AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

50 Thursday afternoon AMS Philadelphia 2009
A RED COWBOY IN THE WHite SUN: AMERICAN
RESONANCES IN AN ICONIC SOVIET EASTERN
Katerina Frank
University of California, Davis
In this paper I will explore the music in Vladimir Motyl’s 1969 film White Sun of the desert.
This movie has become a Russian cultural icon over the past four decades. Quotations from
the movie are often referenced in casual conversation, and cosmonauts have established a
tradition of viewing it before every launch. The film’s action unfolds in the deserts of an untamed
Russia during the last days of the Russian Civil War. Beyond its unwavering popularity,
this film is significant because it reveals a cross-cultural dialogue between the USSR and the
United States that informed the development of Cold War-era subjectivity of a new generation
of the intellectual elite.
White Sun is an example of a genre colloquially labeled Eastern, which developed in the
1950s and draws inspiration from the American Western. Motyl was heavily influenced by
classic films like Stagecoach, The Magnificent Seven, and especially, High Noon. This is evident
in the long, panning shots of the Russian “frontier,” a sympathetic minority character, and
a silent protagonist in the vein of Gary Cooper. Even though the Soviet government heavily
criticized Hollywood, it nevertheless strived to recreate the success of the American film industry
at home. Therefore, regardless of the strong anti-Western sentiment of the Cold War,
it is not surprising to see American influences in Soviet films. What is fascinating about this
relationship, though, is how the filmmakers appropriated and recontextualized elements of
American cinematography to articulate their critique of Soviet society. For example, the main
character, Sukhov, became an ideal type for the Russian man despite being a decisively solitary
and ironic figure. This characterization stands in contrast to a typical Soviet protagonist, who
draws strength from being part of a collective.
The cross-cultural influences in Isaak Schwartz’s score are not as obvious, since the music
is steeped in Russian popular traditions. There are only two distinct musical pieces in the
film; an instrumental work and a guitar ballad. The instrumental piece features the balalaika,
whereas the song is a representative of “bard” music, a Soviet genre that originated in the
1950s. Though stylistically the song has strong ties to Russian romances, in the case of White
Sun it can be interpreted as a type of cowboy song, expressing nostalgia for a romanticized
past. In addition, Schwartz’s score belongs to a post-Stalinist trend of sparsely orchestrated
scores that emphasize the individual.
In this paper, I will explore the ways in which Motyl and Schwartz develop a new subjectivity
through allusions to Westerns. Special emphasis will be placed on the score and how it
references the American genre yet is deeply entrenched in compositional techniques of Soviet
films. I will also explore tropes of masculinity, race and personal alienation in other Easterns,
and trace their connections to similar themes in American Westerns. In doing so, I hope to
bring attention to a dialogue that transcended the Iron Curtain.