Soviet Fidelity and the Pet Shop Boys

Abstract

‘Only a contrapuntal use of sound in relation to the visual montage piece will afford a new potentiality of montage development and perfection’; so said Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Grigori Alexandrov in ‘A Statement on Sound’ (1928).1 Writing at a time of vast developments in film sound they expressed a fear that ‘sound recording [would] proceed on a naturalistic level, exactly corresponding with the movement on the screen, and providing a certain “illusion” of talking people, of audible objects, etc.’.2 For these Soviet filmmakers and theorists, sound should shy away from synchronization and move towards a juxtaposition of the image and sound track in order to best serve montage. Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov were assured in their belief that montage was still the most effective means of creating an emotionally and symbolically powerful film. As Peter Larsen describes: For Eisenstein […] it was a question of retaining the experimental European montage culture that had functioned throughout the silent film period as an artistic alternative to mainstream films. For this reason they reject the synchronisation of sound and image, calling instead for ‘a contrapuntal use of sound in relation to the visual montage piece’. They imagine that in time this can lead to ‘an orchestral counterpoint of visual and aural images’.3