In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

6 The Problem of Heteroglossia in Early Soviet Sound Cinema (1930–35) Evgeny Margolit Let me start with a clarification: the problem of heteroglossia or multilingualism (raznoiazychie) in early Soviet sound cinema is a problem for today’s film historians; the filmmakers and film critics of the period did not consider it as such. Indeed, one of the artists who used multiple untranslated languages as a principal device in his early sound films—Ivan Kavaleridze, a prominent figure of the Ukrainian avant-garde—and even coined the term, devoted no more than a few paragraphs to the practice in his memoirs, which were written some thirty years after the fact.1 and yet those first years of sound cinema saw the release of about a dozen films—Soviet film studios produced about twenty sound films a year on average in the first half of the 1930s—that showcased a broad range of heteroglossic strategies. Outside of the Soviet Union, we also find the practice of heteroglossia in German cinema of the same period, just prior to Hitler’s rise to power (e.g., in Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Kameradschaft [1931]; in Das blaue Licht [The Blue Light, 1932], directed by arnold Fanck and Leni riefenstahl from a script by Béla Bal ázs; in Niemandsland [No Man’s Land, 1931], directed by Victor trivas, himself a russian émigré), as well as in the experimental work of the Czech novelist, screenwriter, and director Vladislav Vancura (e.g., Marijka Nevernice [1935]). Yet even in the well-known Kameradschaft, in which bilingualism is an integral element of the dramatic plot, a translation of the foreign dialogue appears in subtitles . By contrast, Soviet cinema rejected translation in such cases as a matter of course. This holds true not only for Kavaleridze’s Koliivshchina (By Water and Smoke, 1933) and Prometei (Prometheus, 1936), or Boris Barnet’s classic Okraina (The Outskirts, 1933), but also for a broad range of lesser-known films that share at least one thing in common: typically these are significant works of art, situated (from a modern perspective) in one way or another outside of the contemporaneous cinematic mainstream. I emphasize “modern perspective” because many of these films went unnoticed at the time (e.g., Tommy [1931], the first sound film by the patriarch of russian cinema, Yakov Protazanov), disappeared from view because they were banned (e.g., Moia rodina [My Native Land, 1933], by Iosif Heifits 120 | Evgeny Margolit and alexander Zarkhi, and, once more, Prometheus), or were never considered in terms of their heteroglossia (e.g., Putevka v zhizn’ [road to Life, 1931], directed by Nikolai Ekk, the first Soviet “fully talking picture”). One possible explanation for this phenomenon may be that the Soviet screen was supposed to present an ideal reflection of a world moving toward communism. This model emerges with absolute clarity precisely at the start of the 1930s. The preceding decade had proffered two ideals, two competing utopian visions. One was the industrial utopia, based on the idea of absolute mastery over the primal and unpredictable “natural principle.” Its principal doctrine was the total mechanization of society, whereby man became one component of a flawless mechanism, and himself a mechanism, a “man-machine”—a term coined by the 1920s writerphilosopher alexei Gastev. In cinema, this vision reaches its practical and theoretical peak in the films of Dziga Vertov. The alternative view envisions a return to a “natural society,” emphasizing nature as the generative, life-giving force. aided by science and technology, the new man attains maturity; after mastering the language of nature, he evolves into nature’s creative partner. This is the tradition of Velimir Khlebnikov, taken up in poetry by Nikolai Zabolotsky (e.g., the narrative poem “torzhestvo zemledeliia” [The triumph of agriculture, 1933]), and that finds its fullest cinematic expression in the works of alexander Dovzhenko. By the end of the 1920s, it was the industrial utopia that had come to dominate the creative imagination. In cinema, this is especially evident in the proliferation of the agitprop film, with its outright paganistic deification of industrial production at the expense of the individual and nature. at the same time, films espousing the alternative vision—including such major works as Dovzhenko’s Zemlia (Earth, 1930), Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Prostoi sluchai (a Simple Case, 1930), and Mikhail Kalatozov ’s Sol’ Svanetii (Salt for Svanetia, 1930)—were either censured in the official press (in the first two instances) or passed without notice (in the third). The world of...

Share