Eisenstein and Cartoon Sound Douglas Kahn

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Eisenstein and Cartoon Sound

Douglas Kahn

Developing out of Soviet cinema's hothouse theoretical debates, SergeiEisenstein's ideas on sound and cinema are a remarkable encounter of thevisual cut with the suture and mix of sound, the speed at which the visual worldcould be comprehended with a l aggard aurality not yet accelerated by theauditive mass media, the international visualist language of montage with thenationalising effects of the sound of language, the desire for an ongoingdevelopment of cinema as an independent art with the inertia of "photographedpresentations of a theatrical order",1 and a materialist experiment intent uponanti-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-gardethrough its early fascination with 'American eccentrism', an appetite expressedacross the entire European avant-garde for ragtime and jazz, cowboys andIndians, cops-and-robbers and Chicago gangsters, Salvation Army, for slapstickpratfalls and sight gags, Charlie Chaplin, for all that was fast, funny, irreverentand overflowing with artifice. Eccentrism was discursively linked to sound filmthrough 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 thatpainting had given up copying with the advent of photograph y. Otherwise,theatre would be "...merely the three-dimensional photography of real life".2The kinetophone made this especially true because "The only distinctionbetween [theatre] and cinema-silence has been removed by Edison with hislatest invention". 3 Naturalistic theatre reproduced through sound cinema was acopy of a copy of nature, twice the reason to develop a new theatre, an 'anti-illusionist' 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 histheories of cinema. In 1922 Eisenstein co-wrote an essay with FEKS (Factory of the Eccentric Actor) cohort Sergei Yutkevich that pitted 'eccentrism' againstcinematic ill usionism and more specifically against synchronised sound cinemacirca 1905 (The Jazz Singer was late 1927). The essay quoted the French criticClaude Blanchard who remarked, "People who visited the darkened halls in1905-6 will of course remember the pri mitive imitation sounds that invariablyaccompanied the showing of a film (the crashing of waves, the roar of anengine, the sound of breaking crockery, etc. etc.)."4 Blanchard himself thoughtlittle of such synchronisation because the technical imperfect ions were tooevident: "The illusion did not work!"5 Eisenstein and Yutkevich questioned thedesire for illusion in the first place. In addition, they were puzzled why America,the wellspring of "eccentrism" had itself not overcome "the temptations of illusion"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, Hindutemples or the back-alleys of San Francisco out of papier mache, in Hollywood

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,combinations which will carry on the true tradition of film comedy.10[my emphasis]

That Grierson echoed the contrapuntal principle of the 'Statement on Sound',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.11 Eisenstein's firstmove toward applied sound cinema ran counter to giving sound precedence; itwas a plan to add sound after-the-fact to The General Line (1929), renamedOld and New . Unfortunately, financing for the project promised by a London firm

was withdrawn,12 his first use coming years later with the banned BezhinMeadow (1935-37) and then finally in Alexander Nevsky (1937-38),13 but bythat time his approach and the times had become conservative. The soundscript for Old and New , on the other hand, wa s very adventurous despite thefact that the story - the efforts of a peasant woman, Marfa, to collectivise andtechnologise farming in her community - might seem like an unlikely vehicle for major experimentation. Eisenstein's lack of experience apparent ly sanctioned awish-list freed from practicality - just as well, many ideas would have beentechnically difficult or impossible to realise at the time - or perhaps he was intentwith his very first sound project to establish a cinematic practice commensu ratein sophistication with visual montage. For whatever reasons, the scriptdemonstrates a systematic attempt to achieve an auditive montage very muchalong the lines proposed in the 'Statement'. The very fact that he chose toretroactively add sound ass ured, again, a diminution of language. Likewise, theautonomy of the sound montage was established. In fact, there could be littleother response; if the quickness of the visual cutting had been paralleled withlike speed in sound cutting the result would have fallen on laggard ears.Historically, there had not yet been the cumulative decades of auditive massmedia needed to produce a properly accelerated comprehension of code, suchas television channel switching. Instead, Eisenstein was still relying on thecumbersome Wagnerian leitmotiv, i.e., a cliched music or an internalconstruction of code.

One way Eisenstein proposed to use sound was similar to how conventionalcinema uses music: to bridge the cut/s. For example, in an early scene in Old and New where two brothers cut their hut down the middle and inefficientlypartition their fields simply because they are separating (set as an example of irrational peasant behavior), the sound in the script moves from a crosscut saw,to a circular saw, to the "...deformation of the saw sound (Zeitlup [slow-motion])into sobbing,"14 - the sobbing si gnaling the poverty and suffering suchirrationality imposes. This ability to stretch across the cut (of the hut and

montage), to meld continuously from one 'object' or entity to another, is afeature intrinsic to sound and it has had little parallel with in the cinema or videography until the recent computer-based capacity for 'morphing'. Yet it wasthe same nonobject-like stretching that gave Disney an early success withOswald the Lucky Rabbit just prior to Steamboat Willie. Oswald's selling poin t"...was a rubbery kind of movement that tied into fresh and amusing gags". InOh, What a Knight , Oswald wrings himself out to dry, and later, when kissing afair maiden's hand, he pulls an endless length of arm from her sleeve in order tohave mo re to kiss! In Trolley Troubles even Oswald's electric car is flexible,

"widening and flattening to accommodate the unpredictable changes in thetracks beneath it".15 There was also a phallic fascination, a morphing betweenflaccid and erect and ba ck again, easily observed in the cartoon cannon andrifle barrels relaxing after each firing; itself well within Eisenstein's own field of fixations, as evidenced by his cock drawings. Eisenstein's essay on Disney hasthis very elasticity as the main conc ern, finding precedent in Lewis Carroll, theGerman caricaturist Walter Trier, etchings by Toyohiro, Bokusen and Hokusai,



etc.16 He calls it "plasmaticness" and considers Mickey in possession of "...thisplasmation par excellence".17 He briefly ent ertains the idea that its secrets areheld in a prenatal, even cellular memory, a standard from which to gauge themorphing of growth and shrinkage. To explain the "pre-logical attractiveness" of Disney cartoons in the United States, he says that the plas matic "all-possiblediversity of form" finds its ground as a counter to a "...social order with such amercilessly standardised and mechanically measured existence".18 He thengoes on at length to generalise such transformations to fire,19 a fire "...assuming all possible guises"20 in a aural-like flux where borders dissolve andthings are born and die in a moment, and through fire back to music: "...hereinalso lies the secret of the fascination of music, for its image too is not stable". In fact: " 'Music' - the element of Disney". But not completely. While Eisensteinrevelled in the action in Disney's foreground, he thought that "Disney isamazingly blind when it comes to landscape - to the musicality of landscapeand at the same time, to the musicality of color and tone".21 Bambi, for instance, lacked the lyricism of Chinese landscape and painting "...in itstreatment of fluffy beings - monkeys or fledglings".22

At one point in the sound script for Old and New a fanfare is blurted out only tobecome shrill laughter, then saw sound is distorted into laughter which melds

into 'animal laughter'. Eisenstein must have thought his farm animals arthritic incompa rison to the transformative talents of cartoons animals and animalsounds. But the cartoon connection is actually more immediate. As preface tothe script, Eisenstein lists among several categories kinds and degrees of sound. The three kinds of sound are (1) musical, (2) natural surroundings and(3) animated cartoon. The three degrees of sound are (1) slow motion, (2)animated cartoon (an exaggeration of number three above), and (3) specialtypes of distortion of a purely acoustic sort (to be found). Eise nstein, faced withthe problem of associating certain sounds to rapid visual cutting from shot toshot, uses the quick, often disjunctive sound/visual image relationships of the

early sound cartoons as a means to accelerate sounds into at least some proximity of association_"Must find ecstatic gradations of timbres, corresponding tothe ecstatic gradations of the shots..."23 The difficulty he faced was inherited byhis plans to add sound after-the-fact to Old and New . A shot in a cartoon ismuch lo nger in duration than a flurry of Eisensteinian shots; with a new film hecould have geared the shooting to the exigencies of sound. Nevertheless,'animated cartoon sound', later called 'Mickey Mousing' in filmmaking jargon,served as an example of coordi nating sound and image in rhythmic,contrapuntal and timbral ways. For example, when the collective's baby bull,Fomka, grows to full size in a series of shots constructed much like the

awakening stone lion sequence in Battleship Potemkin, then ins eminates his'bride' in one of cinema history's rare cross-species point-of-view camerashots...

Wedding - "lyricism" - Negro chorus. Parody onFomka's motif with Hawaiian guitar Growth of Fomka - crescendo of Fomka's leitmotiv.

Choppy. With each jump in Fomka's growth the soundgets stronger. Without transition. This same figure isrepeated in Fomka's running. There they fuse

The "Attack" - terrifying increaseCow spreads her legs - complete pause. Then sound of gunfire and an apogee of mooing.24

And perhaps when animated cartoon sound existed in both kind and degree itwould result in how the film's harvest time becomes a bountiful occasion for a" "



... .

Finally, Eisenstein's own drawing talents must be taken into account, not just inhow they might dispose him as an inside admirer of the technical proficiency of the Disney company cartoonists, but how his penchant for graphicscorresponded to an inscript ive notion of sound and sound cinema. Eisenstein'sinterest in things Japanese is well known, and this extended to sound cinema:"If European painting owes the origins of impressionism to the Japanese, if modern sculpture stems from the Negro plastic, the phonetic cinema will be noless indebted to the Japanese..."26 As Harry Potamkin wrote, in an essay that

moved topically from Eisenstein and Japan into cartoons: "...graphic sound_thekey to the sonorous film".27 He then quotes Eisenstein, "...it is nece ssary toreduce to the same denominator the conceptions visual and phonetic".28 Onemanifestation of this reduction was the phonographic script, i.e., sound drawndirectly on the optical track, scattered throughout Romance Sentimentale(1930), a fi lm attributed to Grigori Alexandrov with arguable collaboration fromEisenstein (the first sound film by Russian/s if not in Russia).29 From thisperspective, the orthography of phonographic inscription, and the implicationsfor a universal alphabe tics (making a return to their initial encounter with Far East languages as the biblical lost language), make their true debut in the

infantilised bodies of cartoon animals, where bent elbows squeak because theyform the proper phonographic letter for a s queaking sound, one that is read aswell as heard. Eisenstein's early principle of asynchronicity was criticised asdogmatic by Dziga Vertov, who said that all possible relationships of sound andvisual image should be used in the pursuit of 'pravda'. Yet in his dogma, and inhis awkward attempt at conceptualising sound after-the-fact for a decidedlysilent film, Eisenstein has proven to be more artistically provocative than hisfellow Soviet filmmakers of the period. The various trajectories of Eisenstein'sunrealised ideas have only rarely been attempted since. If he had achievedeven his initial plans for sound experimentation it might have changed the

terrain of subsequent cinema, music and sound arts.

1. Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Grigori Alexandrov, 'Statementon Sound', The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents,1896-1939, edited by Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, Harvard UniversityPress, Cambridge, Massachusett s, 1988, pp. 234-35.

2. ibid., p. 37. Vladimir Mayakovsky, 'The Relationship BetweenContemporary Theatre and Cinema and Art'

3. ibid., p. 37. See also "The Destruction of 'Theatre' by Cinema as a Sign of the Resurrection of Theatrical Art" p. 34-35

4. Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Yutkevich, 'The Eighth Art. OnExpressionism, America and, of course, Chaplin' in S. M. Eisenstein:Selected Works. Volume 1, Writings, 1922-34. Edited and translated byRichard Taylor, BFI Publishing, London, 1988, p.

5. ibid., p. 29.6. ibid., p. 30.7. 'Statement on Sound', op.cit. (note 1), p. 234-35.8. Ann Doane, 'The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and

Space', in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, edited by Elisabeth Weis and

John Belton, Columbia University Press, New York, 1985, p. 162.9. Leonard Maltin, Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated

Cartoons, New American Library, New York, 1987, p. 35.10. Cited in Maltin, p. 35.11. John Grierson, 'Pudovkin on Sound', in Cinema Quarterly , Vol. 2, No. 2

(Winter 1933-34), pp. 106-8.



. , ,the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1982, p. 38.

13. The full status of Romance Sentimentale in this respect is outside thescope of this article.

14. Eisenstein at Work , op.cit. (note 12), p. 39.15. Maltin, op.cit. (note 9), pp. 32-33.16. Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney , edited by Jay Leyda, translated

by Alan Upchurch, Methuen, London, 1988, p. 12ff.17. ibid., p. 69.18. ibid., p. 21.

19. ibid., pp. 24-33 and 44-47.20. ibid., p. 41. He arrives finally at Heraclitus, Hegel on Heraclitus, and Leninon Hegel on Heraclitus.

21. Sergei Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature, translated by Herbert Marshall,Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, p. 389.

22. ibid., p. 391.23. Leyda, op.cit. (note 12), p. 39.24. ibid., p. 40.25. ibid., p. 40.26. Cited in Harry Potamkin, 'The Compound Cinema: Further Notes' (Close

Up, April 1929), in The Compound Cinema: The Film Writings of Harry Alan Potamkin, edited by Lewis Jacobs, Teachers College Press,Columbia University, New York, 1977, p. 9. < p>

27. ibid., p. 9.28. ibid., p. 9.29. cf. Harry Potamkin, 'Playing with Sound', ibid., pp. 86-88.

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