Andrei Ujică’s 1995 documentary Out of the Present tells the story of Sergei Krikalev, the last S... more Andrei Ujică’s 1995 documentary Out of the Present tells the story of Sergei Krikalev, the last Soviet cosmonaut, who was stranded aboard the Mir space station from May 18, 1991, to March 25, 1992. He was thus one of two former Soviet citizens to watch the collapse of the USSR from space. Through a com- parison of Out of the Present with Theo Anthony’s 2021 documentary All Light, Everywhere, this article examines the conditions, processes, and contradic- tions of recording and observing the present from a cosmic perspective. This analysis is performed through the critical frameworks of the unwatchable, which explore the limits of visibility in visual media. My interpretation of Out of the Present contributes to the discourse on the unwatchable by introducing the problem of the political subject and the way in which the political deter- mining of the eye governs the field of watchability.
This article interrogates the material history and conceptual origins of Sergei Loznitsa's The Tr... more This article interrogates the material history and conceptual origins of Sergei Loznitsa's The Trial (2018), an archival documentary that re-edits restored footage and deleted scenes from Iakov Posel'skii's 1931 propaganda documentary 13 Days, one of the Soviet Union's
Portuguese director Salomé Lamas’s experimental documentary Extinction (2018) is a poetic explora... more Portuguese director Salomé Lamas’s experimental documentary Extinction (2018) is a poetic exploration of post-Soviet and post-Socialist space. The documentary follows Kolja, a Moldovan national living in the de facto state of Transnistria, a breakaway region on the border of Moldova and Ukraine. Shot in stark black and white, the film seeks to investigate the current geopolitical borders of eastern Europe by undermining those between documentary and fiction. It combines modes of the essay film, ethnographic documentary, road movie — even the paranormal spy thriller — to interrogate the subject of borders and the borders around its subject. Critics have thus far failed to note how the film exoticizes the image of eastern Europe. Using Extinction as a case study, I would like to question how experimental ethnographic documentary that blends modes of fact and fiction addresses issues of borders, citizenship, and identity in post-Socialist and post-Soviet space. Extinction, I suggest, misrepresents particular post-Socialist and Soviet spaces like Transnistria and its bordering countries in the interest of making an abstract global commentary on borders. In the film, experimental devices intended to question borders end up voiding post-Socialist spaces of their historical meaning and commodifying them for a film festival market.
This article aims to temper the myth of the sound and scale of Arsenii Avraamov's city-wide mass ... more This article aims to temper the myth of the sound and scale of Arsenii Avraamov's city-wide mass spectacle the “Symphony of Sirens”—a myth that has been largely unquestioned in English-language sound and urban studies scholarship on the symphony. Instead of focusing solely on the symphony's dreaded noise, I pay attention to the symphony's silence—to the limits of what can be known about its sounds. Drawing on Avraamov's untranslated writings and personal correspondences, I investigate how the symphony's ideal of proletarian unity collides with the geographic, social, and sonic reality of the cities it sought to compose. I then investigate the roots of this ideal in Avraamov's personal aesthetic philosophy, as well as his idiosyncratic views on mechanical reproduction. This article will be of interest to those who wish to explore the connections between urbanism, colonialism, sound technology, the mass spectacle, and mass media in the Soviet musical avant-garde.
Scholars tend to conceive of city symphony films in terms of a musical analogy that likens their ... more Scholars tend to conceive of city symphony films in terms of a musical analogy that likens their formal elements to those of a musical work. This article argues instead that those elements are also an inaudible expression of sound. It traces the influence of sonic avant-garde composers such as Luigi Russolo, Arseny Avraamov, Oskar Fischinger, and Rudolf Pfenninger on the dynamics of Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Big City and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. This influence manifests itself in two distinct techniques of inaudible sound: 1) the generation of ‘visual noise’ through fast editing speeds and motion blur; 2) the treatment of motion as sound. These techniques invoke sonic practices that stem from the rise of noise as a social, aesthetic, and technological problem in the early 20th century, as well as the development of graphic technologies — such as the phonograph — for understanding and reproducing sound. In sounding the inaudible, Vertov and Ruttmann’s films construct a fluid exchange of senses that addresses the shifting aesthetic and political implications of sound as a multi-sensory phenomenon in modernity.
Cinema scholars categorize city symphony films of the 1920s and early 1930s as a subgenre of the ... more Cinema scholars categorize city symphony films of the 1920s and early 1930s as a subgenre of the silent film. Defined in visual terms, the city symphony organizes the visible elements of urban experience according to musical principles such as rhythm and counterpoint.
In City Symphonies Daniel Schwartz explores the unheard sonic dimensions of these ostensibly silent films. The book turns its ear to the city symphony as an audible phenomenon, one that encompasses a multitude of works beyond the cinema, such as musical compositions, mass spectacles, radio experiments, and even paintings. What these works have in common is their treatment of the city as a medium for sound. The city is neither background nor content; rather, it is the material through which avant-garde works express themselves. In resonating through the city, these multimedia pieces perform experiments that undermine the borders between sight and sound.
Applying an interdisciplinary approach, City Symphonies expands our understanding of the genre, breaking out of the confines of the cinema and onto the street.
Andrei Ujică’s 1995 documentary Out of the Present tells the story of Sergei Krikalev, the last S... more Andrei Ujică’s 1995 documentary Out of the Present tells the story of Sergei Krikalev, the last Soviet cosmonaut, who was stranded aboard the Mir space station from May 18, 1991, to March 25, 1992. He was thus one of two former Soviet citizens to watch the collapse of the USSR from space. Through a com- parison of Out of the Present with Theo Anthony’s 2021 documentary All Light, Everywhere, this article examines the conditions, processes, and contradic- tions of recording and observing the present from a cosmic perspective. This analysis is performed through the critical frameworks of the unwatchable, which explore the limits of visibility in visual media. My interpretation of Out of the Present contributes to the discourse on the unwatchable by introducing the problem of the political subject and the way in which the political deter- mining of the eye governs the field of watchability.
This article interrogates the material history and conceptual origins of Sergei Loznitsa's The Tr... more This article interrogates the material history and conceptual origins of Sergei Loznitsa's The Trial (2018), an archival documentary that re-edits restored footage and deleted scenes from Iakov Posel'skii's 1931 propaganda documentary 13 Days, one of the Soviet Union's
Portuguese director Salomé Lamas’s experimental documentary Extinction (2018) is a poetic explora... more Portuguese director Salomé Lamas’s experimental documentary Extinction (2018) is a poetic exploration of post-Soviet and post-Socialist space. The documentary follows Kolja, a Moldovan national living in the de facto state of Transnistria, a breakaway region on the border of Moldova and Ukraine. Shot in stark black and white, the film seeks to investigate the current geopolitical borders of eastern Europe by undermining those between documentary and fiction. It combines modes of the essay film, ethnographic documentary, road movie — even the paranormal spy thriller — to interrogate the subject of borders and the borders around its subject. Critics have thus far failed to note how the film exoticizes the image of eastern Europe. Using Extinction as a case study, I would like to question how experimental ethnographic documentary that blends modes of fact and fiction addresses issues of borders, citizenship, and identity in post-Socialist and post-Soviet space. Extinction, I suggest, misrepresents particular post-Socialist and Soviet spaces like Transnistria and its bordering countries in the interest of making an abstract global commentary on borders. In the film, experimental devices intended to question borders end up voiding post-Socialist spaces of their historical meaning and commodifying them for a film festival market.
This article aims to temper the myth of the sound and scale of Arsenii Avraamov's city-wide mass ... more This article aims to temper the myth of the sound and scale of Arsenii Avraamov's city-wide mass spectacle the “Symphony of Sirens”—a myth that has been largely unquestioned in English-language sound and urban studies scholarship on the symphony. Instead of focusing solely on the symphony's dreaded noise, I pay attention to the symphony's silence—to the limits of what can be known about its sounds. Drawing on Avraamov's untranslated writings and personal correspondences, I investigate how the symphony's ideal of proletarian unity collides with the geographic, social, and sonic reality of the cities it sought to compose. I then investigate the roots of this ideal in Avraamov's personal aesthetic philosophy, as well as his idiosyncratic views on mechanical reproduction. This article will be of interest to those who wish to explore the connections between urbanism, colonialism, sound technology, the mass spectacle, and mass media in the Soviet musical avant-garde.
Scholars tend to conceive of city symphony films in terms of a musical analogy that likens their ... more Scholars tend to conceive of city symphony films in terms of a musical analogy that likens their formal elements to those of a musical work. This article argues instead that those elements are also an inaudible expression of sound. It traces the influence of sonic avant-garde composers such as Luigi Russolo, Arseny Avraamov, Oskar Fischinger, and Rudolf Pfenninger on the dynamics of Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Big City and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. This influence manifests itself in two distinct techniques of inaudible sound: 1) the generation of ‘visual noise’ through fast editing speeds and motion blur; 2) the treatment of motion as sound. These techniques invoke sonic practices that stem from the rise of noise as a social, aesthetic, and technological problem in the early 20th century, as well as the development of graphic technologies — such as the phonograph — for understanding and reproducing sound. In sounding the inaudible, Vertov and Ruttmann’s films construct a fluid exchange of senses that addresses the shifting aesthetic and political implications of sound as a multi-sensory phenomenon in modernity.
Cinema scholars categorize city symphony films of the 1920s and early 1930s as a subgenre of the ... more Cinema scholars categorize city symphony films of the 1920s and early 1930s as a subgenre of the silent film. Defined in visual terms, the city symphony organizes the visible elements of urban experience according to musical principles such as rhythm and counterpoint.
In City Symphonies Daniel Schwartz explores the unheard sonic dimensions of these ostensibly silent films. The book turns its ear to the city symphony as an audible phenomenon, one that encompasses a multitude of works beyond the cinema, such as musical compositions, mass spectacles, radio experiments, and even paintings. What these works have in common is their treatment of the city as a medium for sound. The city is neither background nor content; rather, it is the material through which avant-garde works express themselves. In resonating through the city, these multimedia pieces perform experiments that undermine the borders between sight and sound.
Applying an interdisciplinary approach, City Symphonies expands our understanding of the genre, breaking out of the confines of the cinema and onto the street.
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In City Symphonies Daniel Schwartz explores the unheard sonic dimensions of these ostensibly silent films. The book turns its ear to the city symphony as an audible phenomenon, one that encompasses a multitude of works beyond the cinema, such as musical compositions, mass spectacles, radio experiments, and even paintings. What these works have in common is their treatment of the city as a medium for sound. The city is neither background nor content; rather, it is the material through which avant-garde works express themselves. In resonating through the city, these multimedia pieces perform experiments that undermine the borders between sight and sound.
Applying an interdisciplinary approach, City Symphonies expands our understanding of the genre, breaking out of the confines of the cinema and onto the street.
In City Symphonies Daniel Schwartz explores the unheard sonic dimensions of these ostensibly silent films. The book turns its ear to the city symphony as an audible phenomenon, one that encompasses a multitude of works beyond the cinema, such as musical compositions, mass spectacles, radio experiments, and even paintings. What these works have in common is their treatment of the city as a medium for sound. The city is neither background nor content; rather, it is the material through which avant-garde works express themselves. In resonating through the city, these multimedia pieces perform experiments that undermine the borders between sight and sound.
Applying an interdisciplinary approach, City Symphonies expands our understanding of the genre, breaking out of the confines of the cinema and onto the street.