close up - Monoskop

FROM SILENCE TO SOUND 81
is translated here). Sound is a 'two-edged invention'. It probably would be used to
subordinate film to theatricality, but it could be used to create 'new possibilities of
developing and perfecting the mounting [montage]'. But to do that sound would have
to be used in dialectical counterpoint to the image.
The statement, originally published in the Leningrad magazine Zhiznikusstva on 5
August 1928, had already provoked a furious row among Soviet film-makers.
Pudovkin's cameraman Golovnya claimed that Pudovkin did not know much about
synchronized sound when he signed the piece, and soon changed his ideas. 8 Writing in
his own name in 1929, for example, Pudovkin continued to argue for a contrapuntal
relationship between sound and image, but one that is less dialectical than
associational. 9 Alexandrov at least remained committed to the theories articulated in
the statement. He tried to put them into practice when he produced the first
Russian-made sound film, Romance sentimentale, in France in 1930. The film ran the
soundtrack backwards, used 'drawn sound' - that is, graphic figures such as letters,
lines and profiles scratched onto the soundtrack of the film and then played back
through the projector - and other techniques for manipulating sound^ which he
discussed with the Close Up contributor Harry A. Potamkin. 10 Eisenstein always
denied any involvement in the production, but there is at least circumstantial — if
hardly impractical - evidence that he played a central part. According to Luis Bunuel:
Eisenstein's friends have tried to blame Alexandrov for the debacle of the
shoddy and dreadful production of Romance Sentimentale. But I saw Eisenstein
making it with my own eyes, since he was shooting it on the stage next to me
when I was making L'Age d'or."
The point of the story is that Eisenstein - certainly the engineer in him - and
Alexandrov were excited by the aesthetic possibilities opened up by sound. There was
a debate and not just a line about sound in Close Up.
Some contributors, and especially the women among them, remained resistant. For
Bryher, silent cinema was, or at least became in retrospect, 'the art that died'. (The
'gendering' of the debate about sound is discussed in the introduction to Richardson's
work in Part 4.) Other contributors, Macpherson notable among them, soon began to
be won over to the creative possibilities of contrapuntal sound for an enriched
montage:
People have not yet begun to speak, far less think, of sound in the same way as
they think now and write in Close Up and elsewhere of vision. They must. The
theory of sound and sound-vision is just as complicated, and in many ways
similar. Sound must never be thought of alone. It must now be inseparably and
forever sound-sight. The construction of sound-sight aesthetic must be taken in
hand. 12
In the editorial reprinted here, from which this programmatic quotation comes and
which shows him at his most perceptive as a critic, Macpherson cites Alfred
Hitchcock's Blackmail as an example of what could be achieved. 12 Enthusiasm has
taken over from suspicion: