Soviet Film Music

Tatiana Egorova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134377251
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Arts de la scène

In the years 1917 to 1991, despite unfavorable prevailing conditions, there were outstanding achievements in the music created for the cinema in the Soviet Union. Perhaps in no other country was film music associated with so many distinguished composers: Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitry Shostakovich, Isaak Dunayevsky, Georgy Sviridov, Aram Khachaturian, Alfred Schnittke, Nikolai Karetnikov, Edward Artemyev, Edison Denisov, and Sofia Gubaidulina. They were ready to accept film directors' invitations because they considered the cinema to be a perfect laboratory for testing the concepts and themes for future operas, symphonies, oratorios, and other large-scale compositions. A remarkable characteristic of Soviet film music was the appearance of successful director - composer collaborations, such as the famous 'duets' of Eisenstein - Prokofiev, Kozintsev - Shostakovich and Tarkovsky - Artemyev. This fascinating volume is the first attempt at a historical analysis of Soviet film music - a unique and full

Part 1
1917-1941

1
Music and silent cinema. The alternative: pianist versus composer

Scarcely a week had passed after the October Revolution in Russia, when on the 1st (14th) of November the First Conference of Proletarian Culture and Education Organizations was held in Petrograd. This Conference passed a unanimous resolution, stressing the necessity of creating proletarian cinema.

The Russian pre-revolutionary cinema had been the only one of its kind, there being no other national cinema in the Russian Empire. It appeared ten or twelve years later than did those in France, England, Germany and America. Nevertheless, by the beginning of the First World War, Russia had become one of the leading countries among those which possessed a well-developed and effective cinema and film industry (for example, within the period of 1914-1917 over two hundred feature films had been released). Thus, the young Soviet Republic inherited more than two thousand picture houses, about ten film studios, a number of laboratories for developing negatives and producing positive copies and, above all, trained and well qualified creative and technical workers. However, many of the owners of picture houses, studios, etc. found themselves in strained and hostile relations with the representatives of the new authorities who wished to take the contents and the subject-matter of released films under their own complete control, and to recast them in the spirit of the revolution.

By the middle of 1919, these unceasing efforts, to submit film manufacturers to certain conditions and continuously charge them with anti-Bolshevist tendencies in their films, led to a mass emigration of the owners and managers of film factories and studios. Emigrants would take away or destroy film equipment, reels and pictures. To stop this process and to preserve the basis of the film industry, the Soviet of People's Commissars passed a resolution, according to which the film industry was declared to be national property. On the 27th of August, 1919, Lenin signed a decree which placed all of the photo and film trade and industry under the jurisdiction of the People's Commissariat of Education. Later this date was celebrated in the USSR as the birthday of Soviet cinema.

The first two decades of the 20th century saw the flowering of silent cinema. True, it was not really silent, for films were accompanied by music. It was played in the auditorium during film shows and was considered indispensable. There were particular reasons for this. One of these was purely technical. According to the German film theoretician, K. London, film music was introduced 'because of the necessity to drown the zooming of the apparatus rather than for aesthetic reasons'¹. Another explanation may be that in the early period of its development this new 'machine art' was regarded by part of the audience as a comic spectacle, an unusual and fascinating attraction which helped one spend one's free time pleasurably. It is, therefore, quite possible that the directors and producers of silent films started to get them 'wired for sound', with music acting in Z. Lissa's opinion, 'according to the same principle of noise damping as it does in the circus, in a café or at a fair'². A similar view was held by Victor Shklovsky, a well-known specialist in literature and a film critic. As early as the midtwenties he had a talk with Vladimir Messman, who, in collaboration with S. Bugoslavsky, had written the leading manual on music compilation for silent film. He tried to convince Messman that 'film music is of the same significance as music in a restaurant'³.

This estimate of film music was supported by the fact that silent films were, as a rule, shot to the accompaniment of pianists. It seemed reasonable to suppose that, if music helped actors perform by emphasizing the expressiveness of their movements and gestures, it could in the same way help the audience watch the film. Anyhow, it was soon clear, both to the theoreticians and practicians and the common cinema-goer that 'music enhances the impressive effect of silent sequences' (S. Krakauer)⁴. In the end, the pianist and the cinema operator were taken on the cinema staff. Moreover, in March 1917, the first trade union of cinema operators and pianists was organized in Moscow. In January 1918 (i.e., already under Soviet rule) it was renamed and became the Union of Cinema Workers.

There was nothing paradoxical in this uniting of people so different by profession. On the contrary, it was consistent with the real state of affair, since neither the cinema operator nor the musician took part directly in the work of the film team, being mere 'mediators' between the picture and the audience, and providing the technical and, partially, the aesthetic conditions for watching. Thus, the picture recorded on the screen had no analogous musical accompaniment recorded: it was each time re-created anew and thus there existed a great number of contradictory variants in the individual musicians' improvisations. There seemed to be only one way to free silent film music from its dependence on the will or whim of these pianists: it was necessary that, besides the film director, the script writer, the camera-man and the actors, there should be a composer who, instead of selecting musical fragments to illustrate one or another sequence, should compose music intended only for one particular picture.

The need to create original music scores for silent films became especially acute in the later half of the 1920s; it was connected with the fact that a considerable number of cinemas in the large towns of the country had symphony orchestras at their disposal. Using orchestral accompaniment to silent films had become a tradition almost everywhere in Russia at the beginning of the century. Little by little pianists had to retreat, and were replaced by trios, quartets, quintets and small orchestras. By the year 1913, large orchestras of 24 and more would gather by the cinema screen not only in St. Petersburg and Moscow but also in the provinces. It is known, for instance, that at the famous Shander cinema palace in Kiev there was an orchestra of 60 musicians, who played whole symphonies during the shows, regardless of what was represented on the screen. (For some reason or other, preference was given to the later symphonies of Tchaikovsky.)

The October revolution and the civil war suspended this process for some time. In 1922, however, orchestras appeared again in the most respectable cinemas. Specially appointed members of the Association of Revolutionary Cinematography (as a rule, they were managers in the musical-artistic department of the cinema section) hurriedly compiled 'recommendation lists' and 'film albums', and collected fragments of 'old imaginative music', as the classical music of the past centuries was called.⁵ For the same purpose, thousands of guidebooks and manuals were published, which contained recommendations and suggested the most typical devices for musical illustration of silent films; there were also the so-called 'tables of moods' which made it easy to decide what kind of music (should be performed) and at what moment, depending on the genre of the film and the contents of the particular sequence. Music examples were given in each case. Later, professional classes for the training of sound engineers were organized, while in the Moscow and Petrograd conservatoires optional courses were arranged. The next stage was the writing of music scripts ordered by the studios, indicating the musical fragments to be used, with strict limits on their time lengths. Afterwards such strict timing became one of the characteristics of sound film music.

The transition from improvisation and compilation to an original music score marked an entirely new phase in understanding the peculiarity of film music. No attempts at perfecting the technique of piano accompaniment, or replacing the pianist by an orchestra, or using records during the film show, etc., could stop this process. The complicated polyphonic dramaturgy of the montage cinema of the '20s, which required a thoroughly rhythmical treatment and organization of all cinematic: techniques and, above all, the powerful art of Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Alexander Dovzhenko, FEKS⁶, Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, which was revolutionary in spirit and in its very method of imaginative thinking — all of this by far surpassed the limits of the modest 'repertoire' of music designers, which consisted of a collection of popular song and dance melodies and fragments of classical music, turned into endless harmonic sequences and tremolo. Instead, the young Soviet cinema was in need of quite a different kind of music, which would not just illustrate the contents of separate scenes but would unite them dramatically; it had to be in keeping with those stormy times of the breaking up of the old order and the strengthening of the new ideology.

The following example shows the earnest and responsible attitude of directors towards silent film music, and their understanding of its role in the cinema: in July 1925, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Sergei Eisenstein were present at a conference held by the Commission of the USSR Central Executive Committee, where, at Eisenstein's request, a resolution was passed 'to ask comrade Meyerhold during his trip abroad, to meet the composer Prokofiev and to have preliminary talks with him about his return to the USSR to prepare a film-symphony, and notify the Commission of his terms'.⁸ The film-symphony mentioned in the resolution was to be music for a monumental picture about the revolution of 1905 which Eisenstein was then going to shoot. This was an unprecedented episode in the history of the pre-sound cinema: not only did the director think it necessary to have original music for his film — he also tried to get a famous composer engaged for its creation. Unfortunately, this intended meeting of these two great artists of the 20th century did not take place. They finally met in 1938 in Paris, and agreed then and there to work together on the film Alexander Nevsky.

As for this great idea for a picture about the first Russian revolution, it was not to be realized. Parts of the material were used in Battleship 'Potemkin' (1925), for which special music was actually written. When this film was on in Berlin, the German composer Edmund Meisel approached Eisenstein with an offer to write music for it. The artistic effect surpassed all expectations: Meisel's music formed such an organic unity with the visual sequence of the picture that Lion Feuchtwanger, shaken by what he saw, devoted a whole chapter of his novel Erfolg (Success) to a description of the effect produced by both the representation and the music in Battleship 'Potemkin' upon thousands of Berliners. Afterwards, when analyzing his film, Eisenstein confessed that Battleship 'Potemkin', though shot as a silent film, 'had much of what can be achieved by a sound picture'. The effect achieved was greatest in the scene where the battleship encountered the whole squadron, and 'music of the machines' ruled supreme: 'in style, this film already overstepped the limits of "a silent picture illustrated by music" and passed into the new province of tone-film...'⁹

Another example of a purposeful, specifically dramatic use of original music in this pre-sound cinema of the '20s, which anticipated the achievements of sound cinema, was The New Babylon (1929), a film by the Leningrad directors Kozintsev and Trauberg. This picture is significant not only because it was the beginning of the long-lasting and fruitful work in the cinema of composer Dmitry Shostakovich: the music of The New Babylon was the opening page in the biography of Soviet film music.

Of course, there were some other attempts at writing original music scores for silent films besides The New Babylon. Thus, according to Block and Bugoslavsky, over ten such film compositions were available in the USSR in 1929¹⁰. Only a few of them were of much interest, such as the musical illustrations by Belza to that classic example of Soviet silent film, The Arsenal, directed by Dovzhenko (1929), Arkhangelsky's music to Polikushka, filmed by Sanin (1919), Astradantsev's to the pictures by Chervyakov A Golden Beak (1929) and Cities and Years (1930). However, to a great extent, the musical accompaniment to these films had its prototype in a pot-pourri of operatic, song and dance melodies, embellished by unpretentious devices of sound expression. On the whole, music of this kind has not left any significant trace or memory in the history either of the country's cinema, or the country's music, except for the music score by Shostakovich for the above-mentioned film of Kozintsev and Trauberg, The New Babylon.

Accepting the director's invitation to write music for their new film, the young but already well-known composer did not feel himself to be a novice in the cinema. In his student days he had been obliged to take up jobs to support himself, and for two years he had worked as accompanist in one of the Leningrad cinemas, which was situated at the corner of Nevsky Prospekt and Herzen Street (now Bolshaya Morskaya) and bore the name Bright Reel. Later Shostakovich took over the pianist's job at the then luxurious cinema Splendid Palace during the incumbent's illness, and in February 1925 got permanent work in the cinema Piccadilly. All of this helped him acquire necessary practical skills and knowledge of the technical side of creating silent film music. He put his experience to use when writing his score for The New Babylon, though what the directors required from him was far from conventional. First, according to the film makers' idea, music should not just illustrate or copy the action, it was to participate actively in the action. Secondly, its role was, like that of the action, to be a powerful, emotional and ideological influence upon the audience. 'Therefore', one of the directors recollected, 'we at once came to an agreement with the composer that the music was to be connected, not with the exterior action but with its purport, and develop in spite of the events, regardless of the mood of the scene'¹¹.

Before he started working, Shostakovich carefully studied the arrangement of the film sequences and asked for timings of each scene. Then he looked through all the material once or twice, and only then set to work. He himself admitted that in writing the music he did not follow the principle of illustration, but assumed as a basis the contents of the main sequence in each series of several interconnected sequences¹². Hence, many scenes in the film, which showed the tragic love of the Versailles soldier Jean and a shopgirl from a fashionable Paris shop, Louise, were 'read' by the composer not according to the exterior, factual aspect of the action, but in accordance with its inner subtext; special attention was paid to revealing the emotional state of the characters. The scene set in a restaurant where Jean comes in search of his beloved may serve as an example of this method. The bourgeoisie, having recovered from its panic, is noisily celebrating its victory, while by the walls of the Bastille the captive Communards, Louise among them, are being shot. The composition of the scene is based on a contrasting montage of sequences, representing the drunken revelry of the victors and the execution of the rebels, which alternate with a close-up of Jean's face; in his eyes we see inconsolable anguish and despair. But revelation comes too late: Louise is dead. Jean's inner state gave Shostakovich a clue to the treatment of the whole episode. The gloomy, dramatic music which accompanied it was in a complicated contrapuntal interaction with the representation, and persistent in attracting the spectator's attention to the man's tragedy, to his soul's drama.

The music of The New Babylon contains many ingenious and witty 'findings' which put one in mind of Shostakovich's grotesque comic opera The Nose (after Gogol). For example, the scene representing the rehearsal of an operetta was accompanied by Hanon's piano exercises. Depending on what was shown on the screen, these monotonous passages acquired nuances, causing now boredom, now gaiety, and sometimes a sense of danger. Similarly unusual and stereotype-breaking was the use of a large quotation from The Child's Album by Tchaikovsky (An old French Song) to characterize cold and haughty Versailles, hostile to rebellious...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction to the Series
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART ONE: 1917-1941
• PART TWO: 1941-1958
• PART THREE: 1959-1969
• PART FOUR: 1970-1985
• PART FIVE: 1986-1991
• Notes
• Filmography
• Index