Eisenstein and Cartoon Sound Douglas Kahn

AboutBackground Texts Links Eisenstein and Cartoon Sound Douglas Kahn Developing out of Soviet cinema's hothouse theoretical debates, Sergei Eisenstein's ideas on sound and cinema are a remarkable encounter of the visual cut with the suture and mix of sound, the speed at which the visual world could be comprehended with a l aggard aurality not yet accelerated by the auditive mass media, the international visualist language of montage with the nationalising effects of the sound of language, the desire for an ongoing development of cinema as an independent art with the inertia of "photographed presentations of a theatrical order",1 and a materialist experiment intent upon anti-illusionism with the increasing stultification of the Stalinist cultural order. This much is either well-known or self-evident. But what of Mickey, Bamb i and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit? These and other cartoon characters were ushered into the Russian avant-garde through its early fascination with 'American eccentrism', an appetite expressed across the entire European avant-garde for ragtime and jazz, cowboys and Indians, cops-and-robbers and Chicago gangsters, Salvation Army, for slapstick pratfalls and sight gags, Charlie Chaplin, for all that was fast, funny, irreverent and overflowing with artifice. Eccentrism was discursively linked to sound film through the Russian avant-garde theat re's reaction to the simple prospects of sound cinema. In 1913 Vladimir Mayakovsky said that theatre, in the face of cinema, should give up its naturalistic copying of nature in the same way that painting had given up copying with the advent of photograph y. Otherwise, theatre would be "...merely the three-dimensional photography of real life".2 The kinetophone made this especially true because "The only distinction between [theatre] and cinema-silence has been removed by Edison with his latest invention". 3 Naturalistic theatre reproduced through sound cinema was a copy of a copy of nature, twice the reason to develop a new theatre, an 'antiillusionist' theatre, and this is what eccentrism provided, the performances of music hall, clowning and the circus, and the spectacle of eccentrism in general. It was this theatre where Eisenstein cut his artistic teeth and first sent forth his theories of cinema. In 1922 Eisenstein co-wrote an essay with FEKS (Factory of the Eccentric Actor) cohort Sergei Yutkevich that pitted 'eccentrism' against cinematic ill usionism and more specifically against synchronised sound cinema circa 1905 (The Jazz Singer was late 1927). The essay quoted the French critic Claude Blanchard who remarked, "People who visited the darkened halls in 1905-6 will of course remember the pri mitive imitation sounds that invariably accompanied the showing of a film (the crashing of waves, the roar of an engine, the sound of breaking crockery, etc. etc.)."4 Blanchard himself thought little of such synchronisation because the technical imperfect ions were too evident: "The illusion did not work!"5 Eisenstein and Yutkevich questioned the desire for illusion in the first place. In addition, they were puzzled why America, the wellspring of "eccentrism" had itself not overcome "the temptations of ill usion"6 in its own films. America had not only given in to temptation but it now housed the supreme trompe l'oeil artists, constructing the slums of Rio, Hindu temples or the back-alleys of San Francisco out of papier mache, in Hollywood Thus. As with all silent films. and gags were not geared to particular sound effects or songs. The late 1920s gave birth to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit ( September 1927). Mary Ann Doane has stated that these exaggerations were produced as a compensatory voice: "The absent voice re-emerges in gestures and the contortions of the face . sounds and music were spread out over the bodies of both characters and objects. it had just been on the outside looking in. There is similarity here with what Disney did in the early cartoons. in fact. Take. as refined in abstraction as the old silent art.7 This play of music would diminish the role of speech enough to avoid the reduction of cinema to a 'filmed play' and to mitigate against the language-based national markets that so threatened the international posi tion and internationalist disposition enjoyed by Soviet cinema. Disney. because the animation was not done to a specific beat.8 In early sound cartoons. Later in the decade. ran into trouble when he tried to add sound after the fact to two unreleased silent cartoons: "The finished products reveal their origins. for instance. In general. voices. Making his sound strip first and working his animated figures in distortion and counterpoint to the . voices were re/introduced along with sounds. The nature of his material forced upon him something like the right solution. Any implied or compensatory sound..all of them offspring of the bioscope who had the allegiances of both children and intellectuals.a sharp discord" and ultimately lead to ". and many more. if great figures like Chaplin are to come again. American cartoon characters were accommodated in the space opened up by Chaplin . not the metaphoricity. The 'Statement' posed this relationship through the metaphor of music: "Only the contrapuntal use of sound vis-a-vis th e visual fragment of montage will open up new possibilities for the development and perfection of montage". Pudovkin and Alexandrov.it is spread over the body of the actor". instead of the dramatic disjuncture that appeared to be occurring. made themselves heard with a vengeance..the creation of a new orchestral counterpo int" between sound and visual image. The 'Statement' rehashed earlier Soviet arguments about cinema as an art form separate from theatre and went on to propose that sound montage be developed along the lines of visual montage and that the two be asynchronous to one another.studios.9 In 1935. is the cartoonist Disney. everything that could make a sound or speak through any means did so. by far. the 'Statement' sought a continuous line of development out of the silent cinema. successfully extending th e elements of silent cinema into sound under the actuality. written collectively by Eisenstein. there is no fusion b etween sound and picture". whether it be a squeaking elbow joint. the British filmmaker John Grierson singled out the precedence of sound as the basis for Disney's success: Out of the possibilities of sound synchronisation a world of sound must be created. although both had been implied through a variety of techniques. The developmental process will be marked initially by ". the exaggerated gestures and actions of silent film acting: they disappeared with the advent of the talkies but lived on in the cartoons. It is no accident that of all the comedy workers of the new r egime the most attractive. music had always been there. In cartoons.. of music. Mickey Mouse (May 1928) and the 'Statement on Sound' (August 1928).. the music that structured the visual dominion of gestures an d actions provided the sonic device to introduce voices and sounds to any and every latency that could be heard. fly foot steps or flesh ripped off to play a rib-cage xylophone. there could be little other response. What a Knight. wa s very adventurous despite the fact that the story . In Oh. to a circular saw.might seem like an unlikely vehicle for major experimentation. i. the autonomy of the sound montage was established. easily observed in the cartoon cannon and rifle barrels relaxing after each firing. the script demonstrates a systematic attempt to achieve an auditive montage very much along the lines proposed in the 'Statement'. to meld continuously from one 'object' or entity to another.12 his first use coming years later with the banned Bezhin Meadow (1935-37) and then finally in Alexander Nevsky (1937-38).10 [my emphasis] That Grierson echoed the contrapuntal principle of the 'Statement on Sound'.11 Eisenstein's first move toward applied sound cinema ran counter to giving sound precedence. finding precedent in Lewis Carroll. Eisenstein's essay on Disney has this very elasticity as the main conc ern. to the ".was a rubbery kind of movement that tied into fresh and amusing gags". was no accident for he was quite familiar with Russian film and only a year earlier he had written favorably on Pudovkin's use of sound..the sobbing si gnaling the poverty and suffering such irrationality imposes. Eisenstein was still relying on the cumbersome Wagnerian leitmotiv.just as well.13 but by that time his approach and the times had become conservative. Instead.beat of the sound. Marfa... Eisenstein's lack of experience apparent ly sanctioned a wish-list freed from practicality . such as television channel switching. . a cliched music or an internal construction of code. The very fact that he chose to retroactively add sound ass ured. the German caricaturist Walter Trier. and later. financing for the project promised by a London firm was withdrawn.. in an early scene in Old and New where two brothers cut their hut down the middle and inefficiently partition their fields simply because they are separating (set as an example of irrational peasant behavior). In fact.e. Unfortunately. renamed Old and New. he pulls an endless length of arm from her sleeve in order to have mo re to kiss! In Trolley Troubles even Oswald's electric car is flexible.deformation of the saw sound (Zeitlup [slow-motion]) into sobbing. it was a plan to add sound after-the-fact to The General Line (1929)."14 . is a feature intrinsic to sound and it has had little parallel with in the cinema or videography until the recent computer-based capacity for 'morphing'. Likewise. One way Eisenstein proposed to use sound was similar to how conventional cinema uses music: to bridge the cut/s. many ideas would have been technically difficult or impossible to realise at the time . Historically. "widening and flattening to accommodate the unpredictable changes in the tracks beneath it". Yet it was the same nonobject-like stretching that gave Disney an early success with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit just prior to Steamboat Willie.. when kissing a fair maiden's hand. itself well within Eisenstein's own field of fixations.the efforts of a peasant woman. Oswald wrings himself out to dry. there had not yet been the cumulative decades of auditive mass media needed to produce a properly accelerated comprehension of code. Bokusen and Hokusai. on the other hand. he has begun to discover those ingenious combinations which will carry on the true tradition of film comedy. if the quickness of the visual cutting had been paralleled with like speed in sound cutting the result would have fallen on laggard ears. to collectivise and technologise farming in her community . etchings by Toyohiro.or perhaps he was intent with his very first sound project to establish a cinematic practice commensu rate in sophistication with visual montage. This ability to stretch across the cut (of the hut and montage). The sound script for Old and New. the sound in the script moves from a crosscut saw. For whatever reasons. For example. Oswald's selling poin t ". as evidenced by his cock drawings. again. a morphing between flaccid and erect and ba ck again. a diminution of language.15 There was also a phallic fascination. 'animated cartoon sound'.... The three degrees of sound are (1) slow motion."lyricism" . (2) animated cartoon (an exaggeration of number three above).19 a fire ". for instance. then ins eminates his 'bride' in one of cinema history's rare cross-species point-of-view camera shots."23 The difficulty he faced was inherited by his plans to add sound after-the-fact to Old and New. I n fact: " 'Music' .in its treatment of fluffy beings . and through fire back to music: ".21 Bambi.crescendo of Fomka's leitmotiv.to the musicality of landscape and at the same time. With each jump in Fomka's growth the sound gets stronger. Parody on Fomka's motif with Hawaiian guitar Growth of Fomka . and (3) special types of distortion of a purely acoustic sort (to be found).complete pause. he says that the plas matic "all-possible diversity of form" finds its ground as a counter to a ". for its image too is not stable". As preface to the script.18 He then goes on at length to generalise such transformations to fire. (2) natural surroundings and (3) animated cartoon.social order with such a mercilessly standardised and mechanically measured existence". To explain the "pre-logical attractiveness" of Disney cartoons in the United States....herein also lies the secret of the fascination of music. served as an example of coordi nating sound and image in rhythmic. uses the quick. For example..22 At one point in the sound script for Old and New a fanfare is blurted out only to become shrill laughter. But not completely. Eisenstein must have thought his farm animals arthritic in compa rison to the transformative talents of cartoons animals and animal sounds. with a new film he could have geared the shooting to the exigencies of sound. Wedding .. faced with the problem of associating certain sounds to rapid visual cutting from shot to shot.. Fomka. contrapuntal and timbral ways. There they fuse The "Attack" . lacked the lyricism of Chinese landscape and painting ". Eisenstein lists among several categories kinds and degrees of sound.. then saw sound is distorted into laughter which melds into 'animal laughter'.assu ming all possible guises"20 in a aural-like flux where borders dissolve and things are born and die in a moment. While Eisenstein revelled in the action in Disney's foreground. Without transition. to the musicality of color and tone".monkeys or fledglings". corresponding to the ecstatic gradations of the shots.this plasmation par excellence". This same figure is repeated in Fomka's running.the element of Disney". A shot in a cartoon is much lo nger in duration than a flurry of Eisensteinian shots.etc. later called 'Mickey Mousing' in filmmaking jargon. often disjunctive sound/visual image relationships of the early sound cartoons as a means to accelerate sounds into at least some proxi mity of association_"Must find ecstatic gradations of timbres. The three kinds of sound are (1) musical. Choppy.terrifying increase Cow spreads her legs .17 He briefly ent ertains the idea that its secrets are held in a prenatal. Then sound of gunfire and an apogee of mooing. he thought that "Disney is amazingly blind when it comes to landscape . grows to full size in a series of shots constructed much like the awakening stone lion sequence in Battleship Potemkin. Nevertheless. when the collective's baby bull..24 And perhaps when animated cartoon sound existed in both kind and degree it would result in how the film's harvest time becomes a bountiful occasion for a .. even cellular memory.16 He calls it "plasmaticness" and considers Mickey in possession of ". But the cartoon connection is actually more immediate..Negro chorus. Eise nstein. a standard from which to gauge the morphing of growth and shrinkage.. Cambridge. p. a fi lm attributed to Grigori Alexandrov with arguable collaboration from Eisenstein (the first sound film by Russian/s if not in Russia). 2. 30. one that is read as well as heard. Leonard Maltin.e. if modern sculpture stems from the Negro plastic. p. scattered throughout Romance Sentimentale (1930). Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Yutkevich... p. Eisenstein has proven to be more artistically provocative than his fellow Soviet filmmakers of the period. Yet in his dogma.it is nece ssary to reduce to the same denominator the conceptions visual and phonetic". 'The Relationship Between Contemporary Theatre and Cinema and Art' 3. Volume 1. Cited in Maltin.. 'The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space'. Sergei Eisenstein. and this extended to sound cinema: "If European painting owes the origins of impressionism to the Japanese. 10. and in his awkward attempt at conceptualising sound after-the-fact for a decidedly silent film. of course. Eisenstein: Selected Works. John Grierson.. Vsevolod Pudovkin and Grigori Alexandrov.graphic sound_the key to the sonorous film". op. 'Pudovkin on Sound'. ibid. (note 1). 2. 35. p. 1988. 1. p.. but how his penchant for graphics corresponded to an inscript ive notion of sound and sound cinema. in Film Sound: Theory and Practice. Eisenstein's own drawing talents must be taken into account. 6. 37. 34-35 4. 1987. 106-8. New American Library. music and sound arts.25 Finally. If he had achieved even his initial plans for sound experimentation it might have changed the terrain of subsequent cinema. in Cinema Quarterly."26 As Harry Potamkin wrote. and the implications for a universal alphabe tics (making a return to their initial encounter with Far East languages as the biblical lost language). Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. Edited and translated by Richard Taylor. . 35.. sound drawn directly on the optical track. not just in how they might dispose him as an inside admirer of the technical proficiency of the Disney company cartoonists. Ann Doane.cit. in an essay that moved topically from Eisenstein and Japan into cartoons: ".. make their true debut in the infantilised bodies of cartoon animals. The various trajectories of Eisenstein's unrealised ideas have only rarely been attempted since. New York. 162. Harvard University Press. See also "The Destruction of 'Theatre' by Cinema as a Sign of the Resurrection of Theatrical Art" p. London. 5. M.whole gamma of sound effects". ". 1988. Eisenstein's interest in things Japanese is well known. ibid. No. where bent elbows squeak because they form the proper phonographic letter for a s queaking sound. p. 'The Eighth Art.29 From this perspective.. pp. p.28 One manifestation of this reduction was the phonographic script. 9.. p.. p.. Massachusett s. ibid. 'Statement on Sound'. 234-35. the phonetic cinema will be no less indebted to the Japanese. 7. Eisenstein's early principle of asynchronicity was criticised as dogmatic by Dziga Vertov. America and. ibid.. On Expressionism. 'Statement on Sound'. BFI Publishing.". edited by Elisabeth Weis and John Belton. Columbia University Press. 29. Chaplin' in S. New York. Writings.. The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents. 11. Vol. who said that all possible relationships of sound and visual image should be used in the pursuit of 'pravda'. 1985. 8. 234-35. 1896-1939.27 He then quotes Eisenstein. 37. Vladimir Mayakovsky. 1922-34. 2 (Winter 1933-34). the orthography of phonographic inscription. pp. i. edited by Richard Taylor and Ian Christie. . ibid. 15. 1977. He arrives finally at Heraclitus. ibid. 40. p.cit. Columbia University. 22. p. (note 12). 'Playing with Sound'. 24. 21. 39. edited by Lewis Jacobs. 'The Compound Cinema: Further Notes' (Close Up. 86-88.. in The Compound Cinema: The Film Writings of Harry Alan Potamkin. p.cit. 38. ibid. Hegel on Heraclitus. Sergei Eisenstein. 20.. 12ff.. p. 25. pp. p. 18. April 1929). Methuen. 9. Sergei Eisenstein. p. Leyda. Cambridge.cit.. 26. Nonindifferent Nature. 24-33 and 44-47. pp. p. p. 19. 17. Maltin. The full status of Romance Sentimentale in this respect is outside the scope of this article. 391. translated by Herbert Marshall. ibid.. Eisenstein on Disney. op. Eisenstein at Work. 1987. op. 23. 14. < p> 27. (note 12). 1988. 9. p. translated by Alan Upchurch. p.. pp. New York. ibid. ibid. 69. 29. 21. 40. ibid. 39. p. 41. © 2004 SoundCulture and Contributors .. 1982. 16. New York. 389. ibid. Eisenstein at Work. and Lenin on Hegel on Heraclitus. Cambridge University Press. Pantheon Books with the Museum of Modern Art. Jay Leyda and Zina Voynow. (note 9). Cited in Harry Potamkin. cf. ibid. ibid. p. London. Teachers College Press. 13. 32-33.. p. edited by Jay Leyda. 9. p..12. Harry Potamkin. op. 28.