The Secondary Orality and Russian Media

Workshop: April, the 24th 2015,
Time: 12.30-18:00

Address: King’s College London,
Department of History
Room S 8.08, Level 8, Strand Building,
London WC2R2LS
Underground: Charing Cross

Inquiries: Dr. Dmitri Zakharine: dmitri.zakharine@kcl.ac.uk

The one day workshop will reflect the contribution of broadcast voices to the rise of Russian/Soviet/Russian listening communities in the long 20th century.

Programme: talk: 25 minutes; discussion: 20 minutes

12:15-12:30 Coffee break

12:30
Dmitri Zakharine, welcome & introduction of guests

12:45-13:30
Serge Tchougounnikov, L’Université de Dijon
“Sound-image”: the history and pragmatics of one formalist concept

13:30-14:15
Jan Levtchenko, Higher School of Economics, Moscow
Transcendent voices of the state in the Early Soviet Sound Film

14:15-14:30
Coffee break

14:30-15:15
Stephen Lovell, King’s College London
Making Orality Primary: Soviet Radio’s Relationship with the Written Word

15:15-16:00
Larissa Zakharova, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris
Was the Soviet telephone a medium of secondary orality? Some evidence from Soviet films of the 1920s-1970s.

16:00-16:15
Coffee break

16:15-17:00
Eugénie Zvonkine, Université Paris. 8, ESTCA, France
Public speech in films of ‘stagnation’ period

17:00-17:45
Dmitri Zakharine, King’s College London
Scream queens in Soviet broadcast? Audio-visual culture and listening communities

18:15
Dinner

Abstracts

Serge Tchougounnikov, L’ Université de Dijon
“Sound-image”: on the history and pragmatics of the formalist concept

The concept of sound image (Lautbild, zvukovoj obraz) is believed to stem from the early film theory which is closely tied to musicology. The term ‘sound image’ is also used in verse theory. I am going to work out the history of this term focusing on the role it was supposed to play within the formalist theory of poetic expression. The idea of ‘sound image’ is closely bound to the other major formalist concepts such as “rhythmic syntactic figures” (O. Brik), ‘verbal gesture’ and ‘sound gesture’ (Polivanov, Sklovskij, Tynianov, Jakobson). Indeed, the career trajectory of this concept within the period between the 19th century psychology and linguistics is highly instructive. I will try to illustrate the practical use of the concept ‘sound image’ citing examples from the early formalist film shooting practice (e.g. the film Poručik Kiže, (1934). My comparative analysis aims at considering the concept of ‘sound image’ as a clue to understanding the apotheosis of syncretistic communication forms in the context of Russian culture of the 1920s.

Jan Levtchenko, Higher School of Economics, Moscow
Transcendent voices of the state in the Early Soviet Sound Film

The present paper aims to investigate some vocal effects that came into play in Soviet films in the early 1930s. In course of the early Soviet experiments with sound recording, performed by broadcast engineers Alexander Shorin (Leningrad) and Pavel Tager (Moscow), the Soviet Union has become able to set up an independent sound film production. It was probably not so highly advanced in Russia as in Hollywood, but still it was sufficient to shoot films with impressive sound effects. During the earliest period, human voices recorded to film simultaneous to the picture, underwent certain distortions, not only due to the shortfalls of sound technology, but also for a clear conceptual reason. For example, voice was being alienated from the body and tended to become a kind of supreme instance that represented the Soviet state existing ‘anywhere and nowhere’. Such films as ‘Alone’ by Grigorij Kozintsev & Leonid Trauberg (1931), ‘Ivan’ by Alexander Dovzhenko (1932) and ‘Deserter’ by Vsevolod Pudovkin (1933) give evidence of how this concept was implemented in the early film. A kind of supernatural voice that belonged to the state was set to be emitted via loudspeakers. It was then gradually getting inside human mind and started ruling it from the inside like a personal voice. The aim of the analysis is to examine how the dominant (transcendent) voice of the state triggers the protagonist’s identity loss while forcing the individual to get his self adjusted to alien’s voice.

Stephen Lovell, King’s College London
Making Orality Primary: Soviet Radio's Relationship with the Written Word

Anyone who has read a turgid Stalin-era radio script will naturally assume that orality in Soviet broadcasting was so secondary as to be entirely parasitic on the written (even printed) word. But the relationship between speech and text on Soviet radio, from its early days in the 1920s through to the 1960s and beyond, was in fact less unequal than that. This paper will review the efforts of Soviet broadcasters to borrow from written forms while also defining a distinct aesthetic and communicative role for themselves - sometimes to the extent of liberating themselves entirely from the text. It will also show the extent to which these efforts were conditioned, and even inspired, by changes in technology.

Larissa Zakharova, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris
Was the Soviet telephone a medium of secondary orality? Some evidence from Soviet films of the 1920s-1970s.

In the Soviet Union, the development of electronic communication technologies was a concomitant of literacy progression. In this context, some technical devices, such as telephone, appeared to remain bound to the urban context of communication. Telephone was mainly used in cities by literate subscribers during the major period of Soviet history. Under these circumstances telephone was set to become a precarious medium of secondary orality. To verify this hypothesis, I am going to analyze scenes from the Soviet films that were shot in the period between 1920 and 1970. In these scenes conversations of telephone users are deliberately put on stage by sound and film directors. Examining oral expressions used by protagonists during their conversations I will try to answer the following questions: From when did the telephone start being filmed as a medium of secondary orality? What obstacles did prevent telephone from becoming a medium of secondary orality? What social and cultural aspects of Soviet reality are stressed in the scenes in which the Soviet telephone is put on stage?

Eugénie Zvonkine, Université Paris. 8, ESTCA, France
Public speech in films of ‘stagnation’ period

During the Stalinist period, official and public speech had always been a central reference point of filmic narrative. However in the post-Thaw period it became progressively unimportant in film, even though official and public speeches remained unavoidable part of collective performances, such as inauguration and closing parts of Soviet ceremonies. My paper will focus on the question how film voices were edited and performed throughout the stagnation period. Within my film corpus there are movies that continue staging public speech, in its traditional function, as a culminating point of film narrative (Speech for the Defence //Slovo dlia zashity by Vadim Abdrashitov (1977)). We can also see how public speeches in films move from official to more intimate settings (Brief encounters //Korotkie vstrechi, by Kira Muratova (1967), I want that podium // Proshu slova, by Gleb Panfilov (1976)). The official tenor of public speeches may also become disrupted due to the disclosure of underlying facts (Twenty days without War // Dvadcat dney bez voyny, by Alexey German (1976)), Getting to Know the Big Wide World // Poznavaya belyi svet by Kira Muratova, (1979), The Same Munkhausen // Tot samyi Munhausen by Mark Zakharov (1979)). I am going to analyse the effects of “stammering” both in acting and editing. It has to be established how the exaggerated voice deformation is enhanced by shortfalls of intradiegetic recording technology, by low quality microphones, by a change of sound amplitude as well as by a meaningful juxtaposition of sound and image.

Dmitri Zakharine, King’s College London
Scream queens in Soviet broadcast? Audio-visual culture and listening communities

The attitude of the Western society toward female sexuality experienced a rapid change at the beginning of the 20th Century and this change was reflected in acoustic experiments with high-pitched hysterical voices of “femmes fragiles” and “femmes fatales”. Sensations that were once viewed as dangerous, experienced extended social acceptance as the Western society reached a certain level of mutually expected self-control. The character represented by shrill screaming was usually a seductive woman who was afraid of becoming a victim of rape and male violence. Famous possessors of high pitched female voices such as Olga Baclanova (also known as the “Russian Tigress”), Madge Bellamy, Carroll Borland and Fay Wray doubtlessly helped the Hollywood thrillers of the 1930s to unprecedented box-office success. Although a montage of shrill female voices was possible with Soviet audio technology, Soviet main-stream film of the 1930s - 1950s refused to import the character of a scream queen from Hollywood. The rise of the voice to emotional octaves did not fit with the established stereotype of the Soviet woman as a working woman and militant mother. Using different approaches to the phenomenon of mediated voice, the paper aims to establish which aspects of Russian oral expression were set to match the targets of propaganda on the one hand and to suit the taste and preference of the Soviet listening community on the other.