The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1928–1935
Lecture by Lilya Kaganovsky
Monday, October 26, 2020, 3:30 pm

As cinema industries around the globe adjusted to the introduction of synch-sound technology, the Soviet Union was also shifting culturally, politically, and ideologically from the heterogeneous film industry of the 1920s to the centralized industry of the 1930s, and from the avant-garde to Socialist Realism. Lilya Kaganovsky explores the history, practice, technology, ideology, aesthetics, and politics of the transition to sound within the context of larger issues in Soviet media history. Industrialization and centralization of the cinema industry greatly altered the way movies in the Soviet Union were made, while the introduction of sound radically altered the way these movies were received. Kaganovsky argues that the coming of sound changed the Soviet cinema industry by making audible, for the first time, the voice of State power, directly addressing the Soviet viewer. By exploring numerous examples of films from this transitional period, Kaganovsky demonstrates the importance of the new technology of sound in producing and imposing the "Soviet Voice."

Lilya Kaganovsky is the Richard and Margaret Romano Professor of Slavic, Comparative Literature, and Media & Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her publications include The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1928-1935 (Indiana, 2018) and How the Soviet Man was Unmade (Pittsburgh, 2008); the co-edited volumes Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos (2019); Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema (2014), and Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s (2013); as well as numerous articles on Soviet and post-Soviet cinema. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema and the Associate Editor for Film and Media at The Russian Review.
 

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Members of the audience are encouraged -- but not required -- to watch the film Chapaev (1934) prior to this lecture.