Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema [Hardcover]

This innovative volume challenges the ways we look at both cinema and cultural history by shifting the focus from the centrality of the visual and the literary toward the recognition of acoustic culture as formative of the Soviet and post-Soviet experience. Leading experts and emerging scholars from film studies, musicology, music theory, history, and cultural studies examine the importance of sound in Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet cinema from a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives. Addressing the little-known theoretical and artistic experimentation with sound in Soviet cinema, changing practices of voice delivery and translation, and issues of aesthetic ideology and music theory, this book explores the cultural and historical factors that influenced the use of voice, music, and sound on Soviet and post-Soviet screens.

The essays here on sound and speech may . . . be considered pioneering, while the essays on music are a welcome addition to a small body of scholarship. Taken together, these pieces open a range of possibilities for future research.Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema is an important book. It contains rich case studies, important theoretical insights, and an admirable interdisciplinary and international focus. Most important, it . . . should serve as a foundational text in the field of Russian/Soviet sound studies.

Lilya Kaganovsky is Associate Professor of Slavic, Comparative Literature, and Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is author of How the Soviet Man Was Unmade.

Masha Salazkina is Research Chair in Transnational Media Arts and Culture at Concordia University, Montreal. She is author of In Excess: Sergei Eisensteins Mexico and has published in Cinema Journal, Screen, October, and KinoKultura.

An invaluable account of sound as a core cinematic modality. With contributions by leading scholars from six countries, this volume marks a new 'sonic turn' in both SlÃ4