There Is No Acoustic Relation: Considerations on Sound and Image in Post-Soviet Film

Kira Muratova's 1992 film, Chuvstvitel'nyi militsioner (The Sentimental Policeman), opens with a close-up of a baby's face.¹ The baby (Natasha) is lying in a purple and green cabbage patch, occasionally illuminated by a passing searchlight. Nearby, a policeman (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 the baby'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 Policeman to think about the relation between sound and image, body and voice in post-Soviet film—a context that, in a way, mirrors 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 restructuring during these years, refers to it as the "first perestroika," that is to 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 release.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 presumed to intervene in the creative decisions" ("FP," 48). The result was that film production dropped precipitously: from 109 feature releases 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 reconstruction campaign that called for glasnost and perestroika.³ In May 1986 the Union of Soviet Filmmakers established a Conflicts Commission, 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 ardently promised by Soviet ideology.⁴ Control over the creative process was relaxed and the redundant oversight system, with its massive bureaucracy, significantly curtailed. And although this new reconstruction (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 out as a uniquely strange film and Kira Muratova as a most unusual filmmaker. The plot of the film is quite simple: Tolia, a young policeman (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. Elena Zakharova...