in total silence.

Muratova began making her nonconformist films in the Soviet

Union in the mid-1960s. Radical in both form and content, often

filmed using nonprofessional actors and improvised dialogue, Mu-

ratova’s films were never mainstream in any sense of that word.5

Dismissed by Soviet censors for their “incompatibility with the aes-

thetic canons of Socialist Realism” and their director’s “evident

political unreliability,” her films were repeatedly banned in the So-viet Union or shown in very limited release, and Muratova herself

was three times “disqualified” from filmmaking altogether.6 Her

films were also some of the first to be “unshelved” in the mid-

1980s by the Union of Soviet Filmmakers’ Conflicts Commission,

and for a brief time Muratova experienced something like popular-

ity.7 Of the four films she had made during the Soviet period, two

were shown with some frequency on Soviet television: Korotkie

vstrechi (Brief Encounters, 1967, released in 1987) and Dolgie pro-vody (The Long Farewell, 1971, released in 1987). Since the late

1980s, Muratova has been lauded for her radical, nonconformist




(possibly feminist or in any case anti-patriarchal) filmmaking, and

she remains one of the most original if least understood post-Soviet

directors.8

A number of common visual threads unite Muratova’s fairly dis-parate oeuvre, but her use of sound is generally singled out as the

major element of her film style. Muratova’s favorite sound-track

materials are classical music, total silence, and “choral speaking,”

which she has compared to “operatic quartets or quintets where

each character sings simultaneously about something different,”

a kind of “harmony of chaos”; generally, her sound track serves

to counterpoint, rather than simply underline, the action on the

screen.9 This is to say that sound in Muratova disturbs our percep-tion, makes itself audible in a way that sound in “classic” narra-

tive film (here I am referring both to Hollywood conventions and

Soviet cinematic conventions) is not supposed to do. It sensitizes

us to its presence, turning us into listeners as well as viewers, or,

to borrow Stephen Heath’s formulation, into “auditors” as well as

“voyeurs.”10

Paradoxically, sound in film is something we are not supposed

to hear; and from the first years of sound cinema, film sound has

been operating under a kind of erasure. As Donald Crafton points

out, almost immediately following the coming of sound, Holly-

wood studios found themselves in a curious position: sound effects

that the year before had seemed impressive and new, viewers now

found distracting, intrusive, and unnecessary. Crafton suggests that

already by the end of the 1928–29 Hollywood movie “season,”

American journalists were reacting against flamboyant insertionsof sound effects: “Like overly garish Technicolor, they felt, sound

should not call attention to itself as a supplement.”11

Integration of sound and image, coherence, and “naturalness”

were prized for sound film. In 1929–30, “Audiences could still see

movies which emphasized the newly discovered screen voice, [but]

they could also observe film styles which played down formal ex-

pression and novel effects to construct an illusion of unified au-

diovisual space.” Meanwhile, sound engineers were making theirtechnology “inaudible” (TT , 311). In other words, rather than

foregrounding sound, directors and engineers were learning how




to make it disappear, to erase its presence from the consciousness

of the audience. The viewer was becoming desensitized to sound,

and this happened both through diffusion (i.e., the more sound

films audiences watched, the less attuned to sound they became)and through the conscious efforts of the sound engineers, direc-

tors, and producers: audiences wanted a unified filmic space, one in

which there was no disjunction between sound and image.

So what might be the stakes of making film sound “present”?

What can the opening of The Sentimental Policeman teach us

about Muratova’s film specifically and post-Soviet cinema more

generally? I want to offer a few suggestions here that focus specifi-

cally on the notion of an “acoustic relation”—a way of thinkingtogether (or not) the joining of sound and image.

If we look again at the opening sequence of The Sentimental

Policeman, we can see that up until the moment the policeman ac-

tually finds the baby, we are, quite simply, watching a silent film.

Jane Taubman, in her seminal work on the cinema of Kira Mura-

tova, underscores the filmmaker’s indebtedness to early cinema: the

reduced color palette (probably filmed with a blue filter to simulate

nighttime); the solo piano, like the accompaniment in silent movie

theaters; the long takes that recall pre-Revolutionary melodramas,

before the montage school introduced rapid cutting; the police-

man’s mechanistic movements, which echo theater director Vsevo-

lod Meyerhold’s biomechanical acting style; and the policeman’s

strange leaping dance around the cabbage patch while searching

for the unseen baby (KM, 66–67).

Indeed, the opening images of The Sentimental Policeman arenot accompanied by synchronized sound; everything—the baby,

the sentimental policeman, the cabbage field (i.e., the “natural”

world)—is silent, overlaid by a sound track that seems far removed

from the diegesis of this film in terms of both time and space (though

the music echoes the notion of birth: Noël). Tolia, our sentimental

policeman, performs a series of bizarre dance-like movements that

are completely theatrical in their silent mimicry. Yet we perceive

them as absurd only if we think in terms of sound film, that is, interms of a particular kind of realism that synch-sound enables. His

movements, though still exaggerated, appear more comprehensible




if sound is removed from the picture. In other words, if we watch

this as a silent film (with a classical music sound track to accom-

pany, on a record, the moving image), we will be more likely to

accept the theatrical gestures as “normal.”As Mary Ann Doane has pointed out in an essay about the body

and voice in cinema, silent film made up for its lack of sound with

the movements of the body:

The silent film is certainly understood, at least retrospectively

and even (it is arguable) in its time, as incomplete, as lacking

speech. The stylized gestures of the silent cinema, its heavy pan-

tomime, have been defined as a form of compensation for thatlack. Hugo Münsterberg wrote, in 1916: “To the actor of the

moving pictures . . . the temptation offers itself to overcome the

deficiency [the absence of “words and the modulation of the

voice”—M.A.D.] by a heightening of the gestures and of the fa-

cial play, with the result that the emotional expression becomes

exaggerated.” The absent voice reemerges in gestures and the

contortions of the face—it is spread over the body of the actor.

The uncanny effect of the silent film in the era of sound is in partlinked to the separation, by means of intertitles, of an actor’s

speech from the image of his/her body.12

If we consider the opening sequence of The Sentimental Police-

man in terms of Doane’s observations, we can see that the police-

man’s heavy pantomime acts as a kind of compensation for lack:

the absence of the voice, the separation of the voice from the body

reemerges in gestures and contortions of the face. The effect is un-canny, though perhaps not immediately so. At first the sequence

strikes us as merely playful, and it is only when we realize that

the baby is now crying and yet we cannot hear it that we become

aware of lack. We are watching a “ phantasmatic body,” “recon-

stituted by the technology and practices” of silent cinema (“VC,”

33). Yet I would like to suggest that with The Sentimental Police-

man, Muratova is staging a return not simply to silent cinema but

to early sound cinema, to the moment of transition from silence tosound, the moment when cinema first finds its “voice.”

Let us look again at the opening sequence to see some of the op-




erations on sound and image at work in this film. The first shot of

the film is of the baby’s face turned to one side, with the searchlight

moving across it (fig. 1). The baby turns, looks at the camera, looks

at the source of the light, thrusts its tongue out, and the like—this

is a very long shot (46 seconds), especially by the fairly rapid edit-

ing that will characterize the end of the sequence. It is worth noting

that we cannot possibly understand what we are seeing here. We

remain in a tightly focused close-up showing exclusively the baby’s

face. In other words, the relationship to the image is itself intimate

and tightly bound, without any sense of the larger world. The light

is simply a light to look at, an object of fascination. Because thebaby is not crying or making any other obvious gesture that would

suggest the production of sound, the “problem” of sound and its

relationship to image and body is not yet posed.

We then cut to the policeman squatting in the field, holding a

baby doll. There are several things to notice about the cross-cutting

that will characterize the rest of the sequence: first, there are no

shot/reverse-shot sequences; rather, the cuts are all designed to sug-

gest a disconnection between the two places or scenes.13 Only twofeatures bind the two spaces together: the “silent film music” and

the searchlight. We cut back to the baby, in a medium (full-body)

Fig. 1. Baby in the searchlight.




shot. Then back to the policeman, now holding the doll in such a

way as to make it clear that the doll is broken (fig. 2). We should

note here that this is the first shot that posits that something is bro-

ken, that there is a rupture or a disjunction that needs repair. This

suggestion comes from the policeman, and he is shown as the agent

who effects a repair: he restores the doll to its original working

condition by reinserting the doll’s leg into the body. Afterwards,

however, he is visibly dissatisfied with the doll, aimlessly rattling

and shaking it. That is, there is a rupture at work that is not played

out at the level of the symbolization of the body. This is not the

mirror stage, in other words, in which a disjuncture in the bodilyreal is to be repaired by a symbolic gesture of misrecognition (I

thought the body—of film, of the infant, of myself—was disrupted,

but look, I have repaired it!). These gestures are the first that might

produce some form of diegetic sound, but not necessarily. In short,

the audience is still looking for what precisely is in need of repair,

what there is that moves beyond the level of a symbolic rupture.

At 2:20 there is a cut to an enigmatic series of shots (fig. 3).14 I’ll

return to this in a moment, but it is worth saying at the outset thatthe unfolding of this sequence points to certain qualities that are

stressed throughout: the body, a certain kind of rhythm that is felt

Fig. 2. Policeman holding a broken doll.



Fig. 3. Close-ups of the hand, in motion.




within the body below a rational level, stiffness and rigidity, and

potentially, a gesture of authority. It also re-cuts the body that was

just repaired in the previous shot: the policeman rejoined a limb to

the baby and found that it was unsatisfying; here we find his ownlimb extracted and isolated, and eventually it falls limp to his side,

vanishing from the frame.

The next cut occurs at 2:57 and is a long shot of the baby, now

twisting and crying (fig. 4). Now we have an evident source of

diegetic sound, and the disruption that afflicts the film becomes

manifest. I think Muratova is playing with the audience in this

sequence. It is not until three minutes in that it becomes apparent

that there is a real rupture (i.e., a rupture within the actual materialcondition of the film) in need of repair. It cannot be symbolically

sutured closed (or not only symbolically), but requires an actual

material change: sound must be brought to film so that image and

sound, body and voice, can all be aligned.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, this is an interesting rewrit-

ing of the history of the subject. Almost all psychoanalytic ac-

counts begin with a presumptive and originary wholeness that is

later sundered (by an awareness of sexual difference for Freud, by

entry into language for Lacan, through object-loss for Klein, etc.).

What is Muratova’s suggestion here? Is the advent of sound per-

ceived as a disruption that splits an originary wholeness in film

(the contented close-up of the infant), requiring the “repair” of

synchronization? Or is film ruptured at its advent, as suggested by

the policeman’s legless doll?

Moreover, there is the question of gender: all psychoanalytic ac-counts of this originary wholeness are united in their belief that it

consists in the unity of the child with the mother, including Julia

Kristeva’s chora, a concept that seems unusually apt for discussing

Muratova. Chora is not language, but those aspects of language

that exist before language itself, such as melody or rhythm. For

Kristeva, chora is the process of signification, the space between the

sign and the signified, “an essentially mobile and extremely provi-

sional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeralstases,” intimately connected to the maternal body.15 The chora

is at once the maternal part of giving birth and the birth itself. As




Kristeva puts it, “Plato’s Timaeus speaks of a chora, receptacle,

unnamable, improbable, hybrid, anterior to naming, to the One,

to the father, and consequently, maternally connoted to such an ex-

tent that it merits ‘not even the rank of syllable’”;16

it functions asa synonym for “semiotic disposition,” “signifiance,” “geno-text,”

and at other times as a signifier for a moment prior to the mirror

stage and the symbolic (AM, 102). Part of this fantasy is the desire

to put a maximum distance between the mother and the symbolic

order. But the chora is also a surplus of energy that animates the

subject:

Discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the sub-

ject who is not yet constituted as such and, in the course of his

development, they are arranged according to the various con-

straints imposed on this body—always already involved in a se-

miotic process—by family and social structures. In this way the

drives, which are “energy” charges as well as “psychical” marks,

articulate what we call a chora; a nonexpressive totality formed

by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of move-

ment as it is regulated. (RP, 25)17

This, of course, is related to the overall psychoanalytic approach

to the question of sound (the psychoanalysis of sound): sound in

Fig. 4. The squalling baby in the cabbage patch.




cinema represents the maternal body and our earliest originary

wholeness with that body, when sound arrived to us in bass rum-

bles, rhythm, and movement, disconnected from any clear sense

of source (or of meaning). As Silverman has pointed out, “it hasbecome something of a theoretical commonplace to characterize

the maternal voice as a blanket of sound, extending on all sides of

the newborn infant.” For Guy Rosolato and Mary Ann Doane, the

maternal voice is a “sonorous envelope” that “surrounds, sustains,

and cherishes the child”; Didier Anzieu refers to it as a “bath of

sounds,” while for Claude Bailblé it is, quite simply, “music” (see

AM, 72). Indeed, Muratova’s entire soundscape may be described

as “choric” as well as “choral”: that is, all the characters speak-ing at once, the “bath of sounds” that surrounds the spectator of

the film—the overall experience of watching a Muratova film is

predicated on listening to the exuberant chaos of the audio track,

on hearing all the sounds at once as a kind of music and rhythm

rather than speech. Kristeva particularly stresses the chora’s “ki-

netic rhythm,” a phrase that begins to explain the dance-like, mar-

ionette-like movements of the policeman, including the rigid ex-

tension of the arm, the torsion of the wrist and the flexing of the

fingers.

But if the beginning of Muratova’s film is an invocation to the

chora, its kinetic rhythms and emphasis on disconnected, source-

less sound, where is the maternal body to which this infant be-

longs? Alone in a cabbage patch, as if the product of fairy tale or

mythology, rather than biology, the baby lies isolated in a field, oc-

casionally illuminated by a passing searchlight.18

The only personwho seems to hear it is the policeman, whose body appears insis-

tently nonmaternal. Or is it? Skinny, bony and angular, awkward-

ly uniformed, and carrying its symbols of male authority without

ease or naturalness, this figure is neither—or both?—maternal nor

paternal (he is, after all, the sentimental policeman, who tells his

wife, “You are an orphan. I only now understood that you’re an

orphan. I will be both mother and father to you [Ia tebe—i mat’ i

otets]). The need to join sound, image, and body is experienced asa “call,” a literal call from the child that we cannot hear but that

the policeman can, implying that there is a juncture of sound, body,




and image from which the viewer is excluded. But this call is also

experienced as an Althusserian hail, bringing the policeman from

his position seated on the ground to attention (though somewhat

sloppy attention, it must be said) (fig. 5). What follows is a kindof hysterical choric crisis, showing precisely how traumatic the

joining of sound to cinema is in a Soviet context—precisely why

psychoanalytic and historical negotiations are necessary. I hear the

call, I do not hear the call. I am a father, standing at attention, I am

a mother giving birth, crouching with the infant dangling between

my legs (fig. 6). This crisis has its origins in Soviet history: how

does Soviet cinema imagine its relationship to sound when the his-

torical moment of “joining”—which should have been experiencedas a kind of organic wholeness or reparation of a broken system

now made whole, vision and hearing together—coincided with the

rise of Stalinism and the end of the revolutionary avant-garde?

In psychoanalytic film theory, sound has been described both as

a maternal “blanket” and “sonorous envelope” that surrounds the

child, and as an “umbilical net” which the mother weaves around

the child, and in which the infant is hopelessly trapped.19 The pa-

ternal voice that reaches the infant from outside this “sonorous

envelope” or “umbilical net” is the voice of the other, taken for the

voice of the Other (Law, prohibition). The coming of sound to So-

viet cinema coincided not only with the First Five-Year Plan, with

policies of “industrialization” and “collectivization,” and with the

nationalization of the cinema and the creation of a massive bureau-

cratic apparatus of censorship and oversight, but also with the shift

from avant-garde experimentation to a strict adherence to the ide-ological demands of socialist realism. Early Soviet sound cinema

recorded not just any voice, but the voice of state power address-

ing the viewer from the screen. What should have been a “natural”

joining (cinema was looking for its voice) was a forced superimpo-

sition: cinema began to speak with the voice of ideology, with the

voice of the Father (Stalin, the “Father of the People”).

In the opening sequence of The Sentimental Policeman we see

that the contact with the choric body cannot be conceived throughthe mother. Instead we see someone who must be fit into the place

of the father—yet, as I have argued elsewhere,20 no Soviet man can




imagine himself in the position of the father, always already oc-

cupied by Stalin. The “normal” Lacanian maxim is “Le père ou

pire”—“the father or worse.” Normally, this proposition is given

as a forced choice, like “your money or your life,” but Stalinist

paternity, or any other form of authoritarian historical trauma,

already represents le pire. One cannot make the choice betweenthe father “or worse,” because the symbolic father already is the

worst: hence the constant presence in the opening sequence of the

Fig. 5. Policeman standing at attention.

Fig. 6. Birthing the baby.




searchlight, the only visual element joining the baby and police-

man.21 The juncture of sound and image under Stalinism makes the

fantasy of organic wholeness impossible. We are left with a non-

father, an unfather whose only paternity is to a broken doll.The shots that end this opening sequence are all designed to

emphasize dislocation and disjuncture: they appear to show, for

example, the same action (the policeman spinning in disorientation

as he tries to pinpoint the source of the sound, falling with his ear

to the ground) taking place repeatedly, but in different locations

(locations that are not readily distinguishable from each other).

Some are explicitly jump cuts (see 3:58). For all of them the guid-

ing principle is rhythmic editing (call it choric editing), as the filmattempts a reconciliation of sound and image that parallels a join-

ing of the infant body with the only body possible in the Soviet

tradition. This “birth of sound cinema” from a male body ill at

ease with authority also presents itself as a six-minute encapsula-

tion of film history, moving from static shots and simple cuts to

pans, dolly shorts, and jump cuts, all to the “kinetic rhythm” of

Kristeva’s chora.

Just one final feature seems worth noting about the end of this

sequence: the final, ecstatic juncture of sound to body-image does

indeed mark the breakdown of “choric editing”—the policeman’s

body moves smoothly and naturalistically, as he slips off his hat

and kneels by the baby (fig. 7). The final shot clearly shows the re-

lationship of all the bodies within the space outlined by the camera.

But the sound that signals the overcoming of the many disjunctures

featured in this sequence is a mirage (or, a “miracle”): it is not livesound at all, but a recording. It does not match perfectly the move-

ments of the baby’s body, and its acoustic properties indicate it was

recorded in a small room, and the sound quality suggests either a

phonograph recording or an old film, with evident age and distor-

tion audible in the sound. Muratova, in short, seems to be retelling

a failure of any kind of choric union: a simulacrum of sound joined

to a simulacrum of a non-mother and a non-father. To paraphrase

a Lacanian maxim, there is no acoustic relation.22

Writing about the simultaneous birth of the horror film genre

with Hollywood’s transition to sound, Robert Spadoni has sug-




gested that the coming of sound produced, for the second time

in film history, the “media-sensitive viewer.”23 Spadoni borrows

the notion of media sensitivity from Yuri Tsivian, who argued that

the early film viewer was particularly sensitized (aware, watchful)

to the film viewing experience, to his or her role as a viewer.24

The early viewer was always aware that he or she was watching a

film, which meant at once the “miracle” of the moving image and

sensitivity to everything that the moving image still lacked. (Thus

Maksim Gorky’s famous 1896 description of the Lumière Cinema-

tographe as a “kingdom of shadows,” as well as O. Winter’s simi-

lar formulations a few months later.)25

Spadoni argues that we cansee something similar happen with early film sound: the coming of

sound to cinema reproduced that original sense of the “uncanny,”

reminding the audience that they were watching a mechanically

reproduced shadow play, only now, with sound, whose source and

reproduction were still troubling, in particular if the sound went

out of synch with the moving image. According to Spadoni, early

sound films marked the “return of the repressed” of early cinema:

in his formulation, this was “the perception of realism mixed withthe unreal, bodies that seemed more alive but also dead” (UB, 6,

18). The heightened awareness of the medium produced medium-

Fig. 7. There is no acoustic relation.




sensitive viewers: people would go to the movies to hear a voice

(not see a picture).26

We can see a similar thing happen with Muratova’s film. Like

the early sound films, Muratova’s The Sentimental Policeman (andall of her films) resensitizes the viewer to the cinematic experience,

insisting with its theatricality, reproduction, and reproducibility on

our awareness of the spectacle unfolding before us. Both Irina San-

domirskaia and Emma Widdis refer to this as a form of “haptic

perception”—that is, that which communicates with the senses (in

this case, hearing) before the intellect; a nonverbal communication

delivered by sight or, as Sandomirskaia points out, by sound.27 At

no point in watching a film by Muratova are we taken in by the“reality effect.” At no point are we allowed to lose ourselves in

that “hermetically sealed world,” while remaining invisible, un-

seen voyeurs of the screen.

This media sensitivity is one part of what makes watching Mu-

ratova’s films an uncanny experience. Like Freud’s Unheimlich,

Muratova’s films thrive on repetition and regression, on doubles

and doubling (e.g., the pairs of nurses in The Sentimental Police-

man that repeat each other’s sentences; or the man at the police sta-

tion who says the line “My mother doesn’t let me come home after

eleven” an uncountable number of times, with slightly different

inflections), that remind us that we are watching a performance.

For Freud, the uncanny is produced through a confrontation with

lack that cannot be scotomized: the seemingly unmotivated return

of the repressed, which comes about because the ego (the subject)

has come face-to-face with a particular fear (of impotence, castra-tion, immobility, muteness and blindness).28 Muratova’s cinema is

altogether a cinema of the uncanny, frequently manifesting these

signs of dis-ease: speaking in tongues, falling silent, doubling, and

“idiotic” (i.e., mechanical, automatic) repetition. The opening se-

quence of The Sentimental Policeman doesn’t simply stage a return

to silent cinema, but a sudden regression: cinema, it appears, has

lost its voice, has been left only eccentric, exaggerated gesture.

As Sandomirskaia has suggested, this “regression” is tied di-rectly to seventy years of Soviet ideology and its disciplining prac-

tices (the “culture of the voice” [kul’tura rechi], the elimination of




the non-standard or non-normative from Soviet speech), as well as

to the notion of glasnost —a new “voice-ness” that comes after a

long period of meaningless, disciplined speech.29 Muratova’s ear-

lier (1989) film Asthenic Syndrome has been repeatedly read as anallegory for the coming apart of the Soviet Union; The Sentimen-

tal Policeman may be seen as a kind of rebirth (the film is literally

about the possibility of a new life emerging out of the chaos of the

old), and I think the sound track is another way of being able to

“hear” this process taking place. Stephen Heath has suggested that

sound cinema

is the development of a powerful standard of the body and of the voice as a hold of the body in image, the voice literarily or-

dered and delimited as speech for an intelligibility of the body,

of people—agents and characters—fixed in the order of the nar-

rative and its meanings, its unities and resolutions. In the silent

cinema, the body is always pulling towards an emphasis, an ex-

aggeration, a burlesque (the term of an intractable existence); in

the sound cinema, the body is smoothed out, given over to that

contract of thought [what Godard-Gorin call the New Deal],with the voice as the medium, the expression, of a homogenous

thinking subject—actor and spectator—of film. (“BV,” 191)

Heath is speaking about a certain kind of homogenization—he

says, “every actor begins to speak the same thing” (“BV,” 191)—

that comes with the advent of sound or sound’s new regime of cine-

ma. Where silent film allowed for certain liberties (Doane describes

these as a lack, a compensation for the missing voice, but we canalso see it as liberation, the freedom of the body not fettered by

language, able to speak for itself without recourse to the limits of

linguistic expression or the need to “synchronize” its movements

to specific vocalizations), sound film brings constraint. This is true

for Stalinism and socialist realist discourse, but we can also see it

as applicable to sound cinema in general: sound cinema ties voice

to body, and body to voice. Sound is made intelligible as speech,

while silence, repetition, stutter, accent are all excised from the“talkie.”

In The Sentimental Policeman, Muratova wants us to be aware




of disjunction, and in this way she re-creates for her films the “me-

dia sensitive” viewer of the first (sound) films—a viewer that was

aware of how sound did or did not match the body, was or was not

mechanically reproduced, sound that could be perceived as “au-thentic” and “natural,” and “metallic” and “unnatural,” at the

same time. At stake is the possibility of finally moving beyond the

disciplinary structures of Soviet cinema, structures that appear on

or around 1928–35, the moment of Soviet cinema’s transition to

sound. It is about the possibility of a new voice, not yet articulate,

but free of the restrictive structures of both “classic” cinema and

Soviet discourse. Repetition, doubling, “every actor [speaking] the

same thing”—the voice as the medium, the expression, of a “ho-mogenous thinking subject” (both actor and spectator of film), is

made audible here, while at the same time, pointing past, away

from this sound regime toward the possibility of some future (cin-

ematic) language.

Notes

The inspiration for this paper was an AAASS panel on the cinema of Kira

Muratova, and I am grateful to Nancy Condee, Irina Sandomirskaia, Jane

Taubman, Emma Widdis, and Zhenya Zvonkina for their participation,

discussion, and contributions to our understanding of this most unusual

filmmaker; I am also very grateful to Robert Rushing for his comments

and additions.

1. Kira Muratova, Chuvstvitel’nyi militsioner [The Sentimental Police-

man] (Odessa: “Primodessa-film” and “Parimedia-film” [France],

1992).

2. Kepley notes the massive bureaucratization that took place during

the transition to a centralized “economy”: a two-year personnel plan

provided cinema with more than seven thousand new administra-

tors—over three and a half times more than the number of creative

personnel slated to join the industry in the same interval. In May

1930 the newly chartered agency of Soiuzkino (All-Union Combine

of the Movie-Photo Industry) was made responsible for “all matters

concerning production of the movie-photo apparatus (for filming,projecting, lighting, and so on), movie-photo accessories and materi-

als (films, records, papers, photochemicals, and so on), and also all




matters concerning motion-picture production, rental, and exhibi-

tion” (Vance Kepley Jr., “The First ‘Perestroika’: Soviet Cinema under

the First Five-Year Plan,” Cinema Journal 35, no. 4 [1996]: 31–53;

hereafter cited as “FP”). For a detailed account of the restructuring of the Soviet film industry in the 1930s, see Jamie Miller, Soviet Cinema:

Politics and Persuasion under Stalin (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010).

3. Glasnost was the name of Gorbachev’s policy of maximal publicity,

openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institu-

tions in the Soviet Union, together with freedom of information. The

word, based on the Russian root glas or golos, refers to the speaking

voice.

4. Two films that spoke particularly to the new “amorality” were Vasilii

Pichul’’s Malen’kaia Vera (Little Vera, 1988) and Petr Todorovskii’s

Interdevochka (Intergirl, 1989). For a detailed reading of sex and

violence in post-Soviet pop culture, see Eliot Borenstein, Overkill:

Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 2007). For films about the coming apart of

ideology and the loss of belief, see Aleksei German’s Moi drug Ivan

Lapshin (My Friend Ivan Lapshin, 1984) and Khrustalev, mashinu!

(Khrustalev, My Car! 1998); Tengiz Abuladze’s Monanieba (Repen-

tance, 1987); Karen Shakhnazarov’s Gorod zero (City Zero, 1988);Petr Todorovskii’s Ankor, eshche ankor! (Encore, Once More, En-

core! 1992); Ivan Dykhovichnyi’s Prorva (Moscow Parade, 1992);

Sergei Mikhalkov’s Utomlennye solntsem (Burnt by the Sun, 1994);

and Sergei Livnev’s Serp i molot (Hammer and Sickle, 1994).

5. Soviet critics found the early Muratova films anti-realist and anti-so-

cialist realist because of their nonlinear narratives (sixteen flashback

sequences in Brief Encounters, e.g.) and their lack of a “moral” cen-

ter—i.e., no clear distinction between good and evil or legible ideolog-ical message. Speaking about Muratova’s first six feature films, Jane

Taubman has noted the director’s “ear for heteroglossia,” an ability

to put on the screen a polyphony of voices (often speaking at once) as

a way of countering Soviet cinema’s monoglossia and breaking down

hierarchical structures by privileging women’s voices and women’s

speech over patriarchal discourse (see Jane A. Taubman, Kira Mura-

tova [London: I.B. Taurus, 2005], 8; hereafter cited as KM).

6. To be “disqualified” meant to be downgraded to a lower professional

category, which effectively denied Muratova the right to work inde-

pendently as a director.

7. For a detailed account of Muratova’s life and works, see Kira Mu-




ratova (Imena Odesskoi kinostudii), ed. Galina Lazareva and Vladi-

mir Minenko (Odessa: Astroprint, 2004); KM; and Zara Abdullaeva,

Kira Muratova: Iskusstvo kino (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Oboz-

renie, 2008), hereafter cited as IK. For a theoretical engagement withher films, see Mikhail Iampolski, Muratova: Opyt kinoantropologii

(Moscow: Seans, 2008), hereafter cited as MO.

8. Her breakthrough film was Astenicheskii sindrom (Asthenic Syn-

drome, 1989), which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on Febru-

ary 19, 1990, to mixed reviews. As the film journal Iskusstvo kino

reported: “Asthenic Syndrome was received respectfully, and received

the special prize of the jury. No one doubted the director’s great cin-

ematographic achievement—only, it seems, the film was not very well

understood. Both the audience, many of whom did not sit through

to the end, and the professional critics asked roughly the same ques-

tions: ‘Is this . . . a kind of surrealism? An intentionally invented

concentrate of unthinkable horror?’ But no, this is a merciless look,

cruel, but this is the way we live” (K. Shcherbakov, “Ulybka Kabirii?”

Iskusstvo kino 9 (1990): 146–47; translated in KM, 60.)

9. Jane A. Taubman, “The Cinema of Kira Muratova,” Russian Review

52 (July 1993): 372. On Muratova and sound, see also Graham Rob-

erts, “The Meaning of Death: Kira Muratova’s Cinema of the Ab-surd,” in Russia on Reels: The Russian Idea in Post-Soviet Cinema,

ed. Birgit Beumers (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999): 144–60; KM; and in

particular Irina Sandomirskaia, “A Glossolalic Glasnost and the Re-

Tuning of the Soviet Subject: Sound Performance in Kira Muratova’s

Asthenic Syndrome,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 2, no. 1

(2008): 63–83, hereafter cited as “GG.”

10. Stephen Heath, “Body, Voice,” Questions of Cinema (Bloomington:

Indiana UP, 1985), 176–93. Hereafter cited as “BV.” Heath notes inparticular, “the extreme resistance that can be set up in the ‘addition’

of sound to image (resistance marks what is left over, in excess, from

the position of the ‘subject’ proposed)” (176–77).

11. Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to

Sound, 1926 – 1931 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999),

311. Hereafter cited as TT .

12. Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulations of

Body and Space,” Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 33. Hereafter cited

as “VC.”

13. The “missing” shot/reverse-shot construction fails to suture the view-

ing subject into a coherent and complete world; in a shot/reverse-




shot sequence the second shot purports to show what was missing

from the first shot; “together the two shots seem to constitute a per-

fect whole” (Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice

in Psychoanalysis and Cinema [Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 1988], 12; hereafter cited as AM). On suture, see Jean-Pierre

Oudart, “Cinema and Suture,” trans. Kari Hanet, Screen 18, no. 4

(1977 / 78): 35–47; Stephen Heath, “Notes on Suture,” Screen 18, no.

4 (1977 / 78): 48–76; and Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 194–236.

14. According to the published script, the policeman is checking for rain.

See IK, 368–407.

15. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret

Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 25. Herafter

cited as RP.

16. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Litera-

ture and Art , trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jartine, and Leon S. Roudiez

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 133.

17. Referring to the qualities of the chora’s kinetic rhythm, Kristeva says

that the chora is a “modality of significance in which the linguistic

sign is not yet articulated as the absence of an object and as the dis-

tinction between real and symbolic” (RP, 26).18. See Eugénie Zvonkine, “The Structure of the Fairy Tale in Kira Mura-

tova’s The Sentimental Policeman,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cin-

ema 1, no. 2 (2007): 131–45. Muratova may be referencing the 1951

Vittorio de Sica film Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan), which

opens with a baby in a cabbage patch and has a fairy-tale structure.

19. In The Voice in Cinema, Michel Chion writes: “In the beginning,

in the uterine darkness, was the voice, the Mother’s voice. . . . We

can imagine the voice of the Mother weaving around the child a net-work of connections it’s tempting to call the umbilical web. A rather

horrifying expression to be sure, in its evocation of spiders—and in

fact, this original vocal connection will remain ambivalent” (Michel

Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman [New York:

Columbia University Press, 1999], 61).

20. Lilya Kaganovsky, How the Soviet Man Was Unmade: Cultural Fan-

tasy and Male Subjectivity under Stalin (Pittsburgh: University of

Pittsburgh Press, 2008).

21. The entire film is shot through with images of “the carceral”: fences

with barbed wire, animal cages, the police station drowning in docu-

ments, the children’s home with its locked doors, the court.




22. Iampolski speaks of Muratova’s insistence that reality is never itself

but a representation. See MO.

23. Robert Spadoni, Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the

Origins of the Horror Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press,2007). Hereafter cited as UB.

24. Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception (Chi-

cago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

25. See Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University

Press, 2005), 89.

26. We can see an example of this with Dziga Vertov’s Three Songs of

Lenin: a front-page article in the newspaper Pravda shows a photo

of the working masses on their way, as the caption tells us, “to hear

Three Songs of Lenin” (Pravda, November 2, 1934).

27. See Emma Widdis, “Muratova’s Clothes, Muratova’s Textures, Mura-

tova’s Skin,” KinoKultura 8, online at http://www.kinokultura.com/

articles/apr05-widdis.html (accessed March 18, 2010); and “GG.”

28. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the

Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , vol. 17, trans.

James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1986), 217–53.

29. Crafton writes of a similar “elocution vogue” in Hollywood: “The

elocution vogue reveal[ed] a specific anxiety about the voice. It wasthe standard of speech and language that was the issue, not some in-

nate acoustic property. . . . The supposition that the voice can be iso-

lated and altered suggests that it was something extra, apart from the

personality or physical being of the actor. Like the sound track, which

was at the time conceived of as a supplement to the silent film, the

actor’s voice was being treated as a separate commodity. The debate

over who controlled the disembodied film voice had repercussions in

the realm of labor, increasing the executives’ anxiety about actors.The producers quickly appended riders to the Standard Agreement

that legally recognized the separation of the voice from the body and

established their right to exploit it” (TT , 456).

Documents

There Is No Acoustic Relation