Description
Book SynopsisAddressing the little-known theoretical and artistic experimentation with sound in Soviet cinema, changing practices of voice delivery and translation, and issues of aesthetic ideology and music theory, this book explores the cultural and historical factors that influenced the use of voice, music, and sound on Soviet and post-Soviet screens.
Trade ReviewFeaturing essays from both established and emerging scholars, the volume will be of great use across disciplines in film studies, musicology, Russian studies, history, and cultural studies. It will be especially valuable for Soviet film scholars interested in the Stalinist period.
* Choice *
The stellar and insightful scholarship of . . . virtually every essay . . . thus makes good on Salazkina's introductory call for more 'exploration[s]s of the relationship between technology and the aesthetics of production, reception, and consumption of film' in regard to Soviet and post-Soviet sound, while also laying the foundation for even more exhaustive future work.
* Cineaste *
Sound, Speech, Music augurs exciting avenues of inquiry in film and media studies. The volume's multidisciplinary perspectives, often woven with rich cultural analysis, contribute to a larger discourse in the humanities and social sciences. In coeditor Salazkina's words, 'The contributions here are meant to provoke a conversation that may change the way we look at the history of our modernity'. . . . Undoubtedly, they will.
* Film Quarterly *
The essays here on sound and speech may . . . be considered pioneering, while the essays on music are a welcome addition to a small body of scholarship. Taken together, these pieces open a range of possibilities for future research.
* Slavic Review *
Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema is an important book. It contains rich case studies, important theoretical insights, and an admirable interdisciplinary and international focus. Most important, it . . . should serve as a foundational text in the field of Russian/Soviet sound studies.
* Kritika *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Note on Transliteration
List of Abbreviations
Introduction / Masha Salazkina
Part I: From Silence to Sound
1. From the History of Graphic Sound in the USSR or Media without a Medium / Nikolai Izvolov
2. Silents, Sound, and Modernism in Dmitry Shostakovich's Score to The New Babylon / Joan Titus
3. To Catch up and Overtake Hollywood: Early Talking Pictures in the Soviet Union / Valerie Pozner
4. ARRK and the Soviet Transition to Sound / Natalia Ryabchikova
5. Making Sense without Speech: The Use of Silence in Early Soviet Sound Film / Emma Widdis
Part II: Speech and Voice
6. The Problem of Heteroglossia in Early Soviet Sound Cinema (1930-1935) / Evgeny Margolit
7. Challenging the Voice-of-God in World War II Era Soviet Documentaries / Jeremy Hicks
8. Vocal Changes: Marlon Brando, Innokenti Smoktunovsky, and The Sound of The 1950s / Oksana Bulgakowa
9. Listening to the Inaudible Foreign: Simultaneous Translators and Soviet Experience of Foreign Cinema / Elena Razlogova
Part III: Music in Film, or the Soundtrack
10. Kinomuzyka: Theorizing Soviet Film Music in the 1930s / Kevin Bartig
11. Ear of the Beholder: Listening in Muzykal'naia istoriia (1940) / Anna Nisnevich
12. The Music of Landscape: Eisenstein, Prokofiev and the Uses of Music in Ivan The Terrible / Joan Neuberger
13. The Full Illusion of Reality: Repentance, Polystylism, and the Late Soviet Soundscape / Peter Schmelz
14. Russian Rock on Soviet Bones / Lilya Kaganovsky
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
