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.