Seeing Red: Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA

Rebecca C. Erickson Final Thesis, University of Amsterdam, Research MA in Art Studies

June 2015 Supervisors: Prof. dr. Julia Kursell (University of Amsterdam) Dr. Otto Boele (University of Leiden)

U Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

Table of Contents Introduction—A Lineage of Representations 3 Analyzing Paralinguistic Information 7 Chapter 1— Brushing History “Against the Grain” 10 Towards a Film Atlas 10 Adorno and Benjamin 11 Why Sound Film? 13 Early Sound Film and National Imaginations 14

Chapter 2— The Voice 19 Introduction—Acousmȇtre 19 Representing Immigrant Populations in the USA 20 Vocalic Tactics in the USSR 26 Conclusion 29

Chapter 3— Music: Diegetic and Non 30 Introduction—Nationalism and Representation in Song 30 Jazz in Russia 31 Diegesis 32 “Should” as an Agent in Culture 33 Non-diegetic Space 36 Comrade X—To Kitsch or Not Too Kitsch 38 Conclusion 40

Chapter 4— Mise en Scene 41 Introduction 41 Марионетки 41 Русский вопрос 45 Wonder Man 50 Shall We Dance? 54 Conclusion 57 Conclusion 58 Bibliography 60 Appendix 66

Author’s Note: It is no exaggeration to say that this thesis would not have been possible without the assistance of Ms. Alexandra Kynchikova who has been my Russian language teacher over the past two years. More than simply instructing me in learning a new language, however, she has shaped my understanding of the culture(s) she was raised in after moving across Russia in her childhood, the challenges of moving to places that do not really understand that culture, and the true generosity of the human spirit.

I also owe a debt of gratitude to the University of Leiden’s department of Russian Studies, and more specifically to Dr. Otto Boele for allowing me to participate as a guest student in a course there which also greatly informed and deepened this thesis.

Finally, all of the film clips used for analysis in this thesis can be found at the hyperlink below, with the exception of the scene from Wonder Man. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8PQ2XPVxVcNSmtIc0tCNjE0ems/view?usp=sharing

2 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

The Imagination is not fantasy; nor is it sensibility, even though it is difficult to conceive of an imaginative man who would not be sensitive. The Imagination is a quasi divine faculty which perceives first of all, outside of philosophical methods, the intimate and secret relations of things, the correspondences and the analogies. (Baudelaire in Didi-Huberman 2010: 15)

Introduction Figure 1. Gru

The photograph above is a screenshot of the main character from the 2010 film Despicable Me. Though his first name is Felonius, in the film(s) he is only ever addressed by his surname: Gru. Gru is voiced by actor Steve Carell, and Carell— claimed in an interview to be the inventor of this voice through trial and error by causing/inciting the most laughter— also said in the same interview that he “did not want to represent a specific nationality” (Carell 2013) and so the accent is “vaguely Eastern European” (ibid). While I will admit that it is entirely conceivable (however unlikely) that the inventors of the character did not realize or know that GRU is the acronym for Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency, the Главное Разведывательное Управлениеб; and while actors in the United States may seem to have become, in recent decades, much more politically correct about

3 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson vocal depictions of other nationalities in the movies, the problem with not choosing to own a specific place or people to represent is that the character that has been created may then slide effortlessly into a heritage already living within the media of the United States. Gru is the most recent incarnation and beneficiary of a vocalic tradition stretching into the present from the very earliest years of the invention of the sound film. The focus of this thesis is a series of films both in the United States and the Soviet Union which preceded the Cold War, yet in content and narrative goal could easily be considered “propagandist” in nature. In both countries, the genres of the films were musicals and comedies, with the occasional drama thrown in. The purpose in analyzing these films is to apply the framework of the Mnemosyne Atlas, but not as regards images— rather to understand how these two countries constructed one another in the sonic imaginings of their populations. By applying the idea of the atlas the thesis necessarily invokes the works of Benedict Anderson and his “imagined communities” as well as the work of Michel Chion in his understandings and studies of sound and voice in film. These two scholars provide the atlas with its binding in many respects for by isolating what constituted a sonic representation of the national “other” and “self” in film during these years, it is possible, then, to grasp at the understanding of how the acoustically imagined communities of the Soviet Union and the United States began to take shape in the Interwar Years by already medially positioning themselves as supposed opposites. As will be demonstrated in the historiographical information from chapter one, neither country spared any time or expense in working on creating a filmic, visual culture with which to represent the “other,” and yet even less explored than the history of the visual culture of this time is the aural culture embedded and inhering to the visual. Films, as Michel Chion has long maintained, are not merely their visual components, but their soundscapes as well. Those soundscapes, created to fit, to add narrative clarity (or obfuscation), to support, and—ultimately—to represent the film to its audience were weapons to be used in a conflict both nations were preparing for. One might observe this as being only too natural given what transpired in the Cold War, and yet, a different viewpoint might instead be taken of this time period. Instead of seeing the Cold War as the period when these two nations came to medial grips with the necessity of representing the other to their populations perhaps the “interwar years” could be seen as the setting of that scene—the prelude to the true show played out upon a world stage in deadly earnest. The films created and disseminated between 1924 and 1948 depict a solidifying of purpose behind these two world players whose intentions were supposedly diametrically opposed. Yet the goal of this thesis is to reveal, the history and musical/acoustic elements of this opposition of ideologies while explicating that comparison through the ideas behind the Mnemosyne Atlas. Owing to the nature of film culture in the 1920s and 30s, films representing the so-called “opposite” were not surrounded by hundreds of other competing films. One way of viewing what transpired then is available only to scholars in the present. By looking back, exhuming these films

4 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson from the time space between them and suspending them side-by-side the argument can be made that both nations provided their populations with roughly half of a filmic version of the Bilderatlas. When the films of this time period from the repertoire of both nations are present together only then can a viewer have the entirety of the images in this particular “atlas”1. The aim of applying such a viewpoint to these films is to conflate the temporal space between the images and soundscapes thus producing a third body born of that original interstice. Each viewer to encounter the films in their respective cultures encountered them with time and separation between them. Thus, the time- element, that which can be retroactively collapsed by a scholar of this time, was the mechanism that gave birth to the rarified images and senses of each film—the afterlife (Nachleben) of which survived to interact with the subsequent films during the Cold War.

Rather than turning to narrative, memory often figures the past with the immediacy of images, images that may be borrowed… Mnemosyne makes the unfamiliar familiar, the strange less so. A paradoxical creature, even as she would annul temporal and spatial distances, she reminds us how “long” time is. (Johnson 2012: 4)

Aby Warburg built his Mnemosyne Atlas from 1924 until 1928, and it was an experiment in both memory and association, drawing upon the space between images to understand the ways that images could be understood to acquire agency through their afterlives. The afterlife of the image was the part of the image that went on dwelling in the mind of the viewer: that which survived to interact with the other images upon the various tableaux he had staged in the exhibition. Warburg’s experiment, then, was to elicit and inspire humans to understand and encounter the afterlife of images in conjunction with other images. As much as the Mnemosyne Atlas can be said to be about the differences between things it is also about similarity and about the ways in which images and impressions emerge from an interstice created by time. All of these concepts come in to play in the analysis within this thesis. Similarity, difference, alongside of concepts of “self” and “other” are explored in addition to the means by which sound films were used to seal the images being created of these two nations. In this manner, the final body of meanings and associations that the USSR and the USA represented to their populations can be said to have emerged from this temporal interstice, and these impressions were further reinforced by other media: popular songs, posters, and news reels. These reinforcements functioned as a kiln would upon soft clay, hardening it enough to hold a shape indefinitely— until broken. Chronologically, the films that are analyzed are as follows2: Марионетки [Marionettes] (1934), Новы Гулливер [The New Gulliver] (1935), Цирк [Circus] (1936), Shall We Dance (1937), Ninotchka (1939), Comrade X (1940), Wonder Man (1945), A Royal Scandal (1945), and Русски вопрос [The Russian Question] (1948). Three of the films effectively do not occur within the

1 I am not the first person to think of constructing a film atlas this way, though rather than being based upon this concept I found the source which cites the technique retroactively while searching for additional sources on the Mnemosyne Atlas. 2 The list is by no means exhaustive, as there were other films from both countries in this same time period. For the length of this thesis, however, I had to choose amongst the films for specific examples. The entire list that I uncovered is in the bibliography.

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Interwar Years and this matters because as the 1940s drew towards a close, open hostilities between the United States and the USSR had already reached a point where it seemed as though there would be a smooth transition from WWII directly into the Cold War. To what extent were these films representative of the growing (perhaps better said as souring) sentiments between the USA and the USSR? The purpose of analyzing the vocal techniques and musical methods is to bring forward from a total analysis an understanding of several aspects of the dawning film culture through which two nations were readying their constituencies for a battle of minds. The first and most salient part of the framework which the analysis will reveal is how early films created sonic representations and sonic commentary (musically and vocally) upon both the nationalistic self and the other. Whereas the scholarly literature on representations of the other in music by researchers like Edward Said tends to analyze those representations in terms of “orientalization” or exoticization these films were doing something entirely different. The representations in films representing Russian/American culture were never a form of consumption of the exotic in either land, but, as the analysis of clips and sounding tactics will demonstrate, these strategies were maneuvering efforts during the Interwar Years— attempts to lay claim to an ideological reality, to situate the self3 within that reality and thereby draw acoustic borders around a totalizing conceptualization of an opposed ideology. In the first chapter, these ideas are situated within the framework of Adorno’s debate with Benjamin upon the role of film as an object of art, and upon the existence of a “collective conscious”. The opening chapter of this thesis is concerned with how the analysis of these films will proceed from outlining Chion’s ideas on the acousmêtre to a deeper discussion of the ways the film atlas takes on the task of shaping the imagined communities of the USSR and the USA during the Interwar Years. Discussion of the ways in which film crossed international boundaries much as the literary heritage of various lands, the predecessor to film narrative, had traversed the globe both in translated and untranslated versions. So films now, too, would have global audiences and “readerships”. The result of this discussion is to prepare the reader for the analysis which makes up the remaining three chapters of the thesis in both methodology, terminology and analysis techniques. The second part of the framework that the analysis will demonstrate goes beyond the “how” of these representations into a discussion of potential reasons that representations were made to function as they were and when they were disseminated in films. In addition to discussing the tactics at work in the sound films there are pieces of historiography attached to these analyses to shed light on where these films fit within a timeline of brewing tensions between the United States

3 Indeed, for the USSR the effort to create an imagined community which could be readily identifiable and identified with across its great and varied lands was essential. Less obviously, however, the USA was working in a similar vein in early film by creating a standard image of “American” lifestyle while language regarding “melting pots” was being simultaneously spread about as encouragement to embrace the hybrid reality inhabiting those national borders. The early years of film were a critical time for both nations to cement identities of self as much or even more than the “other”.

6 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson and the USSR. Finally, attention in the analysis will be paid to the fact that while representing the “self” the films demonstrate remarkable similarity in music both as regards styles or genres of music and as regards devices employed in the sound film. The similarity is worth noting because, in the Interwar Years, sound film was in its nascent form, yet composers and sound engineering teams had a surprisingly consistent approach to embedding ideas of sound within films even across cultures that were supposedly very different. These similarities demonstrate an already intensely hybridized global music market in the first few decades of the 20th Century. This globalized market precedes, therefore, the films which also would have been a force therein—it is clear that traveling musicians and radio had already permeated the borders of many countries and successfully begun shaping a globally hybrid concept of popular music which was later embedded into these sound films. The Interwar Years, officially from 1918 until 1939 (Hanson 2012) were a bustling time period. The “roaring” 20s took place in this time span, as did a global financial catastrophe, the Russian civil wars sparked by the October Revolution (Октя́брьская револю́ ция), and the “Great Terror” (Conquest 1968). World War I had rearranged the global geography and the understandings of warfare for all time. In addition, the First World War had instilled in the modernizing global conscious a sense that the world was shrinking. America’s political practices of isolationism under President McKinley at the end of the 19th century ended with Theodore Roosevelt’s aggressive politics and a new jingoistic approach to national identity with a clarifying concept of what it meant to be “American”. From one Roosevelt through a succession of presidents to the second Roosevelt, these ideologies would launch the Interwar Years with a consolidation of that “American” identity, placing much of the worth of that identity upon its capitalistic drive (ironically enough4).

Analysing Paralinguistic Information Praat graphs of the several scenes from various films have been made to represent visually what listeners in the cinemas of the early sound film were exposed to. In addition to making what one hears visible and legible, information regarding how the pitch classes and formants of the vocals were shaped can be read within these graphs. Finally the graphs are colored so that the various voices in these scenes may be compared with one another. There are a few points to be remarked on when looking at such a graph.

4 I say ironically enough because Theodore Roosevelt was responsible for breaking up some of the largest monopolies in history. He labeled those wealthy owners rather famously as “robber-barons”.

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Figure 2 Lullaby from Цирк

The x-axis of the graph indicates the amount of time that has elapsed in seconds recording a piece or clip. The y-axis indicates pitch frequencies. I made this graph from a sound clip generated using Garage Band to record myself singing the melody of the lullaby at the end of Цирк. The graph should be read left to right and what one can see visually in addition to the pitches being sung is the very contour of the melody. This graph will later be used in the thesis to demonstrate a point regarding how lullabies in general are structured and how the song at the end of Цирк is recognizable as one such category of song. The reason for using Praat graphs instead of printed sheet music (as, indeed, I could transcribe the melodies into sheet music) is to install a mechanical barrier between the system of knowledge that is sheet music and these film scores. Furthermore, these types of graphs provide access to analyzing not only sung works, but to the spoken dialogue with its pitch and formant alterations. Both chapters two and three of the thesis deal exclusively with aural techniques of instilling and representing “otherness” in the selected films. While chapter two takes on analysis of how voice is used as a means of creating stereotypes for both genders and implicating traits inherent into the nationals of the country being represented, chapter three, by contrast, concerns itself with musical examples from films—both diegetic and nondiegetic. The purpose of these two sections is to clearly delineate the separate aural strategies used to type these two nations into their contextual representations. The final chapter of analysis will be the fourth chapter, and in it whole scenes from the films will be dissected for two purposes: to exemplify the various tactics in the scenes, to break

8 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson down the action and make it obvious, and to place the characters who were repeat performers of these types of roles within the films they belonged to.

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Chapter 1 Introduction

What Hollywood and the studios of Russia learned in these early years of film was to craft stories, first and foremost, which would appeal to their own publics, but which had a loose enough connection to each other so as to implicate other nations and identities without actually spelling out that otherness implicitly. Once unleashed, these identities were hard to shake off, as several film studios in the United States learned after creating the so-called “Red Trilogy” (The North Star, Mission to Moscow and Ballad of Russia) and were then called upon to justify the films’ existence to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) (Georgakas 2013). Clearly neither the public imagination nor a government’s ideas of what was speech that could be construed as treasonous under the constitution were so malleable or pliant that just any version of Russianness would be allowed on the screen as part of the American film atlas. The same could be said for Russia’s stance towards American identity and attitudes. Several films from this time period illustrate characteristics of American life or, potentially of greater significance in terms of the ideological development of the people, fascist policies and what those types of governments and societies face as challenges. But artists making films in the USSR had to walk a fine line; “national in form and socialist in content” (Stalin 1925) was the seemingly impossible standard set by Stalin as the motto for the ways in which artists could create art for a mass public. So the standard of Socialist Realism became the by-word among artists while the promising avant garde movement that had begun to take shape in Russia at the turn of the century was left to die on the vine or defend itself from being shipped off to the gulag. Clearly, for creators, writers, musicians and composers in both nations the stakes were very high.

Mnemosyne and the Filmic Sound Atlas There are some fundamental differences between how Aby Warburg conceived of the Bilderatlas and how the sound atlas functioned in the Interwar Years. For starters, few (and certainly none of the films within this thesis) lacked a narrative. Films were not various random images upon a page and arranged upon a tableau awaiting association. The films in this thesis all had plots and very specific means of invoking or calling forth the understanding of “other”, but these films are meaningful because they were the first efforts of Hollywood and the film machine of the USSR to attempt these depictions vocally, and these efforts were primarily of consequence because what Hollywood and the USSR invoked in creating such an atlas was not a loose conglomeration of “associations” between images. Warburg’s experiment into the workings of memory and association was (relatively) harmless when compared with what transpired when the assemblages built into the sound film atlas were complete. With each new film created there were new associations between hundreds of characteristics to be invoked and as each year progressed more

10 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson and more associations were to be made in these critical years prior to the full-scale onset of the Cold War. In his introduction to the catalogue of the reconstruction of the Mnemosyne Atlas, Didi- Huberman writes,

Such is, therefore, our heritage, the heritage of our time. In a sense, this is the madness of excess… But, in another sense, it is also wisdom and knowledge: Warburg understood that thought has to do not with forms found but with transforming forms. It is a matter of perpetual ‘migrations’ (Wanderungen), as he liked to say. He understood that dissociation is liable to analyse, to re-edit, to reread the history of man.” (Didi-Hubermann 2010: 20)

Of interest to this thesis is the concept of “migrations”. As it transpired, information that was gleaned from history, from novels out of the cultures represented, and also information that was sometimes pure hearsay (as is the case with the rather famously rumored lascivious appetites of Empress Catherine of Russia as portrayed in Ernst Lubitsch’s A Royal Scandal) migrated its way into these films and therein attained a fairly stable identity. Hence the argument can be made that sound film was a director/studio’s means of sealing the representation inside the image portrayed. These films were much more than their costumes or their symbols because as Chion so sapiently wrote,

The sound film is therefore not just a stage inhabited by speaking simulacra… The sound film also has an offscreen [sic] field that can be populated by acousmatic voices, founding voices, determining voices—voices that command, invade and vampirize the image… (Chion 1999: 27)

It was the off screen field—the minds of the populations and viewing publics—with which Adorno and Benjamin were so concerned when their debate began shortly after the advent of the sound film’s invention.

Adorno and Benjamin In 1936, two scholars, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin each wrote essays that could be said, in the theses of their arguments to be opposed to one another. The matter of disagreement was philosophical in nature, and its origins in scholarly literature and analysis can be traced all the way back to Schiller in various regards (Bloch 1980). But the subject matter of the discussion was popular culture. In Adorno’s case the topic was Jazz music and in Benjamin’s it was the advent of a reproducible film culture. For the rest of Benjamin’s life the two men continued to correspond with one another and this debate between them can be traced throughout that correspondence. The portion of the debate that is relevant to this thesis can best be summarized by quoting a response by Adorno to a letter from Benjamin. In the letter he states, To a certain extent I must accuse your essay of this second romanticism. You have swept art out of the corners of its taboos—but it is as though you feared a consequent inrush of barbarism… and protected yourself by raising what you fear to a kind of inverse taboo. The laughter of the audience at a cinema… is anything but good and revolutionary; instead it is full of the worst bourgeois sadism. I very much doubt the expertise of the newspaper boys who discuss sports; and despite its shock-like seduction I do not find your theory of distraction convincing—if only for the simple reason that in a communist society work will be organized in such a way that people will no longer be so tired and so

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stultified that they need distraction. On the other hand, certain concepts of capitalist practice, like that of the test, seem to me almost ontologically congealed and taboo-like in function—whereas if anything does have an aural character, it is surely the film which possesses it to an extreme and highly suspect degree. (Adorno translated by Taylor 1980: 123)

There are many pieces of information to contend with in this tiny passage. I begin by stating that the letter in question was written in response to Adorno’s having read Benjamin’s essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. To understand, thus, the full criticisms in that passage it is necessary to bring forth the concepts from the essay by Benjamin which provoked those criticisms. To be concise, these critiques and the debate are meaningful for the thesis because they touch upon the ways in which early cinema was shaping the consuming public and was also being shaped by that public and by governments of the lands in which the films were shown. To take up this debate, however, is not to take sides in this thesis. I will demonstrate through the films and the analysis of sound clips in subsequent chapters that both philosophers were proved correct about various points they made in their arguments. Adorno and Benjamin both had grasped, in the very first years of the sound film, facts pertaining to how the nature of art was to change, the nature of a consuming/film- going public and the phantom of a “collective consciousness”. To begin with the analysis and discussion of these points I begin with where Adorno launches into his critique. In his criticisms about newsboys not being experts and “bourgeois sadism”, Adorno has isolated passages in the tenth segment of the essay by Benjamin and in removing these from context he seeks to sever the thread of logic Benjamin has woven throughout his analysis of how a filmic world/public exchanges places with the mere by-stander and becomes a sharer in the experience, an expert of experience. What is at stake in such a debate is whether or not it is true that in becoming a partaker of the experience of a film the viewer truly undergoes a transformation from the “passer-by” to a “movie extra”. There are theorists today who make this claim about witnesses, and they base their theories largely on this very passage by Benjamin. The most notable of these ideologues in the music world is perhaps Christopher Small. In his famous book Musicking he outlines a program of understanding music not as an object, but as a verb whose processes and events structure the whole of life from the instant of contact with the activity of “musicking” (Small 1998). This idea is not so far removed from the true bent of Benjamin’s aim in this essay for, indeed, the real spectre that Adorno wishes to defeat in penning his rebuttal of portions of the essay is the concept of a “collective consciousness”. This fascinating concept of Benjamin’s matters to this thesis because rereading the essay it appears to be a strong forerunner to Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities”. These ideas of collective consciousness begin to manifest earlier on in the essay. The actual terminology for the collective viewership enters the essay in the eighth segment, but the support for the argument begins well back in the fourth segment when Benjamin makes the claim that “… The instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on

12 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson ritual, it begins to be based on another practice— politics.” (Benjamin 1936). Having prefaced the assertions that a potentially revolutionary character attends the viewing of films by dealing openly with the necessary destruction of aura, Benjamin then segues into a discussion of how film undergoes a process of entering the mainstream and reclaiming its status as an art-object by inspiring, simultaneously, through masses of minds a “collective” identity. Adorno deals with these issues in full and the reason I have selected such a tiny fragment of his arguments is because of the last sentence of the excerpt quoted above. This ending sentence is the point at which both men become accurate forecasters of what is about to play out in the Interwar Years in two separate nations, seeking to create mass cultural identities. As later analysis in the thesis will demonstrate, Benjamin was borne out in his claims that art would attain a politicized and highly revolutionary character as it moved through technological transformation into other forms, but Adorno’s words ring true as well, and the vocal strategies from the American side of the atlas, in particular, bear out the admonishment he levels at Benjamin: “…if anything does have an aural character, it is surely the film which possesses it to an extreme and highly suspect degree.” (Adorno in Bloch 1980: 123). The film atlas would not have been possible without this aural character because it is in the aura that the Nachleben of an image resides. In the case of this research, the aura sealed into each of these films by the sound portrayals designed to go with them became the means through which each representation obtained a form of Warburg’s concept of “afterlife”.

Why Sound Film?

In a study conducted in 1946 by Frank Lorimer there is exhaustive statistical analysis on the population changes and diaspora of the citizens of the USSR. These population statistics give a good picture of where groups of people were living, where they were moved to, when they were moved, and what populations were added to the Soviet Union and in what years by the continued formation of the USSR. Furthermore, there are literacy rate data included in the study as well as discussions of policy implementation in the USSR during the Interwar Years. As the data demonstrates, Russia/USSR and the United States of America were both vibrant and culturally diverse nations occupying large landmasses far beyond the needs of their populations. The literacy rates were also similar with populations that were at varying levels of literacy and differing language groups. Yet another similarity not frequently remarked upon in comparing the cultures of the USA and the USSR, is the fact that there were policies of assimilation and immigration being implemented across both nations. In the United States this was to ensure that all of the citizens could attain a basic level of education in the English language and in the case of the USSR this literacy/language mandate was in the Russian language (sometimes referred to as the policy of Russification in the literature) (Rannut 2012).

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Considering this information regarding diverse populations of speakers dispersed throughout a large landmass which is considered to be one nation, at various levels of fluency in the language designated by their respective governments to be the “national” language of their respective societies, the role of film takes on a new urgency. While silent film often relied upon cue cards to explicate at least part of the drama taking place on the screen (requiring literacy of a much higher level in the language), sound film does not, and so through spoken language and also the cues of sounds related to language, but not strictly falling within the purview of syntax or linguistics (i.e. laughter, crying, inflection of words, anger and speech rate or pitch class) a greater literacy in life as opposed to a literacy in a specific language is what is required to be pulled into a sound-film (Chion 1999: 8). It is this greater accessibility that makes the sound film the more valent art form for structuring and nurturing the mindsets of a vast and diverse public. Both governments, the USSR (overtly) and the USA (less obviously) considered film an ideal media form not merely for entertainment, but for the purposes of education. Feature length films in both countries were often shown with a series of shorter productions (called shorts) which could be cartoons, public service announcements, broadcasts from political leaders or any manner of advertising as well. The shorts were the first forms of film that became sound-synchronised (Thompson and Broadwell 2010).

Early Sound Film and National Imaginations The matter of movie houses or cinemas was more complex within the United States than it was in the USSR. Owing to the fact that private property was effectively dissolved by the implementation of Communism and the movements towards collectivization, everything done on the level of the creation of a film and its distribution was tightly controlled, and (thankfully for a researcher) very well documented within the USSR. The danger, when handing out condensed versions of history is to overstate cases. The state, while in fact having absolute control over what was dispersed and marketed in the formative years approaching the sound film, had not as sterilizing effect as might be supposed. Far more disastrous, by comparison, for the blossoming film culture was the fact that there was a near catastrophic shortage of raw film stock for filmmakers in the USSR during the early 1920s. The first circumstance which brought about the stock shortage was the fall of the old Tsarist government. When the wealthy families and owners of private movie houses fled the country they took their materials with them. (Thompson and Bordwell 2010). The second circumstance was an unfortunate incidence for the nation as a whole. A government that wishes to have absolute control, at some point, must still entrust human agents to carry out its orders. In their history of film Thompson and Bordwell elaborate on the incident further: In May [1918], the government entrusted $1 million in credit to a film distributor who had operated in Russia during World War I, Jacques Cibrario. On a buying mission to the United States, Cibrario purchased worthless used material and absconded with most of the money. Russia had little foreign currency, and the loss was serious. It is little wonder that the government was reluctant to give the

14 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

film industry further large sums. Another problem arose in June 1918, when a decree required that all raw stock held by private firms be registered with the government. The remaining producers and dealers promptly hid what little raw film remained, and a severe shortage developed. (Thompson and Bordwell 2010: 106-107).

The history goes on to elaborate the many failed attempts during the first half of the 1920’s to bring a state film industry into successful being. As becomes clear reading about the starts and start overs of the time, any films made in the USSR during this period were made by the sweat, blood and tears of their teams. So it was not overtly the state control which led (as it did in later years) to the excessively well-documented and streamlined state of early filmmaking as much as it was the extremely widespread poverty coupled with a shortage of materials in general. This history, however, is not the case in the United States for the same time period. For a large part of the Interwar Years, cinemas or performance halls continued to be privately owned, and some of this history has to do with the evolution of performance art in the United States. Originally only live theatre, vaudeville acts, or musicals were performed in these halls and the various venues had their own pit orchestras5. Dance halls also had regular orchestras so the life of an itinerate musician was not the unsteady and relatively unprofitable venture it is generally considered to be today. In the first half of the 20th century in the United States there was a high demand for even dilettante performers in dance halls, supper clubs, and performance venues. These graphs are taken from compiled data regarding the spending and earning habits of the United States in the years from 1903-2003. A century worth of spending habits becomes very interesting if the stretch of time examined happens to be the same years that film was starting to become a force in the entertainment world. Notice that while the earnings and expenditures remain mostly flat in and across the Interwar Years, disaggregating the data reveals that Americans began spending in the same time period very heavily on “non-necessities.” It is fairly safe to categorize entertainment as a “non- necessity.” The availability and viability of cinema was contributing to a sea-change in cultural practice visible in the spending patterns of the populace.

5 I use the term “orchestra” rather loosely here. This could have been something as simple as a small ensemble to a single pianist. The larger the venue in a larger city the more chance there would be an actual orchestra performing in the pit.

15 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson Figure 3. 20th Century USA Spending Patterns

Graphs downloaded from the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics

The last graph shows that by the onset of WWII, spending in American households had spiked to almost 30% of the annual income. While it would take until the 21st Century for that spending pattern to touch 50% of the annual income, the sudden and dramatic increase in spending on “non- necessities” coincides with the true formation of Hollywood and the successful incarnation and implementation of the sound film. Film houses were privately owned in the United States and when the film was first invented, anyone who could afford to either rent or purchase a film reel projection system (as there was already an orchestra in place) could also show movies which was a huge treat for a paying public. The films were not tightly controlled (they were not even copyrighted in the early years of film) (ibid.) when originally released and many cinemas had purchased actual copies of the film reels and so could continue to show the films or even bring them back out several years later. It was not until well into the Interwar Years that Hollywood, wise now to the money it was potentially losing, (royalty fees, limiting showings, etc.) moved to control the actual films passing into these houses. To further complicate the scenario, it was not always possible to control what happened to the films once they left the warehouse and were sent abroad. Just as it was relatively easy to build and maintain simple crystal radios, it was also possible (with the right tools and some knowledge of the craft) to duplicate a film reel— especially the shorter film reels. Even after Hollywood started demanding films be returned or destroyed, there were film houses which managed to have bootleg copies on hand to show when the funds to keep a cinema running, or to pay the fees for new releases were not there. The final move in the new and more effective establishment of “Hollywood” as a business not only creating films, but distributing them was the systematic creation of a vertical structure in the film houses. Laying out this part of the history of film in the United States serves to demonstrate the reason that while statistics on exactly how much money a film made in the USSR, how many times it was shown, to how many people are available for the Interwar Years in the USSR, the same statistics are not available in the United States.

16 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

Demographically, the United States of America and the USSR were filled with continually shifting populations through out the Interwar Years and while in the case of one this was because of expanding borders (the USSR), in the case of the other this was because waves of immigrants had not yet stopped arriving from all across the world. In fact, one of the ways in which WWI had rearranged the world’s populations was to inspire many families who might not otherwise have emigrated to the United States to do precisely that. It was also in the Interwar Years that waves of Russian immigrants were pouring across the borders of the United States. Using the immigration explorer tool6 in the New York Times website it is possible to examine the immigrant populations living in a given region of the United States. In Los Angeles, California for example (also known as Hollywood) in the thirty years between 1920 and 1950 the population of Russians more than doubles twice. In 1920 there were not even one million Russians living in L.A. and at the end of the 40s there were suddenly 4 million, and the graphs stipulate that all of these Russians were born outside of the United States. In other words, the children to the Russian émigrés are not part of this tally. Some were escaping from the fall of Tsarist Russia, some had family already in the United States and fled there to escape collectivization, and even more managed to get out before they were caught by Stalin’s Terror. Those who fled The Great Terror to reside in other lands lived to tell their stories. They passed on the knowledge of what was being actively suppressed in the foreign media (Georgakas 2013) and gradually the stories of what Lubyanka, famines, collectivization and dekulakization were doing in the Soviet Union began to circulate. But this gossiping, whispering world whose human stories are the gossamer threads that spin fantasy for filmmakers to capture as depictions can be, and was at times, even-handed and just. The United States had an ugly history all its own with millions of deaths on her own shores and the stalwartly racist practices and rigid policies still in practice to testify to that history. So movies were made in both lands depicting the savagery of one another. This chapter closes with quote, and its words are appropriate to the tale being woven out of the machinations of these two titanic nations during the Interwar Years. Benjamin begins with the phantom of a deadly sin: acedia. In the seventh of his theses on the History of Philosophy, he explicates the path that a cultural theorist or historical materialist must tread when dealing with the prizes that litter the ground we humanists go digging in for our histories.

The nature of this sadness stands out more clearly if one asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize. The answer is inevitable: with the victor… Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin he cannot contemplate without horror. They [the treasures] owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents

6 http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/03/10/us/20090310-immigration-explorer.html?_r=0

17 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

who have created then, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. (Benjamin trans. Zohn 1968)

Further along in the same thesis, Benjamin explains the ways in which the transmission of those cultural treasures paint upon all the inheritors of such finery a legacy of barbarism. Barbarity in this context should be understood as the vicious acts and history of the conquerors who trail blood and gold in their wake, and who, as Benjamin made clear in the above passage, are the writers and profiteers of history and its process as a science. The empathy [einfühlung] (a powerful word, not frequently used in scholarly literature pertaining to historiography) of the masses belongs exclusively to the victors, which produces a particular species of sadness, invokes a feeling of acedia in the heart of the researcher who despairs of grasping something “genuine” of a history so written. In this vein Benjamin presses forward with his line of reasoning concerning the articles of culture:

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain. (ibid.)

And so the following chapters will be an attempt to accomplish that program: I will brush history of film in two countries against the grain. I will unfold more than the partial filmic atlas each country inscribed in the minds of their populations hoping to march victorious over one another. I will reach for as much of that atlas as can be contained within this thesis and search also for an understanding of how both constructed and enclosed an identity of “self” and “other” within the sound film.

18 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

You know what’s been wrong with Communist propaganda in America? —What can be wrong with it? Too many cross-eyed people with whiskers peddling it! — Oh you mean, uh, intellectuals! (Clark Gable and Hedy Lamarr, Comrade X 1940)

Chapter 2

Introduction— Acousmêtre On the American side of the film atlas while there were numerous cinematic techniques embedded within these films to portray Russian7 identity from irony and humor to visual cues in costume and symbols of state, the technique which this thesis intends to dissect, investigate and implicate as the major factor in each film was the unifying thread of how the Russian voice was depicted while speaking English. Voices of foreign nationals in films during the Interwar Years were not permitted to retain their natural character, tone color, vowel formants or pitch classes. Just as entertainers descended from slaves nearly a century prior to this time were required to wear blackface when performing on stage in minstrel shows (regardless of their skin color) (Campbell 2006: 28) so too were the actors and actresses in these films required to masquerade by donning a voice that was not their own in order to represent and, in fact, exaggerate an otherness. Central to the idea behind this otherness is a concept developed by Michel Chion in his discussions of sound in cinema—the acousmêtre. Loosely explained, an acousmêtre is a voice obtaining mysterious powers because it is a voice that is heard and yet remains unseen. Consider the idea of the wizard in The Wizard of Oz when he yells at the party of heroes as they return victorious “PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!!!” Part of his power was in that he was a mysterious floating head with a similarly disembodied voice. The voice in that case becomes something akin to human conceptions of god, which in part of his works on the voice in cinema Chion relates as the original concept of a voice whose origin is unseen and yet whose power as a player in the story is unquestionable. For this thesis the concept is interesting in that Chion also admits that voices in cinema attain varying levels of being acousmatized (Chion 1999: 21), and he also explains the very earliest definitions of a term he admits is “arcane”. He states,

To understand what is at stake in this distinction, let us go back to the original meaning of the word acousmatic. This was apparently the name assigned to a Pythagorean sect whose followers would listen to their Master speak behind a curtain, as the story goes, so that the sight of the speaker wouldn’t distract them from the message. (Chion 1999: 19)

These words are essential in understanding how the voice masquerading as Russian was built to communicate not only nationality, but characteristics of personality supposedly inhering to being a member of the nationality in question. In its most original sense, a voice that has been donned to imitate a person is a form of acousmêtre because the person it represents is invisible. This ultimate

7 It always was Russian culture, as opposed to “Soviet” culture— in the minds of the filmmakers there was no difference between the two ideas which is striking in and of itself.

19 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson being has neither shape nor form save what has been communicated to the listener through the falsified voice, and this brings me to the point that is most psychological behind this kind of acousmêtre. There is a preternatural understanding when listening to someone speak because it is impossible not to know that they are manipulating, falsifying or otherwise altering their voice when speaking (Pearce and Conklin 1971). Even in a sound film (which is a fake assemblage from beginning to end) coupling the visual to the auditory the human brain expects a certain voice to come from a certain build just as the voice itself communicates physical realities to the people listening (Collins and Missing 2003). Communicating with one’s voice is deeply personal examined this way because in doing so information about our very biology is given out, judgments made about our attractiveness (Collins and Missing 2003 and Xu et al 2013) and paralinguistic information related to mood and expression is also given (Pearce and Conklin 1971 and Wiedman 2014). In choosing to ask actors and actresses to don these voices specifically for the purpose of performing the other, directors in the United States were actively creating a strange phantom in the film atlas. Instead of a Bilderatlas these directors created a sound atlas and owing to the nature of vocal recognition this atlas could be instantly summoned, and it could be uniquely tailored to match/simulate the nationality of anyone who learned English.

Representing Immigrant Populations in the USA Perhaps because of the fact that the United States is a culture of immigrants (Thompson and Bordwell 2010) there were constantly populations of people who were working to master English, but long after fluency in the language was attained, still the accent of their mother tongue would proclaim through the English “I descend from another culture.” Foreign accent-adorned-English became a standard portrayal in cinema during these most formative years of the art form (and this is perhaps all the more natural considering that the stage and silver screen drew so many members of the immigrant populations). Still, rather than representing true “nations” the voices were a condensation of attitudes about cultures within various ideological borders, and few immigrant groups were spared in the representation: Slavic people were always Russian, fascists were mostly German and sometimes Italian, Romani (gypsies) were either Eastern European or else of some nameless pseudo-Indo/Arabic land, all Asians were Chinese, and most actors that would be labeled in the United States as “black”8 from somewhere other than the United States did not come from Africa, but from the Caribbean. It was easy to lump the speakers together because they were not representing a true populace owing to the fact that these films were all farcical to begin with, thus (let us not say authenticity) anything approaching accuracy or precision in representation was strictly unnecessary and this was also the power of fiction— one could hand out a little information

8 I despise the idea of race and consequently will not ever willingly use the terms “black” or “white” or any other color of a person’s skin in my own writing to delineate another human being. Those words will always appear in my writing in quotes because they are the words of others and I represent them in my own papers as such.

20 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson along with deep impressions, but not be held accountable for any of it given the nature of the “entertainment”. The depth of the authority of the film atlas was housed in its self-referencing power and so when a person viewing the films was confronted with a character who could easily be shunted into the category of “Russian-born, speaking English” there were some stock traits for that person’s character that could also be applied, but were gleaned from the films in total. There were some differences, however, among those who were playing the role. To begin with, the voice differed if it was masculine or feminine in these movies mocking either Russia, Communism or both. If the speaker was male the voice was higher than the average speaking voice for the time period and the orthography of the speech was also idiosyncratic to some of the common mistakes a person who learns to speak English after growing up with Russian as a mother-tongue. For example in Comrade X there is a moment when a waiter comes in with “hair of the dog” for Clark Gable’s character and his companion (another journalist) says something negative about how the Kremlin is a “rat’s nest”. The waiter over charges Gable’s character by 200₽ and when asked to explain the overcharge he utters a sentence with the type orthographical hash given to actors portraying Russians, “That’s for me! So I am not telling the secret police how the lady talked about the Kremlin.” Of course you have to imagine the fake accent as well.

Figure 4. Waiter Scene Comrade X (1940)

Waiter: Blue waveform, black shading Clark Gable: Gold waveform, black shading American Journalist: Blue waveform white shading Russian Secretary (Olga): Gold waveform, white shading

The graph shows four different voices and the waiter’s voice is blue shaded in black. Compare the waiter’s voice with Clark Gable’s and the reference to “higher” pitch classes in characterizations of

21 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson male voices is eminently clear. Gable speaks in his normal voice (the voice everyone at the cinema a year before in 1939 heard him use to say, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”) at just over an octave lower than the waiter. There are other pieces of paralinguistic/vocalic information buried within this little utterance. The fact that the waiter’s voice is quite high and the way he lays stress upon the word “me” in the sentence along with a sudden pitch change intimates that he is a sneak. In general, men playing Russians were told to speak in a higher pitch class than normal. The exception to this was Peter P. Peters (Fred Astaire) in Shall We Dance. Owing to the fact that he was trying to summon the image of the forceful Russian man while barging unannounced into a woman’s apartment it was all too appropriate for him to speak in a lower than normal pitch class while also speaking in a louder than normal manner. For women the reverse portrayal became the standard: they were to speak in a lower than normal pitch class, mechanically as possible (with very little inflection or pitch variation which is normal to human speech) and more loudly than a “lady” would speak in public. Their English was often very correct, but so bluntly spoken that the manner in which they spoke would be considered rude or abrupt. When paired with the male vocal impersonations this was to portray Russians as an entire society as lacking social awarenesses or graces, as being rude or unconcerned with the feelings of others, and as defying the natural order of humans (as evinced by the switch of vocal timbres, men being made more effeminate while women were masculinized.) A scene from Ninotchka displays an even clearer picture of these representations both in its contents and contrivances. Countess Swana in the storyline is a so-called “white émigré” Russian who has escaped Russia during the revolution (as many did) without her wealth. Her lover, also residing in Paris, has fallen in love with the Russian envoy sent to Paris to oversee the operation of selling off Swana’s jewels. At one point in the film the two encounter one another and in the presence of Swana’s lover. Swana’s speech has no trace of the comic sound American’s had come to expect of a Russian speaking English. Her pitch class when speaking is normal, her English immaculate. In short, she has thrown off her uncouth ways and entered French aristocracy and society with nary a ripple. Ninotchka, on the other hand, played by Greta Garbo (potentially for that famous low voice of hers) speaks mechanically, in a voice pressed into registers that are unnatural even for Garbo, and in the scene as they exchange vicious words while sparring with one another on matters far more weighty than a crossed lover, the contrast between the Russian peasant playing a lady and the lady from the aristocracy is all too clear.

22 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

Ninotchka: Gold waveform, black shading Swana: Blue waveform, white shading Count Dalgu: Blue waveform, black shading

Ninotchka: You see it would have been very embarrassing for people of my sort to wear low-cut gowns in the old Russia. The lashes of the Cossacks across our backs were not very becoming. And you know how vain women are.

Swana: Yes, you’re quite right about the Cossacks. We made a great mistake to let them use their whips. They had such reliable guns.

The words of this exchange are brutal, vicious, and horrible. It is of paramount importance at this point to remember several things all at once in order to dissect what has been done in a mere 40 second exchange. The year is 1939, and Stalin has just assisted Hitler by signing a non-aggression agreement with him towards Germany. It is essential to remember that while the United States does not care very much what Stalin signs with Germany because at this time Ford Motor Corp. was still arming both the English and Germany (Sutton 2010: 90-95) thus the United States was profiting handsomely from both sides of the world war, yet the director of this play is Ernst Lubitsch and the writer of the script was Melchior Lengyel. Both of these men, internationals who had fled Europe for the United States, had no wish to see Hitler gain even another finger hold of power in Europe. Deeply critical, then, of what had transpired it was within the power of both to accuse Russians and the Soviet Union of a heritage of barbarous acts while seemingly entertaining the American public. These words are nothing to ignore in a film billed as a comedy. In this tiny dialogue misinformation is handed out in the guise of something that really transpired, and this is problematic because of Russia’s troubled history at the time. It was widely known that millions of Russians (Mensheviks, intellectuals and the aristocracy) fled the country with the fall of the empire to Communism, and it was also widely known that the possessions (jewels, gold, antiques, and art work) fell into the hands of anyone who

23 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson could claim it and much of that wealth was auctioned off by the government to keep its coffers out of debt (Nadelhoffer 2012: 113). Furthermore, it was also widely known that the collectivization process was a gruesome affair in which thousands starved, but this had nothing whatsoever to do with the aristocracy. In this exchange of dialogue there is a crossing of an American reality (the plantation scene of an overseer whipping agrarian laborers) and a Russian image (think Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina): the rich person who owned land and had serfs working that land. One major problematic is that though there is evidence that whipping was used as punishment by the Cossacks (and, yes, on women too) (Spring 2003: 10), there is little or no evidence that Cossacks would have whipped laborers to drive them harder at their work just as they whipped a horse to urge it to run faster. This is the reason the lie is rather extreme as it paints a picture of enforced slavery of the poor when in fact this kind of life was only really to be found in the United States one hundred years earlier. In point of fact, the movie misses the chance to elaborate on a crueler tale, but does not because the savage history of the dekulakization might not have been widely known a meager seven years after it occurred, and some of this could be attributed to the fact that the press had been misled. An interesting historical phenomenon of the time was a coalition of people in the media who were actively (though potentially through true naiveté) suppressing the news coming out of the USSR about the famine, its origins and the rebellions there. These media suppressors were within the international news agencies and even international governments (Bezmenov 1984). It is believed that in Russian common parlance they were known as “useful idiots”, but the plain truth of the matter is that this ascription is unverifiable as being attributed to any single source (Boller and George 1989: 76). The expression recurs frequently in English and while the sentiment thereof has been echoed in Russian, it remains one of the unverifiable mysteries of cultural understanding in the archive of thought and expression. From 1932-1933 the USSR engaged in a program that nearly bankrupted it and came close to killing off a quarter of its population in Ukraine9 (this after heavy casualties in the first world war) when it decided that as regards the upper middle class peasantry, (termed kulaks) that they would lose all of their livestock and be forced to go into collectivized farming arrangements (Conquest 1968). Many kulaks slaughtered their animals rather than give them over to the confiscating authorities and what food was taken away from the raids was shipped elsewhere. Furthermore, farming peasants were not allowed to eat their own produce. The result of all these measures was a rebellion that even a United States citizen could be proud of. In addition to farmers killing off their own livestock and burning the corpses so that they could not be used for food, the day laborers refused to go into the field to sow, tend or reap the harvest, and many were either shot

9 In his book Harvest of Sorrow, Conquest comes to his peroration in chapter 16 entitled “The Death Rolls”. Therein the absolutely horrifying figure of 14.5 million deaths between the dekulakization and famine is given. The majority of those deaths are said to belong to Ukraine. There is significant discussion as to how accurate this figure would be, but compared with the additional deaths of WWII shortly thereafter (26.9 million odd dead) and one realizes that a veritable catastrophe of human loss and death occurred between 1926 and 1945 about which the world was mostly silent. (Conquest 1986, 299-307).

24 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson or sent off to prison for “rehabilitation” (Conquest 1986). In the end, such resistance was completely futile because the Soviet state did succeed in breaking the kulaks and collectivizing all the farmland in addition to covering up the worst of the press at the time (the 1937 census in the USSR was classified because of the losses of life) (Merridale 1996: 225), and the rebellion itself caused casualties far beyond the reach of the farmers who were rebelling. The famine (because Stalin decided he would not feed a country harboring such dissidents) swept through in the wake of the rebellion and its effects lingered long after the last resisting kulak was either in jail or dead. Is it not interesting, then, that not one iota of this history makes it into a film, but the audience gets a half fiction instead about workers in factories being whipped by Cossacks at the behest of their wealthy masters? Part of the reason for such a fiction has to do with the presumed foreknowledge of the film’s viewers. A filmgoer of 1939 from the lower to upper middle class in the United States would probably never have heard of a kulak thanks to the “useful idiot” press, but there might well have been at least some knowledge about those roving, horse-lord soldiers the Cossacks10. There would also have been some foreknowledge about the fact that while farmers were being collectivized so millions of people were being shipped from farms to factories in the effort to revolutionize the Russian economic engine (Lorimer 1945). Lenin and his successor Stalin were working on converting a nation’s labor force: instead of being based in agriculture, the effort to create an equal share in the work that would be driven by industry was widely publicized in the United States through other scare tactics and propaganda. Figure 5 Anti-Kulak Propaganda 1941

The words read (from upper left to bottom): “Against the howling kulaks—(your) friendly, collective front for planting! Poor and middle peasants, increase seeding, enter/introduce technical culture to strengthen its economy!”

Thus, it makes some sense historically to take the vicious words and dissect the lies hinted at in this tactical exchange. The proverbial icing on the sonic cake is the extreme contrast between the women’s voices as they exchange these verbal strikes. Where the voice of Swana is cultured,

10 There were Russian fairy tales and cultural stories already in circulation in the United States by this time which featured Cossacks.

25 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson urbane and smooth, Garbo sounds ragged, masculine and forceful. The contrast between them, though demonstrated by dress is completed through the aural mechanisms at work within the scene.

Vocalic Tactics in the USSR Another film in the atlas, but from the Russian side which uses vocalics to demonstrate “otherness” was also from the 1930s. Цирк (Circus) debuted in 1936, and it featured an art form that toured the United States frequently during the Cold War. “Cultural exchange” was an international government program that originated during the Thaw period and which only ended after the USSR invaded Afghanistan (Richmond 2005). Both the United States and the USSR participated actively in cultural exchange, shipping over traveling performers who were emblematic of their nation’s supposed cultures. From the US went Jazz performers and modern ballet, and from Russia came classical ballet and the circus. There are sources (Richmond 2011) which indicate that by the time of this film, the circus was a true art form in Russia with a narrative quality to its performances distinctly different from the series of disconnected acts and feats that usually took place in the three rings of American circuses. Цирк was an unusual film because its main character is an American whom we are introduced to while she is flying from pursuit by a blood-thristy mob in the United States. In the film she manages to scramble onto a train in the nick of time with her precious bundle—her baby whose skin is “black”11. She journeys to Russia with her baby and she places herself in the power of a man who controls her throughout the film by blackmailing her; threatening to expose her as the mother of a bi-racial child. The ending of the film still brings tears for someone who grew up in the United States. I wish there was a place on Earth where the words the ringmaster says were true: “This? It means that in our country, we love absolutely all children.” These words are important because in the years to come during the Cold War this criticism of extreme racism was successfully leveled again and again at the United States (Von Eschen 2004: location 48), but already in 1936 it can be seen as a thematic idea in the knowledge of the Soviet film-going public: in the United States you would be persecuted for your skin color. The so-called “land of the free” had trouble making the idea of freedom stick especially in African nations during the Cold War when the Soviet Union could successfully point toward the beleaguered and embattled Civil Rights Movement as the failure of the United States government to extend that freedom to all its citizens in the century following the Civil War. Цирк was a musical starring Lyubov Orlova as a circus performer named Mary. Orlova was a singer who trained at the Moscow conservatory, but did not graduate as she left prior to obtaining her degree in order to help her parents by working. The film is paved from end to end in music which alters from being both diegetic and non-diegetic. Orlova herself sings several times in the film and perhaps the most moving time is after the first threat of blackmail by her controlling

11 I am not ignorant of the prevailing attitudes in Russia regarding prejudice and race. The country has been and remains to this day nearly as racist in its regard for those of other colors and other religions.

26 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson agent Franz von Kneishitz. Her young (a very young toddler from the size of him and the fact that he cannot speak) baby, Jimmy, toddles into the room and her dominator screams at her, “Your past is creeping up on you!” After a nasty scene between the two adults she sinks to the floor with Jimmy in her arms and sings him to sleep half in Russian and half in English. “Sleep my baby. Sladko, sladko. Sleep my malchik.” This is one of the few Russian films that features actual English words spoken by the main characters to highlight the idea that they come from America. Much of the way through the film Mary speaks in the halting Russian of someone who is learning the language, and when she does not seem to know a word she reverts to English. There are several scenes where this occurs and the semblance of her growing confidence in the language as the film moves closer and closer to its end is a sign of her wish to emigrate to the USSR and become a Soviet citizen. One prime example of this sentimental growth is a telling scene right before she saves the circus owner’s show for him when she agrees to go on in lieu of the real performer. The owner (Ludwig) demands to know whether she wishes to be paid in dollars or in rubles. She proudly declares that she wants Soviet rubles with all possible emphasis on the word “soviet”. It is the climax, however, that really steals the show in terms of musical propaganda. As was perhaps only too predictable, Mary’s controlling fiend does indeed reveal to the public that she is the mother of a so-called “biracial” child. At the end of her act, Franz stalks in with the child suspended in front of him as though it were a filthy thing and shouts to the crowd about how the star of the show has committed a racial crime. Franz is then faced down by Ludwig who keeps yelling above Franz’s accusations, “And what of it? Why should it matter that this is her child?” The watching public sees him set the screaming child down and one of the by-standers picks up Jimmy to try to comfort him. Suddenly Franz realizes his power has been taken away when he no longer has control over the child, and he races to get Jimmy back, but one of the crowd yells out “Don’t give the boy back to him!” A farcical little interlude ensues where the crowd passes the now laughing Jimmy back and forth, keeping him away from the evil Franz. The crowd joins his laughter and eventually Franz flees in the face of the crowd’s mirth and acceptance of the child as someone who needs protection. In the midst of this there comes a moment of musical transformation. A single female voice is heard above all the other sounds. The last by-stander to take Jimmy was a woman who begins to sing him a lullaby, cradling him ever so gently in her arms as though he were her own child. Once more Jimmy is passed from on-looker to on-looker and as each new person takes Jimmy in their arms they take up the melody of this tender lullaby, but in their own languages. The last person to take Jimmy is Ludwig who carries the boy back to his mother who is also cradled in the arms of her Russian lover. This is an incredibly powerful image: two would-be Americans suspended in the arms of their Russian protectors being shown love and compassion in the face of viciousness and hate. The scene bookends so beautifully with the earlier scene when Mary sang Jimmy to sleep after Franz’s first attempt (in front of the camera) to blackmail her, and the sonic image of many voices taking up the thread of a song, to extend that

27 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson song as a sign of love, of tenderness, and of human dignity is an equally powerful musical gesture. Lullabies are one of the near universals in musical culture, and even their sound structure is nearly universal (Trehub et al 1993: 285). Lullabies from the majority of cultures possess similar features in melodic contour, pitch interval motion, and they are sung with similar vocalic properties (ibid.). The intent behind a lullaby is always clear in these vocalics: the singer wishes to soothe the person being sung to. Singing to another person is an emotionally laden gesture in and of itself, and this is something that operas, operettas, and musicals tend to mask because the narration of plot, the focalizing gestures, the scene setting, and much of the fabula (Verstraten 2009) is all built through singing and music. When a musical’s plot suddenly includes a scene that takes music out of the context of the musical (i.e. fanciful numbers that comment upon situations occurring to the characters) and resituates that musicking in a scenario that is no longer fictive, this is a movement to repurpose the power of musicking as a cultural practice to draw the viewer ever psychologically deeper into the drama. Lullabies, being of their very nature some of the most intensely personal musical moments in our lives, bear an automatic emotional weight inside of a film context. When the entire crowd joins in that lullaby— not chorally, but individually— it is as though each person who handles that woman’s child was taking a pledge to love, to safeguard and to cherish the life of that baby. It is a gesture bound up with musical and spiritual sacredness and that it pairs in timing with the attempts of Franz to entrap Mary both times between her love for her child and her love for her man makes the scene even more successful. In both scenes it was the musical act of singing a lullaby which put an end to the cruelty and pain sown in the scene that preceded it. In the first instance, however, while Mary is resolution enough for Jimmy to feel safe again, still her plight of being trapped in that horrendous relationship through emotional blackmail hangs in the air after she finishes singing, painted so eloquently upon her features as she gazes back past the camera into the distance. In the second scene this resolution through the song is complete because Mary too now has assurance that she will be protected and cared for in addition to the fact that her dignity as a human will be respected regardless of the color of her child. There is one more vocalic property to these two lullaby scenes which must not be overlooked in the analysis. While in the first lullaby scene it is Mary who sings in two languages because of her portrayal of a character who is not completely fluent in the language, in the final scene there is a lovely lingual gesture embedded in the song. As the boy is handed down during the beginning of the song’s second verse suddenly the language changes. The only languages I am able to verify are English, German and Russian, but to be sure there are other languages present as each singer takes up the thread of the song. This is a gesture that mimics the words of the popular Soviet song Широка страна моя родная (the title in English, though not a translation of those words, is often given as “Song of the Motherland”)

28 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

, which appears earlier in the film by proclaiming in a variety of languages, while continuing to sing the same song, that all immigrants, all cultures and all people in the USSR will be welcome and accepted. Usually I would save a song for a different section of the thesis, but in this case it was a melody which merely served as a vehicle for multimodal vocalic signs for the audience to receive.

Conclusion As has become clear, both countries in the Interwar Years, while concerning themselves with propaganda that was created around generating an image took pains to construct vocal realities for those images to inhabit. The partnership between the images and vocal techniques forged identities that had not only self-referencing power, but opened pathways to the imagination. These identities were sometimes dangerous lacking true information or harboring half-truths or outright falsehoods within the plots of fictions sent out into the world as “entertainment”. Perhaps I feel that it cannot be stressed enough that this humorous guise was potentially the greatest weapon both countries wielded for inside of a fiction no one can be held accountable for passing on misinformation. The claim of “It is a fairy-tale! A fiction!” is only too believable when individuals would be asked to account for those lies, and yet as the previous chapter has demonstrated both countries did in fact call on individuals to answer for fictions when the images of not-yet warring nations portrayed on screen did not mesh with what a government body wanted a paying audience to consume. Clearly, the thought that voice and image could be dangerous tools if handled improperly occurred to more than one faction prior to the Cold War.

29 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

Chapter 3

Introduction—Nationalism and Representation in Song To journey into the music of these films is to encounter two separate identities forged for separate purposes. Music that belongs to the diegetic space and music that does not are phantom agencies sewn into the texture of sound films and their purposes can vary from film to film, but in the case of the sound atlases being built in the films prior to the Cold War in the USSR and the USA these musics were almost always to invoke the spectre of one or the other nationalities. But how does such a process work? The solidifying or, perhaps better still, codifiying of a sonic image into a representation of nationality is a fraught subject owing to the power dynamics involved in musicking with the intent of engaging with culture through music. Going back to Anderson’s “imagined community” music is, in a very real sense, the ideal tool for constructing such a community because the identification with a sonic reality (something very physical) works seemingly both ways, i.e. it can let masses and masses of people into the community while at the same time becoming exclusionary to those for whom there is no resonance with the given musicking or practice. Scores upon scores of papers have been written in ethnomusicology with regard to situating musics upon the earth and placing them within the cultures they belong to, or even identifying the features of musics which belong to certain groups versus other groups. One of the more famous endeavors in this realm of investigation was carried out by an American, Alan Lomax. Lomax and a team of specialists in linguistics, otolaryngology, and vocal therapy developed a system of analyzing and comparing musics across the world and called the system “cantometrics”. It was a means of grasping a culture’s musicking habits, analyzing those habits and situating that information in a database which could be used for comparative analysis. As Anderson argues, the nationality is a fictive agglomeration of a mass identity that has been placed like an umbrella over many cultures within invisible boundaries (Anderson 2006). Studies like cantometrics and ethnomusicology further reinforced the idea that musics could be representative of culture, and thereby (extending the musicking practices of a hegemonic body across the cultures housed within a single nation) of national musics. The last thread of this tale before moving on to the actual music within the films is the idea of the entire so-called “nationalist movement” within the Euro-American classical music tradition. During the early 1800s a composer by the name of Frederic Chopin set down some piano works which were actually folk songs. It had taken nearly twenty-five years to reach the musical world, but a new cultural theory based on the unity of culture through language by Herder had, it seems at last arrived. While all cultures, urged Herder, must be equal it is his claim of a type of essential cultural thought (Grossman 1994: 60) embedded within language that brought the demon of authenticity first to classical music in the European tradition. As can be observed across Europe

30 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson at the dawn of the Romantic period, composers within forming nations began laying claim to the “folk” heritage also residing within those lands, and— whether peasant or profiteer— if it belonged to the folk it also belonged to the rest of the country because it was ostensibly the ur-identity of the people. Thus composers through out the 19th and early 20th centuries believed (or seemed to believe) that an authentic music belonged to a nation as the inheritance of its folk “traditions” (yet another phantom ideology that always seems to come skulking behind the spectre of authenticity) regardless of how far removed from the hegemonic process those traditions were. Thus, representing populaces to each other through customs from varying cultures was neither ridiculous nor even potentially kitsch! While to the ears of a researcher in 2015 it seems ludicrous that the balalaika is what accompanies Hedy Lamarr and Clark Gable on a stroll through the moonlight, at the time (1940) this would seem perfectly natural to invoke the spirit of “Russian” culture. Therefore, the music that is part of the film space but also at all times a signifying presence must be analyzed as well in order to deal fully with the creation of the filmic sound atlas.

Jazz in Russia The problematic nature of Jazz in Russia was that it had no roots in the country’s history and it was also the stock-in-trade, so to speak, of popular music in the United States. Thus it was not only not national in form (at all by way of reasoning the imagined community) it was also not social in content because it was a music that had no social reality in the USSR. The music coming out of cabarets for many years had been the forerunner of what would later become “guitar poetry”. In her book on the development, formation, phenomenological properties and ideological underpinnings of a later form of popular music “guitar poetry”, Rachel Platonov makes clear that while there were guitars and singers, cabarets and a musical scene, it had nothing to do with Jazz (Platonov 2012: 15 and 16). In the same periods that Jazz was booming in the United States, it had no traceable presence in the USSR. Considering the fraught and unstable relationship that would later be built in the Thaw period facilitated by cultural exchange through bands of jazz singers and musicians touring the USSR it is not hard to see that this specific music’s inclusion in films of the USSR during the Interwar Years was always representative. The presence of Jazz automatically called forth from the imagination the notion of the musicking practices of the United States. But what about the other popular music featured (or more accurately embedded) in the nondiegetic space of films from Russia during the Interwar Years? Here we must pay homage (already!) to the processes of standardization of global musical flows because the other so-called popular music in these films sounds remarkably similar across the atlas in films from both countries. Take, for example, the song Orlova sings as she is being lowered into the cannon as part of her act. This song would “seem” representative of American music, but in fact was a Russian popular song from the time. Comparing the musical motives of what is contained within these movies can help the viewer to understand how global cultural flows of music were already well at work within the systems of

31 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson the film scape (Appadurai 1996: 35 and 36). Popular music itself is a problematic term and in the case of describing the songs in these films I use it in its broadest sense, (i.e. music that was appealing and marketed to the majority of people in the urban centers of the countries.) In a sense, these films then were not merely nationalist portrayals of others but also portrayals of their own musical identities to their own populations, but in these “imagined” communities this was frequently the case; while one strengthened the image of an other so one also simultaneously strengthened the image of the conceptual self. That both countries did this through nondiegetic music and in such incredibly similar ways is striking. The nondiegetic music often functioned in the films cape much as the footnotes function in a thesis, present, yet at the discretion of the reader/viewer to consume consciously. For a comparison of these techniques this chapter will examine both diegetic and nondiegetic material from three films: Новый Гулливер (The New Gulliver), Цирк and Comrade X. In the latter two films in particular there are parallels of usage which suggest to the analyst that it was not only in global cultural flows that one could hear similarity of music, but the similarities extended to the very usage of these cultural objects in the social space and this in turn implicates that while ideologies may differ from surface to core and back again, still the systemic ways in which ideology is grafted and applied to cultures through media (music) as an apparatus is not always reflective of those ideologies. Capitalism and Communism were equally at home in the management of the sound atlas as it entered the filmic realm.

Diegesis The diegetic space is essentially what in theatre studies would have been known as the “mise-en- scène”. When music is placed within this space it can act under a single purpose or even in many ways at the same time. A critical understanding to the mise-en-scène is that nothing within the space is empty of function— it all serves a purpose relative to advancing the plot be it even as window dressing for the mood. To choose to add a piece of music directly to the diegetic space, however, had a different purpose in film (inherently so) than it did in theatre and this has, once more, to do with the nature of the sound film as a constructed sounding reality. The sound film is a conglomeration, or, rather, a kind of ultimate assemblage because all the sounds within the sound film are compiled (Chion 1999). Very early on in trying to bring the sound film to reality various companies and engineers were working with a variety of ways to bring in “synchronous” sound. Early pioneers of the technique, engineers and technicians came to the conclusion that one of the best ways of doing this would be to give everything that had to be a sounding reality in the film its own track to be recorded and then compiled together (Thompson and Brodwell 2010). Apart from quite literally flattening12 the soundscape of a film, this eliminates the problem that live theatre

12 One acoustical phenomenon of human sound perception or awareness is that humans (and several other species) hear directionally in space, thus timbre imparts not only where a sound is within a given area, but also in what direction it is located, whether or not it is a

32 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson always had of balancing the diegetic music with the spoken dialogue in a scene because instantaneous and perfect balance within the scene was to be had now at the twist of a button on a switchboard. Now the borders between where the functions of diegetic music within the mise-en- scène and the dialogue in the scenes were blasted to the horizon and psycho-perceptual boundaries could be explored to their conceivable limits.

“Should” as an Agent in Culture With the demise of “balancing” issues between the action and music in the mise-en-scène came the opportunity of producing movies that were not musicals by nature, but had musical numbers embedded within the action and these numbers could serve as commentary, or focalizers (Verstraten 2009), they could move the action or inform it, and the music could not only stabilize a wavering impression of a sense of “culture” but also enhance the viability of such impressions. These impressions were not only available for use in portraying the other, but as stipulated above they could portray the self—provide an axis for grounding a sense of the imagined community into an imaginable aural self. The opening scenes of Новый Гулливер are a wonderful example of this in which the young Pioneers march down to the boat they have worked to build together while singing together. Новый Гулливер was no musical, but these opening scenes in the sunrise of a Russian boys camp with all these young men singing together is a powerful sign, not only of solidarity, but of the promise of what Communism offers to youth and to society. This is the quintessential image of clean living, of community and of success in endeavor. The children are not only hope incarnate, but intent as well. While they sing joyfully together, the music underscores their companionship and their fidelity to the community because singing together invokes the twinned sensations of having worked together and possessing a shared repertoire. Incidentally, the Pioneers had a conceptual doppelgänger in the United States in the Boy Scouts of America, who also had a repertoire of shared campfire songs and songs about the virtues of hard work, honesty and pride in themselves. What is often ignored in such repertoires is the fact that the act of singing together harmonizes a community. The Pioneers were founded in May of 1922 (R. A. F. 1934) and Новый Гулливер was made in 1935. In portraying the camaraderie of the boys by having them sing together only a scant 13 years after their founding, this film simultaneously christened a tradition within an existing entity and a new genre of musicking. It is plain that this type of musicking can give, not only the sensation of community and an identifying point to culture, but it speaks also to the need for such an apparatus within these massive lands that had diverse populations. This tiny segment of film, which nonetheless begins the film, grants the onlooker of 2015 a glimpse of what sound film portrayed the ultimate image of what the average Soviet citizen should be able to expect from belonging to an organization like the Pioneers. This conceptual moving sound source, what direction it is moving in and relative to the self how far away the sound is (Levitin 2006). Recorded sound obliterates the space enclosing the original sound and so flattens the perceivable reality of that sound, compressing it into the same space relative to all the other sounds on the soundtrack for the film.

33 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson identification of “should” within a culture is a powerful tool for a filmmaker because it is the presupposition of all expectations the society may reliably place upon a public/communal entity. The segment of life that films could build and remark upon this expectation is housed in what Appadurai calls the “Ideoscape” of a culture, and the Pioneers (much like any of the other scouting organizations around the world) were a concerted effort to address deterritorialization and diaspora in the USSR. Appadurai states: What is new is that this is a world in which both points of departure and points of arrival are in cultural flux, and thus the search for steady points of reference, as critical life choices are made, can be very difficult. It is in this atmosphere that the invention of tradition (and of ethnicity, kinship, and other identity markers) can become slippery, as the search for certainties is regularly frustrated by the fluidities of transnational communication. As group pasts become increasingly parts of museums, exhibits, and collections, both in national and transnational spectacles, culture becomes less what Pierre Bourdieu would have called a habitus (a tacit realm of reproducible practices and dispositions) and more an arena for conscious choice, justification, and representation, the latter often to multiple and spatially dislocated audiences. (Appadurai 1996: 44)

Film in the Soviet Union was a means of combating the “slipperiness” newly installed in these communities by the collectivization efforts which involved the mass movement of incredibly large segments of disparate populations to new places, reshuffling the human context of their lives. The Pioneers were not merely a form of youth education, but a stabilizing force to create for the youth of the Soviet Union a new kind of “habitus” one that was allowed in film to be imagined as a continuous entity. It bears analyzing, then, that the expectation of this habitus included singing within the idealized realm of sound film: boys should work together, should cooperate, should have “wholesome” fun, should learn lessons about life and working in life, and should sing together. To read this scene as though the music demonstrates only their companionship is to miss something integral to the cultures of the lands that were part of the USSR. All of the cultures residing in the Soviet Union during this time period had forms of choral musicking native to their cultures (Jordania 2006: 49-125), thus this movement to have the boys sing together by way of introduction was to lay proverbial hands on and seize the lowest common denominator among all the various societies at home within the USSR, and it was also to instill longing for the acceptance of that society. Brutal as it may sound, humans are not, as a species, at liberty when listening to music to choose whether to hear or not hear even if those present were to jam their ears shut. Through both bottom up and top down processing, the human mind, long trained in hearing and perceiving, and the body, long trained to sing, are sensitive to song in ways not automatically available to speech because speech often relies on syntax to impart discreet information (Koelsch et al 2004 and Levitin 2006 101-103). But music, housing a gestural language (Schögler and Trevarthen 2007: 286) unbound from syntax has the ability to reach hearers and impart meaning even when a language is unfamiliar. When a song’s form is unfamiliar there is the wish to know more, to be included, and when it is readily intelligible, so the listener is even more deeply forced to allow the music entry

34 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson into the imagination. Using music this way was not simply a matter of invoking the image of a community, but a means of enforcing its participation even while sitting in a theatre. This simple, seemingly innocent song is far more than a sign, it has an agency available only to music in the eras before television and internet, before search engines made the entire world accessible to those with computers or phones, and before news was instantaneous. This song was a means of applying culture to populations as yet not ready to participate, and of inspiring the desire to be participants in those populations. Song, in this crucial time period of Stalin’s early rule, was another means of laying siege to the minds of the populations within the USSR. Consider, for comparison, the wonderful hyperbole in historical documents on the great pain that the Civil War in the United States inflicted on families because it pitted “brother against brother” (Campbell in Power 1994). But songs were capable of reaching into families and recruiting members for causes because song can saturate human nature in ways flyers and pamphlets may miss or the mind has made itself impervious to; for, who makes themselves immune to “harmless” music like this? The answer is, of course, no one. No one becomes impervious to the songs of children, but it is in the educational process (and song was and still is an integral part of those processes) that the nature of the imagined community may take shape (Klein 2003). This scene, miniscule, completely overlooked by many, is an important way that the educational process could reach beyond the Pioneer campground, beyond the school room, and beyond the playground— into the minds of all who saw and heard and thus attained a prized place in the identifying realms of how cultures “should” look to those both within and outside. It is a piece contained within the diegetic space, and as such it attains (if possible) even greater attention than it would have normally had if a troop of Pioneers marched past the audience at, for instance, a parade or fair ground because the motion of the scene demands that one actively listen to music inhabiting the diegetic space. It is a children’s song, recognizable as such through its melody (simple, plain, unadorned and easy to learn), through its noticeable lack of harmony—choral music in areas like the Baltic states, Russia, Ukraine etc. almost always has some form of harmony (Jordania 2006)—it simplifies reception and ease of hearing the melody, its rhythm is also very uniform, without strange syncopations or unexpected emphasis. In other words, this is a song designed to enter the mind and stay there, to be easily recalled and to be simply sung: a song of the people and a song for everyone.

But I wish now to consider the darker side of this picture, for it is the task of the historian to brush history “against the grain” and here is a picture worth noting. If nearly every culture has lullabies so too has every culture a repertoire of melodies their children sing. The reason many scholars rightly term the march from Russia outward into surrounding territories and thence the application of Russian as a language in education as “Russification” is because while Stalin seemed

35 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson to be content to allow various former nations their own cultural ways13 yet his policies in indoctrinating the youth culture into programs like the Pioneers was to effectively give these children a new community to belong to, with a new repertory of songs. Truly, no childhood could be more effectively erased than to erase its songs and replace them— deeply personal, filled with memory and affection, the songs of childhood are the places the mind inhabits when it wishes to revisit the heritage of its youth. Old poetry of the land one descends from, long hours at play with friends, games and understandings without necessarily having “meaningful discourse” these are what are erased when the songs of a culture’s children are replaced. So what can appear innocent in this film is anything but innocent. It is an erasure about to creep upon a generation of children whose songs and games would be translated into an acceptable soviet experience. Though these songs were already being taught in schools and in Pioneer campgrounds around the USSR the diegetic space of a theatre was yet one more means of extending this repertoire to as wide a population as possible within a giant nation; building a new musical identity for a new imagined community.

Nondiegetic Space

Nondiegetic film space was valuable, but films of the Interwar Years were not equally good at using that space at all times, and this is only to be expected given that film as a medium was very new and the sound film was less than a decade old in Цирк and only just ten years old in Comrade X. In Цирк the nondiegetic space is impressively navigated time and again by the sound crew switching beautifully between music that belongs to the space and music that does not. In Comrade X this is much more clumsily handled spacing diegetic music with either absolute silence in the background of dialogue or with music that is usually a kitsch representation of Russian “folk” music (signified through balalaika tunes). It is impressive to find nondiegetic music in Цирк at all since the storyline has a built-in mechanism to have music present almost constantly being that the majority of the action in the storyline takes place within and around the confines of a circus. Thus the background music of the acts in the rings served as a nearly constant source of background music, however, there are still those subtle moments when the music fades out only to return as unquestionably nondiegetic. Yet even in this form it served as commentary/highlighter of the mood of a given moment in the scene. For greater understanding, consider the moment when Mary returns to her room after the first time we see her perform in the circus. Franz pushes her to the floor, there is an ugly quarrel and afterward the scene returns to Mary on the floor and so the music returns out of the silence of her introspection. In a waltz tempo a lone oboe paints a melody that

13 Stalin’s application of Russian education was to insist on a learning of the language so that all could speak Russian, but he did not often eliminate the native tongues at the same time in the educational process, nor did he often insist that “folk traditions” be given up out of hand except where those traditions were clearly pagan/religious (Steffen 2013). Yet the history of the USSR here and across its incredible breadth was widely variegated. Policy changed with the hands that had the responsibility of its oversight and so what resulted was that in some places the Russification was far more brutally and thoroughly applied than in others. It is one of the “messy” tales of history.

36 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

first runs the harmonic minor scale up until the sixth scale tone and then leaps upwards to the supertonic to avoid the augmented second which gives that scale its characteristic sonic quality, and so the return to the tonic is completed from above. There is also a rhythmic emphasis on the descending form of the scale—the run upwards is in sixteenth notes and the return is completed in triplets to the same quarter note pulse. This disjoins the smooth timing of the scale and mimics the ragged breathing/crying of Mary sitting on the floor. By deemphasizing the ascending pattern of the scale and placing greater stress upon the descending line the famous “sigh motive” (Kouchevitsky 1975: 24 and 25) is invoked in this tiny fragment of music. The first version of it is the elongated scale version which prolongs the sensation of someone who inhales more rapidly and then raggedly but more slowly releases the breath, the second hearings of it are when the orchestra joins the oboe, and here the true definition of the sigh motive appears: a descending series of three

or four notes of which the first is repeated after a Figure 6 short pause (ibid.). This type of nondiegetic mirroring of what was going on emotionally and even physiologically with the character on screen is particularly successful as the camera work of the scene starts from afar and draws closer towards Mary’s face so the audience can better read her expressions. She begins to take off her wig and stops half way through the process, dazed, while looking at the scattered contents of a suitcase that she was thrown against. The askew wig makes her seem like a partial person, a strange mix in the black and white version (for a viewer from 2015, the effect is more comic than pathetic because my mental catalogue contains the image of Cruella de Vil) of someone who is between states. Her eyes Figure 7 linger on photographs of a handsome smiling face, and the realization that this is not her suit case, and not her things brings with it a repose from the feelings of despair. At that very moment the music reverses direction and the sigh motive disappears—the emphasis of the melodic direction on the descending scale is replaced by music which surges upward melodically and suddenly her proverbial “prince charming” enters the room with his arms spread wide as he flings open the curtain. Pairing music to motion, the effect of his entrance on the scene with the strewn contents of his suitcase and the fallen Mary is dramatic indeed. With the surging melody it is nearly impossible not to feel a like surge of hope at seeing Ivan Petrovich

37 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

Martinov suddenly standing in the door smiling kindly down at Mary. The Russians at this time were already skilled handlers of sound navigation, and at manipulating the movement of the scene through the soundtrack. As Martinov asks for his suitcase the scene shifts outside of Mary’s dressing room and back into the adjoined dressing room of Franz who is now eavesdropping on their conversation. Suddenly, the sound of the wind outside, and the trains that are pulling in somewhere nearby become audible to the listener. The music has stopped for now and Franz, able to hear to his satisfaction, but unable to see sufficiently creeps outside of the window onto the fire escape to better observe them, thus the sound of the wind pulls the viewer outside mentally along with Franz while maintaining enough of the dialogue as audible to successfully establish a new mental space— that of the eavesdropper. One more shift in this tiny scene occurs when the viewer is reinserted back into the room with Mary and Martinov just as a passing car’s headlights (also audible through the honking) throw Franz’s shadow onto the wall. Martinov stalks to the window, places his hands on the sill and glares back at Franz through the glass. There are a succession of chords then in the orchestra and it is likely no coincidence that the motion is both upwards (in the treble instruments) and downward (in the bass instruments) which come to rest on minor chords all three times though the chords are not repetitions, but progressions. The glass steams over as the two stare at one another until both men are obscured by the forming ice crystals to the sound of the same progression (this time in major and only ascending) played on a glockenspiel followed by the introduction of the harp as the scene changes. There is a short animation in which the ice seemingly “melts” and the next scene opens on what later became one of the most popular patriotic songs of the USSR Широка страна моя родная. At the scene change here a trick is played that film makers would later make much use of as the music’s identity as diegetic or not remains a mystery until several stanzas in when the camera pans back in from the view of Moscow’s Red Square into an apartment where Martinov is teaching Mary to sing the song in Russian. And this is where this thesis will leave them.

Comrade X—To Kitsch or Not Too Kitsch The single notable instance in Comrade X of nondiegetic music comes just as Theodore (who is not a man, see the sound clip accompanying chapter 2) and Mckinley Thompson are leaving her streetcar. Suddenly, in a film where there is almost no nondiegetic music whatsoever, soft balalaikas can be heard playing in the background. When I sat down to watch this film with my Russian teacher (Alexandra Kynchikova) she actually scoffed and said, “Of course! Because all Russian music has balalaikas…” I could not blame her reaction since I had the same reaction myself the first time I saw the movie. To put this in perspective, however, it bears repeating that the United States was incredibly familiar with Russian music from folk to classical through its immigrant populations, some of which included artists of the highest degree (Stravinsky, Balanchine, Fokine etc.) so placing the balalaika in this film is not merely to highlight a mood, but

38 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson to situate, once more, a particular cultural sounding in the resonance of a folk tradition. The director, King Vidor, was aiming for camp in this as was his composer. The person scoring the music for this film was none other than Bronisław Kaper14 and he knew what Russian music sounded like because he was born in Poland and trained through the Warsaw conservatory (Palmer and Larson 2015). This means that the musical misdirection all over this movie was quite deliberate. To move back to the scene, then, this snippet of music in the background is an effort to redirect the audience’s mindset towards the type of person “Theodore” is which is to make her sound as though she is naïve by pairing her stroll through the moonlight with this campy balalaika interlude. The reason for implicating the character as a naïve creature is less obvious because it has to do with undermining strands of plot already woven. A plot in 1940 that demonstrated a woman manning15 a trolley in a metropolis by herself is a plot that consequently imputed a great deal of strength to the character in question, which is also part of the plot. Yet, “Theodore” is a character of contradictory nature and so it was necessary at this point in the film to begin introducing all those contradictions. The balalaika is one means of doing this to undermine her image as a strong woman. This budding naiveté is further underscored when (believing Thompson’s professions that he is miserable about leaving Russia) she seeks to comfort him by remarking “Comrade please do not be sad! There is so much to live for— even in America!... The problem of taking the masses away from Boogie Woogie is a difficult one.” (Hedy Lamarr 1940). Here is yet another Russian woman (there have been a few portrayed in the film already), who seems to be taken in by Thompson and his American ways as though these women lacked any sense of self-preservation or social awareness despite their positions of trust and responsibility in their own society. The effect was to cast Russian women in general in the light of children who are extremely easily led or fooled. Where the vocal characterizations might not be enough to underscore this, the kitsch nondiegetic music is there to reinforce this reading of Russian culture/character. There were a few other places in the film where music entered the diegetic space directly and both times the music was taken out of a context and inserted into a place that did not belong to it. Whatever Bronisław Kaper knew about Russian music he seems not to have cared about the fact that what he inserted into the movie did not belong musically to the scenes he paired it with. After watching the film with Ms. Alexandra Kynchikova, and interviewing her as regards several points in the film we went back repeatedly to these scenes of musical diegesis: first the funeral scene and then the scene in the jail where the prisoners were singing. In both cases (and we definitely agree on this point) the ensembles are all-male professional choruses of high quality. Beyond that, however, Ms. Kynchikova assured me that in neither scene did the music have anything to do in Russian culture with the scenes it had been matched to. In the funeral procession the song was not

14 Kaper was as at home in classical music as he was in jazz and it is little known but he was the actual composer of some of the most famous jazz standards of the time period one of which was later made famous by Miles Davis: “On Green Dolphin Street”. (Palmer and Larson 2015). 15 It is quite the coincidence that the term for steering something is “manning” it.

39 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson about a funeral nor would such music ever have been performed at a Russian funeral. In the jail scene, though the music appears to be woven into a song about the folk and about solidarity, Ms. Kynchikova could not verify it as a true song “of the people” through recognition of the melody or even the lyrics. I combed recordings of Russian folk music, Russian patriotic music, music from recordings made in the 1930s which might have been in circulation, and purchased song collections to try to locate these two melodies and in all cases it was a fruitless search. The situation is problematic because in both cases the music matches the scene too well (vis-à-vis people actually singing in the scene) to support the notion that the songs were lifted out of another recording and placed within this film. After much discussion we agreed that, given the facts that the film has several actors who were Russian émigrés, and given the fact that the composer would also have been familiar with Russian music and traditional ballads, in both selections the singers were likely coached to imitate a recording, part of which is playing at the beginning of each scene, but which is later subsumed by the actors (extras) singing along to the recording. These bits of diegetic music that really do come from Russian culture, add, just as the snippets of Russian language do, to the overall feel of authenticity within the film.

Conclusion The conceptual realities of these imagined communities were hinging in films of the Interwar Years upon musical guises that could reinforce both the ideas of “other” and “self” with equal force and relative ease. While invoking music from either opposing tradition was a useful tactic for constructing semblances of these cultures it was a time consuming process that involved camera work, coaching of extras and singers, the layering of sounds into the soundtrack and deft work of a sound team whose contributions to the art of the film and these representations are often overlooked in the shadow of a film’s composer and director. Identities, beliefs about how culture should look and function, and characterizations were all negotiated by the musical tracks and traces laid down within these filmscape. Taking those musical additions out of their context as has been done in this chapter and analyzing how that music fit within the line of the story (or not) situates music alongside the voice as the other key agency in the creation of this sound-film atlas.

40 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

Chapter 4

Introduction

While these techniques can be observed operating in isolation through out the various films already mentioned in the course of the thesis it is important to observe and analyze entire scenes as they are captured within a film. This chapter will take four scenes from as many films and analyze them for their musical content, their narrative purpose and their vocal techniques. The purpose is to give depth to the already elucidated arguments put into play in the thesis. For while one can spell out the techniques being used, it is useful to view all these techniques in operation simultaneously.

Марионетки [Marionettes]— Coronation of an Idiot

Though it enjoyed little success and even less renown (Leda 1960: 306), the film Марионетки (Marionettes) was an anti-fascist work designed to provoke a lasting critique upon past empires by highlighting everything that was wrong with them: the endemic practices of corruption, the extremities of wealth disparity, the fact that leaders were born into power without necessarily being competent to lead vast nations, and the overwhelming influence of the church into matters of the state. Leonid Polovinkin, a composer who was little known outside the boundaries of Russia, wrote the musical score for this film. Born in Siberia, he was trained in composition at the Moscow Conservatory during a most crucial period for the forming of his talents, 1914-1924 (Barsova, 2015). In short, Polovinkin received his training during WWI and during the fall of the Tsarist Empire. Having thus disposed of Polovinkin’s timing in history the thesis may look at his educators. Though musicologists are taught a sometimes flimsy way of dealing with history of music as though it were some unbroken chronology extending from the Mesozoic up through Mozart there is a certain wisdom in examining the lineage of students a composer took under their wing and the reason for this was the nature of compositional studies in that time. Students in composition admitted to the conservatories were not simply gathered into a lecture hall that could hold four hundred students and then turned loose to compose. Compositional studies were a select study, difficult to enter, and once in, one received the very personal attention of one’s mentors. In the case of Russia this was even truer than for other nations. To give an example, many of the compositions circulating in popular recordings today purportedly composed by the Mussorgsky only bear resemblance to his original sketches and work in terms of thematic material. His mentor, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov often edited those orchestral works to the point of near unrecognizability as is often evinced when one of those early and unedited editions of Mussorgsky’s works is performed in place of the better known Korsakov edition (Oldani 2015). Furthermore, both of Polovinkin’s teachers in composition (Sergei Vasilenko and Nikolai Myaskovsky) were important people in the newly communist government, both of them going on to win the Stalin prize (Myaskovsky won it an unprecedented and unrepeated five times before his death) (Rayskin, 2015).

41 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

To be brief, Polovinkin was educated in composition by two people who had themselves been students under a shifting regime and who understood how to work within that regime. Unlike his contemporaries in film and classical music (Shostakovich, Khachaturian or Volkonsky), Polovinkin received no denunciations by the state for his work in this film or any others. He learned from his teachers how to escape the notice of the censors by being unremarkable, while still managing to create music with meaning to its public and to him— which, as many composers discovered during the terror, was no mean feat. Understanding Polovinkin’s educational background as well as the timing of his education in music, thus explains some of the ways in which he deals with the material for this coronation scene. The storyline for Марионетки takes place in a fictive fascist land called Boufferia. In a stroke of immense creativity, the authors of the film’s screen play, Yakov Protazanov and Vladimir Shvejster decided that the main characters would have no names but be called only by the notes of the major scale in solfege: Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, and Si. The plot weaves in and around the machinations and mishaps of these seven characters. Do is a royal whom the other conspirators wish to place on the throne of Boufferia in place of the child who sits there. Re is an archbishop of some kind and in complete control of the church with very nearly complete control over the monarchy as well. Mi is an actress and singer. Fa is a fascist with military connections. Sol is the barber/butler to Do. La is the prime minister at court and Si is a powerful businessman who controls vast stretches of the government through his business dealings. Looking at the plot it is interesting how the names of the scale tones have taken on their true meanings in this film because the pitch of the scale “Sol” is also known in English as the “dominant” tone of the scale. Aside from Do it is the second most stable tone. Do in the scale is known as the “tonic” and Re is known in music theory as the “supertonic”. The tonic of a scale is the most “stable” pitch meaning that all the other pitches in the scale refer to that tone for their conceptual consonance or dissonance, but something fascinating about the tonic chord in any piece is that it always contains the tonic and the dominant as well as the mediant. In the purely technical world of music theory, the dominant should be subordinate to the tonic pitch of the scale, but keys can change and the dominant may wind up being the tonic of its own scale and such is precisely what happens in this tale when the barber winds up on the throne instead of Do. The scene to be analyzed is his hasty coronation. The period in which the story appears to take place would be somewhere in the early 1920’s and this information can be gleaned from the dress and habits of the characters, but there is another curious factor to this assignment of dates that should not be overlooked as it lends a depth of understanding to the plot. While the mannerisms, dress and popular music portrayed in the majority of the film are accurate to the 1920s, the mannerisms, dress, and ceremonial music imitate a much earlier time period and place: the 1840s with the crowning of Emperor Franz Joseph I as king of Hungary. The visual cues that lead one to this parallelism are the imperial jewels (with the

42 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson exception of the exaggerated crown designed to make anyone who wears it look utterly foolish), and the would-be king’s costume. Figure 8

(Sol addressing his loyal subjects after his coronation. Screen shot taken from Марионетки 1934) Figure 9

(The imperial crown, orb and scepter of Austria, displayed in the Imperial Treasury of the Hofburg, Vienna Austria.)

The musical cues, however, are much more subtle. Polovinkin has done a masterful job in this scene of converting a standard coronation march into a true musical jibe. Underneath the melody of

43 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson the marches (there are three— one for the butler being dressed, one for the entrance to the throne room, and the marionette march) is a constant bass line which simply alternates between the pitches do and sol. There are two reasons Polovinkin has done this. The first, and most obvious, is to musically reinforce the idea that Do and Sol in the case of the throne are interchangeable since both would serve the same purpose of playing “yes man” to the archbishop Re. The second reason is to mimic the Germanic/Austrian musical tradition of nearly a century before. While most bass lines to many Strauss marches were not quite so simple and stripped down a fair number of them use the same structural movement of repeatedly moving between the tonic chord and the dominant chord. Yet, the melodies of the marches are the real mechanisms that convey the irony and even disgust that the audience is meant to feel watching the spectacle. The timbres of the instruments are purposely difficult to listen to. The trumpets sound “tinny” and sickly in their fanfares. The violins seem shriller and the near painful dissonances16 make the march sound clumsy, heavy and hampered. Comparing any one of the coronation marches from the 1840s and 1850s by composers like Tchaikovsky or Strauss lets one understand that though Polovinkin took his model from those earlier marches in terms of tempi, instrumentation, style and tone structure, he added quite a few of modern touches and unlike the efforts of many composers of the period, he did not add the dissonances or shifts in timing to experiment in sound or to break away from old models: he did it to musically comment on the ritualized life of fascist empires and the complete idiocy of the man who was being crowned in the film. When the new king is escorted into the audience chamber after being crowned and sanctified behind closed doors by the head of the church, the band strikes up the march with many fanfares. Here there is a stable tone center, a steady beat, but the king shambles in and when he sees his new public rise to their feet he attempts to back out only to run smack into the people carrying his enormous ermine cape behind him. After being seated the cheers of all those gathered in the throne room to greet their new monarch ring out, and this is another sound technique used to comment upon the system. As the shot pans in upon La cheering, his cheers are suddenly audible to the viewer as being separate from all the other cheers. La’s cheering is dramatic, almost like singing a sustained pitch, it enunciates a picture of protocol and formality and in addition to the pitches conveying this idea, the consonants of his cheer are so carefully timed that it clues the listener in to the purely rehearsed nature of this man’s praise even before Re leans in to whisper, “Do not display your loyalty so quickly, my friend! The king is strange…” Re, a supertonic in the scale, demonstrates in that one little whisper to the prime minister that he is indeed supertonic. Re is going preside over whether or not the court will love this king, whether or not they will approve him. All now hinges upon how this presumptive king pronounces his will in the following speeches he gives to his new public. As the

16 Let it be understood that much of the music of the 1930s in the European/American classical tradition was comprised of dissonance, but the classical and film music of this style was dissonant with a purpose and a decided, almost ritualistic order. In short, there was a heavy process behind serialism and its resulting dissonances. What Polovinkin wrote was tonal music that has been mangled for the purpose of expressing the character the music accompanies.

44 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson hapless Sol proceeds to repeat things he said once to Do as his barber, his subjects in turn take these strange utterances “Sprinkle and Refresh… Lead facemasks. Massages… It is not luxury, but hygiene!” for code to maintain their fascist ways, Sol cements Re’s support of his reign and at the end of the scene it is now Re whose ceremonial “Urrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaahhhhh” we can hear above the others. La leans in to ask him, “So what of your advice to me earlier, eh?” “What advice?” asks Re. “Not to be too loyal too quickly?” Re rejoins with the idea that such a conversation never took place. As the scene concludes, Polovinkin’s marionette march returns to escort the half goose- stepping Sol from the chamber where he promptly turns back into a marionette. This movie, like so many others of its time, demonstrates something Russia had yet to come to grips with. While the USA had been busy already for a decade with labeling Russia as the land of Soviet control, misery and foolish, needless poverty, the Soviets were (in 1934) still far more concerned with the fascists closer to home than the capitalists across the Pacific. It would take WWII to prove to Russia that the real danger to Communism and the Soviet-state was as far removed from the images painted by the throne room scene above as could be imagined. Roughly thirteen years later, however, Russia had caught on.

Русский вопрос [The Russian Question]— Radio Climax The next scene to be analyzed comes from the film Русский вопрос [The Russian Question], and this film represents a shift in Russia’s cinematic approach to those forces it perceived as battling against the rise and realization of Communism. As opposed to the earlier films, by the end of WWII, Russia had figured out that the only force left on Earth that could potentially kill off the dream of Communism was the United States of America, and so now the cinematic propaganda had to become personal, in ways similar to how the United States had been subtly indoctrinating its viewing public for years against Russia as a nation. However, far from doing what Americans and Hollywood would have done by putting Russians onscreen while asking them to speak Russian with an American accent, there are attempts to portray America, but with elements that are distinctly Russian. The largest of these elements would have to be the pronunciation of the main character’s name. None of the main characters have names you would find in Russia, and all the names are perfectly American, and, yet there was just one flaw with the main character’s name. The phonemes [h] and [θ] do not exist in Russian, and so the name Harry Smith is pronounced in this movie as [ga:ri smIt]. The plot follows the misadventures of a New York journalist in his attempts to write a book detailing how Russian’s feel about the question of impending war with the United States. The “honest” and “good” antagonist of the film comes to the conclusions that Russia and her people do not want war with the United States and so writes in his book. For telling the truth his fellow Americans bankrupt him, seize his house, throw out his furniture and will not allow him to publish his book. The film was made at the very beginning of true hostilities between the United States and

45 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson the U.S.S.R. and the scene to be analyzed is the film’s climax in which Harry Smith’s home is being emptied of furniture, his selfish wife (Jessie) leaves him, and his best friend (Bob Murphy) is killed in the explosion of a jet they are testing to observe its physical flight limits. The climax is a potent combination of varying tensions being brought together from strands of plot that were spun separately through out the course of the film. In this suspended twelve minutes a man loses his home, his possessions, his best friend and his wife. There are layers and layers of bitterness in the script and plenty of sound elements which serve as narrators and focalizers as well. It is important to begin with the make up of the characters that are being portrayed here, their historical purpose and their dual roles and double significances. Film being the unique medium it is, housing its own time-space while being able to simultaneously maintain an understanding or feeling of present while showing the audience elements of the fabula yet to occur or which have already taken place the audience has to contend not merely with the events in the story, but also understand the true chronology of events. Yet even beyond the scape of the film there are elements or echoes of characters whose traits are housed in a historical catalogue from the literary past. Harry Smith’s character is not merely a player in this film. His goodness (moral character), his principled nature, and his spine of iron where it concerns those morals are things that ring true for the majority of Russian heroes and protagonists in literature dating at least back to Tolstoy and potentially beyond (Clark 1981: 46). While this is not to create an image of an overly simple “Russian ideal” of manhood and chivalrous behavior (because that would be to belittle the complexity of every protagonist written) it is to remark upon the qualities embedded within this type of character that make him recognizable upon the screen, and so identifiable to his audience. Harry Smith knows what his publisher wants him to write before he leaves to go and investigate “the Russian question”. He knows it when he has returned, and after agonizing upon it he decides to put down the “truth” that Russia does not want war with the U.S.A. and in so doing he has ruined his career. But none of this is unanticipated because of who Harry Smith is. The plot seems to unfold without a single hitch as regards the behavior and mannerisms one would expect of this quintessential “good” man caught trying to do honest work in a “dirty” and selfish world, and even as Harry’s conduct and behavior are unmistakably predictable so are the consequences of his actions. The analysis begins at one hour and twelve minutes into the film. The scene opens upon Harry’s soon to be ex-house to the sound of a radio playing jazz selections on piano and workers carrying all Harry’s furniture out of the house and laying it on the lawn. The radio is problematic in the entire scene because it has been purposely made to seem as though the radio’s music is clearly audible everywhere in the house. The reason they are listening to the radio at all while the house is being cleared of furniture is because their journalist friend is at that moment broadcasting from inside a new jet whose manufacturer said he would pay thirty cents for every foot of ascent the jet makes. There is an undeniable tension to the understanding that Bob is up in that jet because while

46 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

Harry seems cool and unruffled in the dialogue about his friend in this scene, yet there is an insistence that the radio remain on in the fifteen minute intervals between broadcasts from the jet— even while no one is in the room to listen to the radio. In this way the presence of absence and the impending sense of doom is brought subtly into the story. Bob is there through the radio and yet very clearly he is also not “there” and while everyone is anxious for his well being still no one will give voice to his or her misgivings about Bob’s mission in the jet. The unease and feelings of anxiety are communicated far more in what the audience perceives as being unsaid or held-back than by the dialogue and feigned jocularity, and the radio, whose nonsensical jazz fades in and out of the background of the mini-vignettes playing out in different parts of the house, functions both as a lifeline to Bob and a hopeless tether to an impending and inevitable disaster. Consider for a moment the nature of the music ostensibly playing on the machine in the living room. The first quality of the music is its supposed presence in the scene (i.e. it is perceivable). The music is to be understood as diegetic and so there is an “awareness” of it embedded into the scene as well for the audience and the awareness of this music is automatically narrated as conscious because the radio will tell us something important about the plot if the players in the scene can also hear it. Music occupying and inhabiting diegetic space nearly always serves a focalizing or narrative plot device in these “early” films. Harry Smith even draws attention to the fact that one should be listening to the radio as the opening shots pan in upon him sitting in the living room— desolate, emptying before his eyes like the prospects of a career he had worked to fill with beautiful words on crisp pages, so the shelves of this room are being laid bare too and yet the radio remains and he calls Jessie’s attention to it as she enters. Jessie has not had a good run of things as a housewife. She told Harry she would be a perfect wife, and she cannot seem to make good on this promise: she drinks on the quiet, she smokes whenever she becomes anxious, and she cannot be happy with Harry even though he has followed the noble urgings of a clear conscience because it will mean they will have to eat his nobility and be housed in his good heart rather than in a large house behind its picket fence and neat hedge rows.

47 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

Figure 10

(Jessie and Harry right before she leaves him for good. Screen shot taken from Русский вопрос 1947.) Yes, the radio is a symbol of much more in this draining façade. While chairs and tables make way for poverty to enter the stage along with the already present shame Harry refuses to feel, the sound of that bright jazz has a hard and brittle edge to its rhythms—these are the rhythms of a world turning on that music, filling halls with clacking heels and whisky drinkers who spend their evenings socializing to this music. What use the principles of a disciplined mind if you cannot afford to have jazz in your life? So the radio paints a thick and rancid irony upon the entire scene. The house will soon be empty, its furniture gone, and its occupants too, but the radio and the jazz are still here… Dance if you dare. The larger scene is comprised of many smaller ones and each vignette begins with the sound of that radio which then fades into silence while the dialogue of the subsequent scene unfolds only to reemerge at the close of each segment. The content of each vignette is clear—Harry is going to lose everything. The scene with Harry and Fred Williams (a publisher the viewer learns Harry used to work with earlier in his career as a journalist) shows that Williams can do nothing to help Harry get even one single page of that book published and Harry summarily shows him the door with no deal for Harry’s financial security struck. The scene between Meg and Jessie shows that Jessie’s good sense is completely gone as is the mask of domesticity that she’s been wearing in the film. Behind the shards of the broken guise is the woman Jessie really is at her core, (the woman the audience always knew her to be) money-obsessed and disreputable. She turns out to be the kind of woman American housewives of the 50’s and 60’s used to say was “not the marrying

48 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson type”. The last vignette is the scene where Harry and Jessie’s marriage ends. This miniscule scene was as inevitable in the plot structure as Harry’s deciding to tell the “truth” in his book about Russia because in this final vignette Harry has to refuse to give up his principles to Jessie in order to be able to buy her the life she wants. It is this final and, consequently, ultimate act of resistance— refusing to bow to the ultra-capitalistic forces in his life— which confirms Harry as being fit for the role of “Pro-Soviet Hero” in this film. As filmic characters go, this one is an important role in Russian cinema to come in the years following Stalin’s rule, the years known in collective scholarship as the “Thaw” period, and Harry Smith makes a beautiful fore-runner to the genre. Examining Russia’s understanding of cinema in the same light as their unique and complex literary tradition17 one might believe that so-called “Western” Europe came late to the media studies and semiotics party. Russians were accustomed to reading films long before semiotics made this fashionable, and in addition theirs was a readership determined to make sense of the literature put before them and react to it in ways that were not often encountered in other Euro-American reading cultures. There were literary circles through out much of Europe, but the radically participatory nature of Russia’s literary circles and the highly informed and thoroughly educated readership was something truly unique to the culture (Kozlov 2013: location 108). Thus, it is not only appropriate to examine film characters in the context of the literary tradition pervading Russia, but it is essential to understanding the underlying reception of such characters. Harry Smith and his ilk were a group of protagonists who resolved to defend the Soviet from capitalistic forces, and their moral courage was usually rewarded with abandonment by those who sided with capitalism. To understand the ending of Русский вопрос one has to take into account that this man has a spiritual journey to make and it will only be complete once he turns away everyone who would ask him to compromise his ideals, which is precisely what happens in that last vignette. As Jessie stalks out of the film, dragging her coat behind her to the once more audible strains of piano jazz Harry returns to the now emptier living room where his faithful radio lifeline to Bob Murphy remains perched upon his suitcase. The radio is still working and he leans against it, whiskey bottle in hand—his symbolic connection to the one person who earlier in the film said to him, “You know, Harry, you are my conscience.” Of course this is the moment when Bob too will be taken away from the hero. The tension is electric as the scene switches back and forth between three places: the living room and Harry, the radio station central, and the inside of the jet. The station master is on his feet— sweating, nervous— his words coming more rapidly because at the last station break he learned from the manufacturer that not only had the pilot and Bob broken the record, but they were going to destroy themselves with their stunt. Just before the catastrophe, the station manager yells “Bob Murphy! Come back to Earth!” Bob tells the station manager to go to the devil and suddenly yells

17 The literary tradition of Russia, which I refer to here, is not merely its legacy of authors whose work achieved critical acclaim both in Russian and beyond, but the tradition of its informed, dedicated, and, in many ways, participatory readership. (Kozlov 2013: location 93- 107)

49 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson like Christ on his own cross, “Harry! If you are listening, the money from this is for yours!” The jet explodes. Harry, anguished and stricken, surges to his feet smashing the whiskey bottle. At this very instant, directly after the crash there is a brilliant musical switch and this accomplishes something cognitive for every viewer. In the instant of the explosion the music returns to its nondiegetic state and so the mind of the viewer instantaneously reinhabits the mental space of Harry in order to savor his grief. Nondiegetic and diegetic music are strange devices in that their success requires no maneuvering of cameras, no alteration of time (Chion 1990: 80 &81). From one second to the next the mind seamlessly tracks whether the music belongs to the filmic space or to the narrative yet supra-conscious space of the character’s mind. In altering the musical point-of-view (more appropriately the point-of-hearing) like this, especially given how truly little nondiegetic music is in this film, the viewers move from being spectators of that series of vignettes to experiencers/sharers in Harry’s grief. For a dark instant before the scene clears, there is no more music, no more jazz or brittle brightness in the world. The transformation of Harry from a struggling man with a good heart and bad influences in his life is complete, and the Soviet Hero has emerged from the ashes of his friend’s death. There is only one last article to clarify regarding the scene and the vocal technique of having Bob cry out to Harry, as it is only in that last scream that the reason for Bob’s death becomes truly clear. Bob does not fit the usual bill of sacrificial characters in literary tradition: he performs no miracles, he is often the one in need of forgiveness, and possesses no otherworldly qualities, yet he is the character to die in order for Harry to succeed. Harry is a bankrupt man, and as such he would be powerless in the United States, but with the money from Bob’s death flight to the sun he can realize the dream of telling the truth18 about Russia and about the American government’s attempts to silence communism.

Wonder Man— Ochi Chernye Danny Kaye was, for a brief decade and a half, Hollywood’s go-to golden boy of comedy and musical virtuosic performances (Macinnis 2015). One of his least known films, however, contains a strange scene, a scene that adds not one single iota of development to the plot, and which would have taken considerable rehearsing and shots to complete. The scene is epic in the sense that it grabs the hearer, and it is simply difficult not to laugh for the sheer ridiculousness of what is being sung. There is another reason for analyzing this scene and drawing attention to it in this thesis. In a scene that will be later discussed from another film made nearly a decade earlier there is a code word shared between the two protagonists and that code is ochi chernye (dark/black eyes). For

18 The Russian word for truth is pravda and time and again in the years to come this word and the ideals Russians attached to it would return to both the novel and the silver screen.

50 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson those not in the know, this was first a famous poem and then later an even more famous song out of the Russian popular repertoire of the 1910s. Though the language is clearly Russian this song is part of the hash that cultural claims to authenticity often become. The poet who first wrote the words in 1843 was Ukrainian (Koshelivets 1989) the composer of the music that came to the greatest popularity as the melody for those words, however, is not verifiable in the annals of history. Neither Florian Hermann nor Aldagiso Ferraris exist in any form, in any scholarly journal or other historical document. The credit given to either of these men for the creation of that melody is, therefore, unverifiable, and the real issue is that Hermann’s Hommage Valse (which is verifiable as his by tracing print house records) has a noticeably different melody than that which is often performed as Ochi Chernye. Even more curious is that several sheet music distributors feature the song in their anthologies, and yet the melody is attributed in 2015 as being “traditional”. This is in direct contradiction of another source whose misfortunate habit of writing in absolute circles states that,

A Soviet Union musicologist has written this author that Otchi Tchorniya or Dark Eyes is not a Russian folk song, but rather a cabaret song from the repertoire of Moscow gypsies which was popular among the middle classes until the Revolution.” (Fuld 2000: 417)

There are several issues in the afore-quoted text and the largest is that the “Soviet Union musicologist” remains unnamed. Would that the author could simply have identified his source this would then be a less dubious claim. Well might a Roma heritage explain the difficulties pinning down a composer for the melody, but without names to go on to verify sources and informants of any kind, this type of information is well-neigh worthless as a “source”, and yet it is valuable in painting a picture of what hunting for the origins of this kind of literature is often like. While Fuld’s book goes on to document the traceable elements of the melody, its heritage of being circulated in sheet music prior to 1900, there is still no accounting for the double leads of who wrote it, (there are sheet music prints in the United States and Europe with another man— Ferraris— as the composer) and for the variations in the melody between the Valse Hommage and the melody later performed worldwide. Indeed, the song may not have begun as a “Russian” folk song, but illustrative of how fictive and yet binding the “imaginary community” really is, even if the source above is to be believed that this music has no “folk” origins in Russia, and came as a popular song to the rest of the world, in true fashion of global currents in culture, this music has left its home and returned there. Many artists now perform this song, a tribute to Russian heritage in music, and so, with some of Russia’s finest talent performing it regularly at Russian festivals, who could deny that it is a Russian song?

51 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

Figure 11

Opera star, Dmitry Hvorostovsky Performing Ochi Chernye on June 19, 2013 at a live concert in Moscow’s Red Square

This scene in this movie is meant to depict the Russian culture and in choosing to do so they needed a piece of music which, for an American middlebrow consuming public, was easily recognizable as descending from Russian culture. It should not be surprising, then, that rather than choosing works by Stravinsky (who was in the United States by then) or imitating Tchaikovsky the filmmakers chose a popular song for this purpose. What is surprising, however, and the reason for remarking on the scene is that Danny Kaye had to learn the real lyrics in Russian. Many Americans watching this knew that song in an English variation, and for all many of them knew, he could have been mumbling gibberish on that screen, but in a surprising twist, the real Russian lyrics are what he mangles his way through— pretending to sneeze his way through an allergic reaction while trying to sing Ochi Chernye. As is usual in American movies where people are pretending to be Russian there is the ever-present English spoken with an exaggerated accent. In this case, it is an accent so far stretched to its outer limits that without having heard the words, “great Russian baritone, Sergei Ivanovich19” it would not be obvious that Kaye was impersonating someone speaking English with a Russian accent… More likely that he was impersonating someone out of their wits, and this is no coincidence, as fully half the scene is not spent singing, but with Kaye jabbering in that absurd accent about his five years recovering from an acute attack of hay fever. In short, it is not merely the way in which the words are spoken which represents a man short on sense and long on derangement, but the script itself construes the character (and indicts Russians in

19 For those looking for a laugh, Sergei Ivanovich is the name of a minor character in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Whether or not the script purposely borrows this name or not is up for discussion, but in terms of literary symbolism, Sergei Ivanovich is the personification of cold intellectualism—a stark foil for his brother whose intellect is moderated by a sincere love of humanity and a will to do good for it. If the scriptwriter was being clever this could be seen as the author paralleling the two brothers in Wonder Man with the two brothers in Anna Karenina. It would be an interesting comparison as well.

52 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson general thereby) as lacking in even the most rudimentary social awareness. The audience knows that this is no Russian onstage, indeed, the scene is meant to portray a comedy act rehearsed as part of the evening entertainment at a nightclub where the principal character works, but this is all the more reason to examine this tidbit of a scene— the writers and director could have chosen any material they wanted at this point in the film since these incidental musical numbers do not per se develop the plot, but reinforce the characters in their respective lives as entertainers. Figure 12

(Ochi Sneezeye! Danny Kaye pretending to have an acute attack of hay fever. Screen shot from Wonder Man 1945.)

That this man gets up on a stage and pretends to be a Russian classical singer must not be overlooked in these critical years right before the full outbreak of the Cold War. This film was released in 1945 and as hostilities had begun to brew right at the close of WWII between the USSR and the USA so Hollywood had come under fire by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (henceforth referred to in the thesis as HUAC) for producing pro-Soviet/Russian movies (Maltin 2005). Those films are often referred to in literature as the red trilogy (Georgakas 2013) because they were Hollywood’s concerted efforts to cement a partnership that caught the American public unawares in 1941 when Stalin and his Red Army rejoined the Allied Powers. Therefore it is essential to place this scene within the larger historical backdrop containing it. Even during production and first runs at the box office the red trilogy faced attacks against their subject matter. William Randolf Hearst’s papers were the most severe, printing a barrage of attacks against The

53 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

North Star that culminated in calling the film “pure Bolshevik propaganda” (Maltin 2005). After the films were produced, their respective studios, actors and writers were forced to go before HUAC and testify that they were not Communists nor even pro-Communist in any way. Samuel Goldwyn, the same producer of Wonder Man was renowned for his hands on approach to producing films and by 1945 he could smell the first wisps of smoke beginning to grow faintly proclaiming the approach of the Red Scare. Two years previously it was Goldwyn’s studio that had made (with meticulous care and an unprecedented budget of three million dollars) the pro-Soviet film The North Star, and Goldwyn stood to lose everything he had built if HUAC succeeded in convicting him and his studio of anti-American activities. Is it any wonder, then, that while the studio could have chosen any particular material they wanted to, this material is what became a sketch within a much larger film that had nothing to do with its subject? This was a subtle way of showing that while there were films belonging to the studio which could be construed as pro-Soviet, yet the studio maintained is earlier positions on Russianness and its attitude towards Soviets in general: they were boorish, uncouth, and laughable. Subtler still, however, is the way this scene slides into the sustained American half of the film atlas. Ochi Chernye appears several times over the course of the Interwar Years. It makes its first appearance in Shall We Dance (1937), it returns in a film not discussed in this thesis called The Shop Around the Corner (1940) (yet another Lubitsch film), and now it is the piece of music binding this scene to its Russian image in 1945. In such ways does the idea of a film atlas really begin to ring true because a piece of music suspended within each text, meant to portray not merely an otherness, but to stand in place of an absent culture while the actors tasked with these portrayals use the power of a single phrase or strand of melody to help solidify the representations of a vast nation housing many cultures into a single substance—a distilled form of reality to be grasped, consumed, and comprehended in the space of a few minutes. Such is the power of encounter and the magic of Mnemosyne.

Shall We Dance—The Great Petrov Shall We Dance was not the first of the Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire smash hits, but it is one of the most memorable because of its blockbuster score and the sheer multitude of popular hits that raced around the United States because of it. Sheet music from this film flew out of stores during a time period when most houses still had a piano and many households had a person who could play it. The movie capitalizes on an idea that had started circulating around the time the film was made: Russia was the capital of ballet and America was the capital of Jazz and tap— enter Peter P. Peters (Astaire). Instead of a Russian heading up the American ballet (an all too real scenario), this time it was an American who changed his name to be Russian heading up the Russian ballet. Rather than using his real name, Peters has become “The Great Petrov,” and for those really in the mood for a

54 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson good chuckle, Astaire’s character is a ballet dancer dying to do Jazz20. So the premise of the entire film is one layer after another of farce. The scene to be analyzed, however, is the scene in which Petrov first meets his heroine, Miss Linda Keene (Rogers). Like most of the romances of this time, the flimsiest of pretexts was necessary for a man to fall in love with a woman and so Peters heads over to Miss Keene’s apartment to attempt an introduction having fallen in love with her after seeing her dance in a flip-book. He has a bouquet in his hands, and Linda Keene is inside the apartment having stormed up there earlier after fending off the unwanted sexual advances of her dance partner at the club she works at. She is in the apartment with her manager in high dudgeon and declaiming against all dancers in general when Peters approaches the door and listens to her shouting while his card is brought in to Linda by her maid. The card reads, “Petrov” and Linda says to her manager, “What’s a Petrov?” to which her manager replies, “Just the Russian ballet’s greatest dancer…” There follows some amusing repartee about how Petrov must be a “simpering toe- dancer” who should just “go back to Moscow,” and seeing his hopes go down the drain for meeting Linda, Peters decides on a course of action— he is an American like Linda, but he will use the image of a Russian now to gain an audience with her. He sets the bouquet down, puffs up his chest (which is completely entertaining considering what a slight man Fred Astaire was), storms into the apartment uninvited and shouts in a sepulchral bass voice more ludicrous than his puffed up chest, “OCHI CHERNYE!” once again donning the over-blown and completely exaggerated vocal accents that were used in these films to portray the Russian voice. In point of fact, yelling “ochi chernye” is rather inappropriate considering that Ginger Roger’s eyes were a brilliant blue, something visible even in her black and white films. As the scene continues Peters/Petrov runs up the steps of the foyer, turns with a flourish, executes a strange leap down all three steps and then, bowing to them all declaims “I YAM pe-TROFF!” To say that the other characters look stunned would be an understatement. While it may appear that the only vocal technique in play here is the accent and the repeated and inappropriate uses of the words “ochi chernye” (usually in place of “Hello” or “Good- bye”) there is something important to consider as well when reexamining that film atlas. In the dialogue, after the manager thanks him for coming over to see Linda he calls Peters, “Mr. Petrov,” but Peters interrupts him and says “Not Mister! Petrov alone! And why not? Just Caesar. Just Napoleon. And only Garbo! So Petrov, too, she’s enough.” What one has to consider when taking apart that tiny snippet of dialogue is that the type of audience that would pay money to watch this film would likely, two years from now, go and watch another film which has featured in this thesis: Ninotchka. Furthermore, (and this is where coincidence probably has little to do with her name in this list) Garbo had two years previously been the star of MGM’s Anna Karenina. So while it is a coincidence for this film that a later film on Russian subjects stars Greta Garbo as the main character, one has to begin to wonder how much coincidence it was for Ninotchka that Garbo was

20 As it later came to be revealed about Astaire over the years, he was a jazz dancer and consummate tap artist whose greatest fear and self-perceived weakness was ballet forms. (Franceschina 2012: 86)

55 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson the lady who got the part of playing the somber Russian envoy. What is also perhaps not a coincidence at all is that Fred Astaire later starred in the Cold War era musical remake of Ninotchka in 1957. It is almost as if a twenty year sound time capsule were being made and Fred Astaire has locked up a tiny piece of his life that will reemerge twenty years later to star next to a woman who pretends to be a Russian using an exaggerated accent and dancing her way through the film with him—a role once played by “only Garbo”. There is an epilogue to this scene, and it is a masterful piece of art and snideness. In addition to placing Peters in a position of having to come clean in the plot exactly as it was meant to, it is a moment when the so-called “fourth wall” comes crashing down for the audience. Linda Keene is sailing back to the United States and Peters knows this because after his outrageous introduction to her he decided to listen outside the apartment door once more and so he heard her exclaim how very glad she was to be sailing the next day on the Queen Anne. Peters rushes back to his manager, makes all the arrangements and voilà Peter P. Peters of Philadelphia P.A. is also sailing on the Queen Anne for the USA the next day. As the boat is ready to leave Paris, however, Peters is caught on deck by a bunch of reporters who want an interview and some photos of “The Great Petrov” before he sails away. Linda, just boarding, overhears him speaking perfectly normal English and stands there waiting for the inevitable comic confrontation. Peters/Petrov catches sight of her and ambles over. He dusts off his accent and proceeds to continue to try to chat with her (apparently he does not realize that she knows this is all rubbish). Peters’ manager, however, shortly joins the two of them and upon hearing Peters’ bizarre accent proceeds to out him by demanding, “What kind of a game is this?” but it is Linda who answers in a mocking voice and an icy, scorn laden gaze: “Oh, it’s just a game little American boys play.” It was 1937 and though 1939, 1940, 1941 and 1945 had yet to debut their films featuring the “game little American boys” and girls were asked to play, still one realizes upon hearing this line that Hollywood knew precisely how foolish this looked to all involved. That tiny epilogue is a rare glimpse of truth into the farcical atlas Hollywood would continue to spend decades crafting out of sounds and music.

56 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

(“Oh it’s just a game little American boys play…” Screen shot taken from the film Shall We Dance 1937)

Conclusion Suspending the scenes side-by-side, as has been done in this chapter, and analyzing their component sound elements which helped to construct a sense of “other” in the films greatly increases the possibilities for understanding precisely how Hollywood and the USSR were concertedly building a film atlas. That atlas was not fully complete until the end of the Cold War, but its construction and, therefore, its self-referencing power was immense before the time the Cold War had even begun because by repeatedly pouring these sound techniques over their respective audiences, the makers of these films, the actors, the sound crews and the composers were complicit in creating a web of images and sounds which were always permeable to more of the same and yet contained a resistant nature (as shown by the bad press the red trilogy received) to attempts to introduce images/sound techniques which did not support the overall message of the atlas. When paired with the ability of songs to be further exported from the musicals as sheet music or for the marches to be performed in other settings, or even for Americans to attempt to bring Jazz as a popular form into the USSR, these films had crossed the barriers of the mind first, and the messages laid down in that crossing were formidable indeed.

57 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

A visual form of knowledge or knowledgeable form of seeing, the atlas disrupts all these frames of intelligibility. It introduces a fundamental impurity— but also an exuberance, a remarkable fecundity—that these models had been conceived to avert. Against all epistemic purity, the atlas introduces the sensible dimension into knowledge, and the diverse, and the lacunary character of each image… The atlas, therefore, straightaway breaks frames apart. It breaks the self-proclaimed certitutdes of science, which is as certain of its truths as art is certain of its criteria. (Didi-Huberman 2012: 15)

Conclusion The aim of this thesis has been to explore the sonic means with which the stage for the Cold War was laid in the films of the Interwar Years. Two nations assembled a series of references and techniques for claiming sounding realities of self and other. Their goals established a repertory that came in great use beside a plethora of images and other forms of sound narrative (e.g. popular songs and art forms). No one cites the atlas with impunity. No one borrows from its borders and interstitial zones without treading first the images and sounds contained therein: these are the disputed and disrupted nations, the imagined worlds whose paths were mapped in the unresting imaginations of the witnesses to the film atlas of the Interwar Years. Thus it was that Lenin’s words about the cinema were borne out to be true: of all the forms of art, the cinema became, for a time, the most important. Though emissaries of all art forms would be sent out into the world during the Cold War, it was in the budding cinematic field during the Interwar Years that two juggernauts prepared their siege engines in the forms of film atlases. The film atlas housed not merely a visual reference to the other, but auditory references as well for both “self” and “other,” thus strengthening the images the sounds were designed to belong to. From music, to characterizations, from acousmêtre to shadowy musical presence these nations created imaginative spaces for their audiences to hear and to understand new auditory realities. It was not merely images that had “lacunary” characters. The gaps between reality and fiction in the sound characterizations of the film atlases were titantic in some cases and the composers leveraged those gaps or even widened them to create further seeming distance between the ideologies at home in these two nations. As has been demonstrated, it was the agglomeration within film upon film that constructed the atlas from which each nation drew its structuring base for the propaganda in the years to come. Though there are fixed dates and beginnings for the Cold war, the Interwar Years proved to be the cinematic sound test for that war as two nations practiced, yes, representations, but also humanizations. If the call of the historian, the humanities scholar is to look into the material past and understand its properties through the contingent realities built within a span of time and the relationships therein, it has become clear to me, then, that all the aims of the films of the Interwar Years were to arm and prepare for battle. With this understanding, it becomes possible to say that the Cold War was a foregone conclusion as early as the 1930s—potentially the only question being whether or not it would indeed be a cold war. As has been shown through the examples and themes of the thesis, both nations concerned themselves with indoctrinating their populations with imaginings about what the nation opposing theirs looked and sounded like. Still, the real treasure

58 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson trove of information to emerge from this thesis was the aural connection between these nations, the hidden and unremarked upon similarities between two countries hell-bent on demonstrating their disparate natures and their clashing ideology. If only the similarities ended at the mechanisms used, but, in very truth, the song structures, the vocalics and the sounding worlds built by these two nations were so alike that if all had taken place in the same language, I should not have known which films belonged to which nation. Filmmakers, sound crews, engineers, inventors, script- writers, actors, actresses, directors and thousands of other hands joined in making these sound films possible and what they wrought was a collaborative series of imagined worlds all designed to be layered into a sound atlas—illustrating both other and self. These thousands of hands were then the givers of this atlas to millions of viewers. In a dance to be repeated on through the decades up through the end of the Cold War and well beyond it into the present day, the sounds of the atlas became the battle cries of one nation against another. The United States of America and the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics spent the better part of the 20th century preoccupied, lost, as it were, in the atlases they had built while at the same time looking for ways to bridge these interstices, to bring an end to the war. Eventually they succeeded, the atlas returned to rest as movies became classics and then disappeared from memory, and now— exhumed from that repose— they have been lain together to reconstruct the foundation stones of that sound atlas, but instead of a partial sounding reality, this thesis attempted to house the atlases of both countries together. It was a gesture originally designed to implicate both countries as accomplices in fomenting the Cold War long before it started. And while this would indeed seem to be the case, what I now see, at the end of all this analysis is that these two countries were seeking, within film, a means to create the worlds they wanted for their nations. The sound atlases were the true home of the many and assembled imagined communities of the Interwar Years.

59 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

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Video or Film References:

Aleksandrov, Grigori. Circus. Directed by Grigori Aleksandrov. 1936, USSR: Mosfilm.

Baum, Vicki and William A. Drake. Grand Hotel. Edmund Goulding (director). 1932, California: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, February 3, 2004. DVD.

Bezmenov, Yuri, interview by G. Edward Griffen, Soviet Subversion of the Free World Press, 1984. Uploaded to YouTube by Tom Andrews on April 24, 2011.

Birinsky, Leo and Benjamin Glazer. Mata Hari. George Fitzmaurice (director, uncredited). 1931, California: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, September 6, 2005. DVD.

Biró, Lajos, Agnes Christine Johnston, Hanns Kräly and Melchior Lengyel. Forbidden Paradise. Ernst Lubitsch (director). 1924, USA: Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. Never released except in film form.

63 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

Brackett, Charles, Billy Wilder, Walter Reisch, and Melchior Lengyel (original story). Ninotchka. Ernst Lubitsch (director) 1939, California: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, September 6, 2005. DVD.

Carell, Steve, interview by Lindsay Miller, “Steve Carell on How He Created his Despicable Me 2 Character’s ‘Terrible Accent’”, 2013. Uploaded to YouTube by POPSUGAR Entertainment on June 26, 2013.

Dane, Clemence. Anna Karenina. Clarence Brown (director). 1935, California: Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer, September 6, 2005. DVD.

Dukes, Ashley, Hanns Kräly, Dmitri Merezhkovsky (original story) and Alfred Neumann (original play). The Patriot. Ernst Lubitsch (director). 1928, USA: Paramount Pictures. Existing status is as a “lost film”.

Furthman, Jules. Jet Pilot. Josef von Sternberg (director). 1957, California: RKO, March 10, 2000. DVD.

Gershe, Leonard (screenplay) and Melchior Lengyel (original story). Silk Stockings. Rouben Mamoulian (director). 1957, California: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, April 22, 2003. DVD.

Hecht, Ben. The Iron Petticoat. Ralph Thomas (director). 1956, London: London Film Productions, Initial release December 12, 1956—subsequent DVD release date unfound. DVD.

Herzig, Sig and Lawrence Riley. On Your Toes. Ray Enright (director). 1939, California: Warner Bros. Never released except in film form.

Lengyel, Melchior, Edwin Justus Mayer, and Ernst Lubitsch (uncredited for original story). To Be or Not to Be. Ernst Lubitsch (director). 1942, USA: United Artists, March 1, 2005. DVD.

Mayer, Edwin Justus, Bruno Frank, Lajos Biró, and Melchior Lengyel. A Royal Scandal. Otto Preminger (director) and Ernst Lubitsch (uncredited director). 1945, USA: Twentieth Century Fox. Never released except in film form.

Protazanov, Yakov. Marionetki. Directed by Yakov Protazanov. 1934, USSR: Mosfilm.

Ptushko, Alexandr. Novyi Gulliver. Directed by Aleksandr Ptushko. 1935, USSR: Mosfilm

Romm, Mikhail. Русский вопрос. Directed by Mikhail Romm. 1947, USSR: Mosfilm.

Scott, Alan and Ernest Pagano. Shall We Dance?. Mark Sandrich (director). 1937, California: RKO, February 1, 2005. DVD.

List of Images from Screen Captures

Image on cover page. “Collage” by Rebecca Erickson from screen grabs taken on June 12, 2015. Individual images available at: https://nkeducationwatch.wordpress.com/; http://www.kino- teatr.ru/kino/acter/w/sov/2330/foto/m6099/143222/; http://lolitasclassics.blogspot.nl/2011_01_01_archive.html; and https://historyglos.wordpress.com/2014/10/16/black-history-month-black-in-the-ussr/.

Figure 1. “Gru” 2015 digital screenshot taken on July 5, 2015 from the film.

Figure 5. “Anti-Kulak Propaganda” 2015, digital screenshot taken on June 2, 2015. Available from: http://www.lasalle.edu/~mcinneshin/251/wk14/images/depressn/againstkulakshowl.jpg.

64 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

Figure 6. “Orlova between wig and hair” 2015 digital screenshot taken on June 2, 2015 from the film.

Figure 7. “Cruella de Vil” 2015 digital screenshot taken on June 2, 2015. Available from: https://disneymovieyear.wordpress.com/tag/cruella-de-vil/.

Figure 8. “Coronation Posture” 2015 digital screenshot taken on April 28, 2015 from the film.

Figure 9. “Crown Jewels of the Austro-Hungarian Empire” downloaded from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Imperial_Crown_Orb_and_Sceptre_of_Austria_(Imperial _Treasury).jpg on April 19, 2015. Uploaded to the Wikimedia commons on December 17, 2012 by Bede735c.

Figure 10. “Gari and Jessi” 2015 digital screenshot taken on April 28, 2015 from the film.

Figure 11. “Dimitri Dark Eyes” 2015 digital screenshot taken on April 28, 2015 from the YouTube video.

Figure 12. “Ochi Sneezeye” 2015 digital screenshot taken on April 28, 2015 from the film.

Figure 13. “A game little American boys play” 2015 digital screenshot taken on April 28, 2015 from the film.

65 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

Appendix

Vocal Graphs

Цирк 1936

The graph shows the pitches and the melodic contour in the lullaby Колыбельная из кинофильма as sung to Jimmy at the end of Цирк. The motion of the melody is largely stepwise, and, in addition, once a leap in the vocal line is made, the motion of the melody is immediately descending. Across many cultures these two features appear in melodies of lullabies, and attesting to its status as a lullaby, this song survived the film, much as Широка страна моя родная did to continue in use in Russia (albeit with altered lyrics so that it does not flip between German, Italian and Russian.) There are also YouTube videos which would indicate that it has a life beyond the lullaby and is also used in the “art song” context. A song’s power dies with its performative legacy, and when a song survives its original context, assumes another form and then yet another form to continue surviving, what is clear is that the song in question has secured a tradition of performance that will ensure its survival through at least the generation in question. In the age of technological reproduction, when there is so much competition for a place among the “hand-me-down” tunes in the repertoire, that this song would survive its era and its invention is a mark of something both well-crafted, but also something that reached a broad public by casting upon a broad and emotionally poignant bandwidth.

66 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

Ninotchka 1939

Ninotchka: Gold waveform, black shading Swana: Blue waveform, white shading Count Dalgu: Blue waveform, black shading

This graph is from the scene between Ninotchka and Countess Swana. Reading the graph from left to right, spoken dialogue can be easily followed because actors in a scene rarely talk over one another in film. What is clearly visible in the graph is that the baseline of Swana’s speech is more than an octave above where Ninotchka’s character is permitted to speak. The other part of the analysis that is most interesting to note is that while Swana is permitted to have a vast range in her speech patterns, Ninotchka’s voice has an extremely confined register by comparison. This “pressing” of the vocalic range into an unnatural flatness is what gives the Russian female portrayal its seeming androgyny. Notice too that nearly all of Ninotchka’s utterances are falling. Where Swana’s dips and dives in vocal register always return to that upper register, Ninotchka’s trail off into a frequential abyss.

Comrade X “Kremlin”

Waiter: Blue waveform, black shading Clark Gable: Gold waveform, black shading American Journalist: Blue waveform white shading Russian Secretary (Olga): Gold waveform, white shading

67 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

Here one can see the inverse gendering of the male voice in Comrade X. As displayed above, the waiter’s voice, when compared with Clark Gable’s, is notably higher, and in addition to the pitch differences, the male voice in these portrayals has as much flexibility of range as a female voice. This portrayal of inverted genders returns again and again, but perhaps most recognizably in the speech that proceeds Danny Kaye’s performance of очи черные (Ochi Chernye).

Comrade X “My name is Theodore”

Comrade X (Thompson): Blue waveform, white shading Theodore: Gold waveform, black shading

In this scene from Comrade X the listener/viewer can compare the vocalic properties of Clark Gable with the portrayal of Russian womanhood given by Hedy Lamarr. It is plain to see that Lamarr’s voice bisects the range Clark Gable speaks in, and even dips, at times into the range where the majority of his pitch classes fall. However, it is in this graph that the compression of the female voice combined with those falling tones at the ends of utterances is most dramatically visible.

A Royal Scandal

Empress Catherine of Russia: Gold waveform, black shading Vizier Nikolai: Blue waveform, white shading

68 Seeing Red—Navigating Sound Film Propaganda in the Interwar Years between the USSR and the USA Rebecca C. Erickson

A Royal Scandal, other than being a teaser in the thesis, did not have a feature role in the analysis, but that is only due to the fact that the room in a Master’s thesis is not unlimited. Otherwise I could have devoted a chapter to discussing the portrayals and discussions such portrayals inspired between my Russian coach and myself. This graph is a phenomenal demonstration of both the inverse genders because the speakers are both representing Russians and it is plain to see that when paired side by side, the film makers did manage to have the man and woman speak in exactly the same vocal range, with similar inflective range, however with the addition that the woman’s voice frequently ends with descending motion while the man’s ends with rising pitch classes. A rising pitch often indicates (in English as well as several other languages spoken in Western Europe) a question, but when this pitch motion is not paired with a question it can indicate either indecisiveness (weakness in a male), confusion, or—worst of all— untruthfulness (Streeter et al 1977).

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