Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema Volume 2 Number 1 © 2008 Intellect Ltd

Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/srsc.2.1.63/1

A glossolalic glasnost and the re-tuningof the Soviet subject: sound performancein Kira Muratova's Asthenic Syndrome

Irina Sandomirskaia University College S6dert6rn

AbstractThis article attempts to interpret Kira Muratova's Asthenic Syndrome (1989)

from the point of view of the director's work with sound. I suggest that in com-

posing the sound for the film, Muratova seeks to dissect the filmic convention that

treats sound merely as an additional element, which is supposed to support the

illusionism of the realistic visual image by complementing it with the illusion of

an accompanying realistic audio image. In order to subvert this false motivation

of sound by visuality, to highlight sound as an independent agent in the construc-

tion of meaning, and to emphasize the explosive critical potential of film sound,

Muratova employs techniques of sound performance art and sound installation.

She uses the medium of sound to make visible those politics of speaking and hear-ing that constitute the USSR in crisis, a society that imagines itself through

audio metaphors: glasnost, related to the Russian word golos (voice), and pere-

stroika, related to the Russian term nastroika, tuning (of a musical instrument

or an acoustic device). As a result, heteroglossy receives a literal implementationin the spoken word, which is acutely and irreparably out of tune, alienated from

itself and polytonal in a freakish, morbid and perversely pleasurable way. These

effects are achieved through the use of non-professional actors, the use of voices

with substandard articulation, the emphasis on hybrid or dialectal prosody and

phonation, amateur declamations and recitals and other manipulations of the

Soviet norms of high diction. I also explore the genealogy of Muratova's technol-

ogy in terms of the principles of manipulating the viewer's sensitivity and

perception as invented by the Soviet film avant-garde (Eisenstein and Vertov)

and contemporary critical theory (Benjamin and Adorno). I thus understand

Asthenic Syndrome not only as political critique, but also as a meta-filmic

analysis, an allegory of mourning and a diagnosis of asthenia in both film as tech-

nology and in the (collective perception of the) USSR as the symbolic product offilm technologies.

The second funeral of Stalin, glasnost and astheniaIn Gorbachev's project of reforming the USSR - the project that immediately

preceded and, according to many, in fact produced the collapse of the object

of reform - the three slogans, those of uskorenie (acceleration), glasnost and

perestroika, represented processes that not only sought an improvement of

the macro-economics of the USSR, but primarily aimed at the upgrading of

the Soviet material and symbolic economy. Perestroika - the disassembly

KeywordsMuratovasound performanceglasnostlanguage politicsspeech cultureSoviet psychiatry

SRSC 2 (1) pp. 63-83 © Intellect Ltd 2008 63

1. In my analysis ofperestroika I am usingthree etymologicallyrelated meanings ofthe Russian rootstroi-: (1) related tobuilding or rebuilding,as in stroit' andperestraivat',(2) related to formingranks as in the ranksof soldiers at themilitary parade, cf.stroit'sia v kolonnu(form a column) andperestraivat'sia (changeranks), and (3) relatedto acoustic harmonies,the tuning of musicalinstruments andacoustic devices, suchas nastraivat' (tune)and nastroishchik(tuner) - the latteralso being the title ofone of Muratova'slater films.

2. 1 am deeply indebtedto Jane Taubman(2000) for her metic-ulous analysis of thefilm, which equippedme with a perfectlaunching pad for myown reflection.

and the subsequent re-assembly, the re-tuning, and the re-alignment' ofSoviet subjectivity - admitted the need of repairs and thus tacitly acknowl-edged that the organic cohesion of Soviet subjectivity as it had been culti-vated in the predominantly Stalinist regime no longer held: the synthesisof Sovietness in the new generation of the 1980s was dysfunctional, andso was the syntax of the language through which the Soviet subject wasinstitutionalized. Sovietness had stopped making sense: its categories andreality - as they had been synthesized through the structures of normal-ized Russian language - were visibly dysfunctional.

Perestroika was an attempt at structural intervention into what wasalready moving towards meaninglessness by accelerating (uskorenie) thenonsensical and hoping thus to force it back into sense. It is not by chancethat the film that produced the most penetrating analysis of this project ofthe disassembly and reassembly of the Soviet meaning was given a title thatleads associations directly into the mental hospital, the asylum of non-sense, Kira Muratova's Asthenic Syndrome (Astenicheskii sindrom, 1989).

As I demonstrate later, the film performs this state of dissolution as it nar-rates it, and its performative value is connected with Muratova's approach toexpression as tactility rather than representation. I argue that Muratova'sexperimentation in transforming filmic expression into a cinematic touch isher way of implementing the programmatic issue put forward by the avant-garde of the 1920s-1930s: cinema's power to intervene into reality byaffecting the viewers' perception of reality, and thus encouraging the will totransform it. Asthenic Syndrome is narrated with the purpose of explodingnarrativity as such, and therefore offering a synopsis would mean to invitethe reader to follow and see together (as the Greek synopsis literally means)the techniques and effects of her subversion. Muratova glues narrative frag-ments together in such a way as to undermine rather than encourage theviewer's desire of synthesis. In her script the important elements are thegaps, interruptions of time and plot, as well as other misfits betweenepisodes: she practises a critical montage of narrative patches with the pur-pose of displaying the seams of the patchwork on the reverse side of the fab-ric. Her story is put together in seemingly large, crude and hasty stitches,with rotten threads and seams full of lice, hardly holding together; the entireconstruction therefore threatens to open on to a void. This is achievedthrough a perfect mastery of filmic narrative techniques.

The above-mentioned non-narratability of the film is achieved by anoverproduction of narratives without beginning or end (see JaneTaubman's episode-by-episode reconstruction of the story, which isextremely helpful even for the most experienced viewer of Muratova's filmswhen trying to make sense of her labyrinthine storytelling). 2 It is custom-ary to divide Asthenic Syndrome into two major stories. Part 1 shows themain character, Natasha - a woman who has just buried her husband orlover - in a state of acute mourning. She acts out her trauma on the sur-rounding people - friends, family, colleagues, passers-by and every humanbeing that happens to cross her path. Step after step, the grief that pos-sesses Natasha becomes more and more destructive: she ruthlessly purgesher existence of everything that had constituted the meaning of the life withthe man she loved. Home, friendship, warmth and sympathy, professionalachievement, social status, self-respect and simply good manners - all these

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are cast behind in the blind fury of despair as she mourns the death of loveitself. A woman abandoned in (or rather, by) love, a typical Muratovacharacter, is portrayed in a typical Muratova style that we recognize fromher earlier films, such as Brief Encounters (Korotkie vstrechi, 1967) and ALong Goodbye (Dolgoe proshchanie, 1971). As in these earlier films, what isimportant in Natasha's story is the backdrop against which it is set. Thefocus of the austere black-and-white, New Wave-styled visuality nowseems to shift onto the background objects and figures: the scenes ofeveryday life in Odessa, the materiality of its realia (the cemetery, the tramstop, the residence project, the construction site, the hospital), its charac-ters and especially its sounds.

The social realism of the first part is brutally exploded when we discoverthat Natasha's story is actually a piece of fiction, and not a very successfulone. It is a film that is watched (or rather not watched, but slept through)by the other main character, Nikolai. Here, the once so central Natasha dis-appears from Asthenic Syndrome - never to return again. The viewer nowfollows Nikolai, an unsuccessful author suffering from a severe writer'sblock, as he is sleepwalking through a whole chain of Soviet institutions inhis somnambulant search for inspiration and income. We thus visit a com-munal apartment, a class in school, a teachers' meeting, an undergroundartists' salon, as well as the homes of some secondary figures as Nikolaimakes his way to his own home and family. The viewer visits a dog poundwhere Muratova presents a long, inhumanly detailed close-up of the faces(not muzzles) of dogs in cages waiting to be exterminated by the cheerfulstaff in the presence of a compassionate and pleasurably agitated public. 3

Eventually Nikolai is confined in a mental institution, supposedly diagnosedwith 'asthenic syndrome'. Again, the character himself, the tortures of his

Figure 1: Asthenic Syndrome. Photo courtesy of Iskusstvo kino archive.

A glossolalic glasnost and the re-tuning of the Soviet subject: sound performance...

3. There is an allusion toKafka's Penal Colony,without a doubt, justas the whole of thefilm can be consideredas a reflection onKafka's Castle;Muratova's use ofliterature, however,is a topic for specialstudy.

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4. The Soviet school ofminor psychiatry takesits origins in the workof Petr Gannushkin(1875-1933) whosebooks Klinikapsikhopatii, ikh statika,dinamika, sistematika(The Clinical Theory ofPsychopathies: Statics,Dynamics, andSystematization) andKlinika maloi psikhiatril(The Clinical Theory ofMinor Psychiatry)were published in theearly 1930s whenSoviet psychoanalysishad been defeatedand other, moreconventional, moreideologically reliabledoctrines of therapywere being developed.Gannushkin's theoryof minor psychiatry asa pathology ofcharacter (behaviour)received a renaissancein the 1970s andremains a workingtheory in post-Sovietpsychiatry andpsychology in Russia.See Gannushkin(1933).

5. Associated mostlywith the work ofAndrei Snezhnevskii(1904-87), thearchitect of Sovietrepressive psychiatryand for a long timedirector at theSerbskii Institute ofForensic Psychiatrywhich was affiliatedto the USSR Academyof Medical Sciencesand is well-knownfor its role in therepression of theSoviet dissidentmovement in the1960s-1970s.

6. On the linguisticconstruction of theUSSR in Stalin'sMarxism and Questionsof Linguistics, seeSandomirskaia(2006).

sleepy progression through the circles of the everyday Soviet inferno areless important than the lively micro-dramas that are acted out by extras intheir natural environments to create a background for the many internallyunrelated episodes in the story. In the end, Nikolai is drowned in his pro-gressing narcolepsy and his unconscious body is slowly taken away intodarkness in an underground metro carriage moving to the depot. Life hasabandoned him, together with the talking, swearing, love-declaring andquarrelling passengers who left the train at the terminus.

I shall start my analysis by returning to the film's enigmatic title. Whatis asthenia? In the medical language of the 19 70s when Soviet psychiatryreinvented its minor domain (malaia psikhiatriia),4 i.e. therapy of neurosisand psychopathy, 'asthenia' was a term that served as a euphemism formilder and fixable, manageable forms of madness. Another uniquely Sovietterm was 'slowly progressing schizophrenia' (another invention of Sovietpsychiatry in the 19 70s, this time major psychiatry, bol'shaia psikhiatriia).5

This was a fearful diagnosis that presupposed the incapacitation of the legalsubject and was therefore used against dissidents to repress direct politicalopposition. In distinction to that, asthenia did not convey a connotation ofpolitical protest but rather referred to minor dysfunctions of socialization,i.e. smaller, negligible breaches in the discipline of Soviet subjectivity Thesepathologies did not demand institutionalization and the subject was sup-posed to eliminate the asthenic syndrome in himself and by himself, withthe help of rudimentary analysis, hypnosis or minor antidepressants. Whileslowly progressing schizophrenia, the 'madness' of the dissidents, implied atotal rejection of Sovietness and was subject to equally total and uncondi-tional repression (by heavy medication and confinement in isolated hospitalwards), asthenia was a term for an emotional or behavioural disturbancethat was identified in the colluding and collaborating intelligentsia as itarises in a minor, non-ideological conflict between the thinking subject andthe symbolic regime which produces subjectivity The collapsing cohesionof such a colluding, non-oppositional subjectivity was believed to berepairable through a realignment of desires, a kind of perestroika of thesoul. It is evidently this medical and political utopia of a subject thusrealigning himself, by mobilizing strictly internal resources (uskorenie, oracceleration) and by slightly adapting the dominant language to the desiresthus realigned (glasnost'), a diagnosis of meaning in a temporary state ofweakness, that Muratova is dissecting in her remarkable film.

Asthenic Syndrome bears witness to and reflects the second attempt, afterKhrushchev's speech at the twentieth CPSU Congress in 1956, to de-Stalinize Stalin's empire, to cure the asthenia of Stalinism by opening uppublic language as it had been officially established since 1950, the yearwhen Stalin's discussion on language was crowned with the official doctrineof language presented in Marxism and the Questions of Linguistics.6 There isone episode in the film that I consider to be epigraphic to Muratova's analy-sis of glasnost as the USSR's second, linguistic de-Stalinization by Gorbachev.In the scene of the funeral of Natasha's husband, the camera is taking amomentary close-up of the body's dead face. For a short time, the viewer seesa face that produces a striking similarity to the canonic representations ofStalin. Other than this fleeting moment of uncertain recognition, there isnothing in the film that would produce a direct association from what is

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happening on the screen to the disassembly of the symbolic pantheon of theUSSR. I shall take this short sequence as a starting point in my reflectionabout Asthenic Syndrome as a political critique and subsequently concentrateon its reading as an allegory in the Benjaminian sense.7

I shall here return to the questions of mourning and apocalypse inMuratova. As distinct from Jane Taubman who agrees with the contempo-rary Soviet understanding of Muratova's apocalypsism as an expression of theend of the Soviet history,8 I see it as the effect of the director's allegoric (hence,mournful) methodology and as a statement relating to the philosophy of film;therefore I chose her film for this analysis. In her earlier films, Muratova alsoexperimented with sound, or rather with the vocalization of the text of thescript - as, for instance, in the seemingly arbitrary repetitions of apparentlyrandom utterances in Getting to Know the Big Wide World (Poznavaia belyi svet,1979). Never before, however, had she used sound in such an explicitly per-formative way, and never before had she achieved such a level of precision inconstructing the soundtrack as an allegory. When Muratova later tried todevelop this technique in Chekhovian Motifs (Chekhovskie motivy, 2002), herphilosophic critique gave way to a more publicistic criticism of the detestableNew Russian (novyi russkii), the subject of the 'criminal capitalism' of the late1990s. This film, I believe, was a step back (in what concerns the work withsound, but not her other methods) as compared to the experimental search ofAsthenic Syndrome precisely because she gave up philosophic allegorism forthe sake of a satirically distorted hyperrealistic image (for instance, the pivotalscene in the film, the wedding ceremony in the church, was filmed in realtime). In the fairy tale The Sentimental Policeman (Chuvstvitel'nyi militsioner,1992)9 and especially in The Tuner (Nastroishchik, 2004) ('an easy film', in herown words), comparable sound and speech techniques produce the effect ofdecorative vignettes or function as signatures of the master's own hand.Asthenic Syndrome, on the contrary, was an audio-allegory of a time thatimagined itself in audio-metaphors (glasnost'), a materialist analysis of glas-nost as an audio-scape, a critique performed through the means of audio-performance. Therefore, instead of focusing on Muratova's outstanding (andwidely discussed) narrative and visuality, I focus on Asthenic Syndrome as awork of sound art in the disguise of a naturalistic soundtrack. In doing this, Iaddress four questions: (1) How does Muratova use sound to produce anaudio-portrait of a historical era at the threshold of a radical turn? (2) Whattools does she use in order to perform glasnost as materially palpable vocaltextures in the soundtrack? (3) How does she critically dissect glasnost andcontemporary Russian history in general by making her soundtrack act outthe metaphors of glasnost's political language? (4) What are the lines of con-tinuity in Muratova's work with fflmic sound and how can one assess themeta-fflmic level in her work, as a film about fdlmic and cinematic effects inthe construction of reality?

The noise of asthenic silenceGraham Roberts analyses Muratova's work as a practice of Bakhtin's het-eroglossy, as she 'inverts the distinction between the dominant and subordi-nate languages of Soviet society, marginalizing the former and prioritizingthe latter' (Roberts 1997: 312). My purpose here is to illuminate the tech-niques of heteroglossy as these are elaborated in Asthenic Syndrome. Thus

7. There is a considerablebody of literaturediscussing Benjamin'sallegory as aninstrument ofhistorical-materialistanalysis of expression.It is noteworthy thatin The Origin ofGerman Tragic Drama,Benjamin proposesthe allegory as ameans of materialistepistemologicalcritique of thesymbol. The symbolis a god-given, eternal(i.e. ahistorical) sign,while the allegory isthe expression that isacutely aware of itsown man-madeness,its constructedness bythe human as part ofhuman self-productionand in the knowledgeof the human being'sfmitude as ahistorical subject.While symbol presup-poses faith, allegorypresupposes a methodof knowing about selfand history. Hence,the melancholy of theallegorist is not anemotional disposition,but the mode andthe effect of thisknowledge. Hence,also, a specificmournful eschatology,a negativism that ischaracteristic of theallegory as comparedto the gloriouspositivity of theeternal symbol.

8. According to a Sovietfilm critic, 'inMuratova's film weclearly taste theapproaching catastro-phe, or rather thecatastrophe that hasalready begun'. Forthis and other apoca-lyptic responses toAsthenic Syndrome, seeTaubman (2005:45-61, 115-16).

9. On the narrative andlinguistic elements inthis film that allow itsanalysis as a fairy tale

A glossolalic glasnost and the re-tuning of the Soviet subject: sound performance... 67

in the sense of Propp,see Zvonkine (2007:131-46).

my analysis complements both Roberts' work in terms of the technology ofthe 'inversion' and Emma Widdis's work as she reads Muratova's visualityin Deleuzian terms by complementing her analysis of visual textures with astudy of Muratova's manipulation of the audio-faktura (Widdis 2005).

Muratova's work, while constructing the very special sonority in AsthenicSyndrome, can be understood if one applies the principles of audio-art whichhas its origins in John Cage's principles of new music (Cage 1987: 3-56).New music makes no differentiation between tone and noise, between soundproduced with intention (like music in the traditional sense) or withoutintention (like breathing or the beating of the heart). Thus nature and cul-ture, intentionality and non-intentionality become irrelevant. Also, the con-tradistinction between sound and silence is put under a question mark: whatwe perceive as silence, Cage says, is an audio-space filled with noise that wecannot control, and a sound artist learns to use these noises as audio-objectsfound in nature, objets trouvis. The borrowing of such a sound in nature andits relocation into a piece of performance is comparable to the avant-gardevisual arts' strategies of displaying technical artefacts (ready-mades) in artgallery spaces, as Marcel Duchamp did with his toilets and bottle racks. Sucha relocation produces a clash between the texture of the pedestrian objectand the normalizing discursivity of displaying art as it is embodied in thespace of the gallery. This clash allows the avant-garde artist to perform a cri-tique of the politics of representation, taste and judgement. In Cage's case,the relocation of silence (in fact, a piece of unintended, uncontrollable noise)into a work of music allows a critique of the politics of hearing.

Adorno sees the task of new music in the 'emancipation of dissonance'(a term by Arnold Sch6nberg) and in the destruction of 'sedimentedinvariance' in the use of music (or, with a correction for Cage, anyintended sound) as language:

... chords which are always to be used in identical functions, even worn-outcombinations like the steps of a cadence, themselves often merely melodicphrases that reformulate the harmony [...] Their invariance has become sed-imented, a kind of a second nature.

(Adorno and Gillespie 1993: 401-14)

The language of music is produced in the hearing, Adorno says, guided bypolitics of hearing that materializes in the work of hearing performed by thelistening subject, the subject's taste and expectations in the reception ofmusic. Hearing is thus culturally produced: it is educated by the syntax ofcorrect harmonies and assumes this syntax as 'a second nature'. The workof listening thus tends to the conditions of Benjamin's technological repro-ducibility; in Adorno's interpretation, listening is an acoustic automatonproducing (expecting) recurrent (musical) symbols, or insignia.

This contextualizes Muratova's strategies of disrupting harmonies, i.e.the automatic expectations of what the audience is used to hearing (or see-ing) in film. I contend that Muratova's interest in identifying and disruptingaudio-insignia could originate from her collaboration with the composerOleg Karavaichuk, who had written music scores for several of her earlierfilms. The following quotation shows how the young Karavaichuk's perfor-mance was reviewed by an American critic in 1961: it anticipates the tone

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and language that reviewers used almost thirty years later in response toAsthenic Syndrome, as has been noted by Taubman in her analysis of thefilm's reception. Also, we should note the features of a live sound perfor-mance, not just a concert execution of a musical piece, that Karavaichuk isstaging in the concert hall:

A gaunt, haggard figure with a shock of flaming golden hair, he rushed ontothe stage of the Palace of Culture, holding one hand in front of his face toshield it from the audience [...] As soon as his hands touched the keys [.,.], hebecame [...] so captivated by the music that it was terrible to watch [...I Atfirst it seemed to evoke some weird pictures of the first stirrings of a new-born world - completely atonal in character - then jazz rhythms came intoevidence, followed by grim, ironical music, to which Karavaichuk weaved hisbody in strange contortions and sinuous movements. Unfortunately, at theclimax the pianist stopped dead, swore heartily in Russian, and raced intothe wings. [...] Karavaichuk may be a sick man, but he is undoubtedly agenius. It is refreshing in a country where there is so much conformity tofind a composer who throws restraint to the wind and follows his naturalinclinations.

(Seaman 1961: 367-68)

It is easy to see that the 'refreshing' feeling of the critic celebrating the'genius' in his 'natural inclinations' towards freedom is the effect ofKaravaichuk's well-staged and calculated scenic gesticulation, as deceptiveand provocative as the carefully staged freakishness of Muratova's AsthenicSyndrome which would produce a similar reaction in its enlightened admir-ers. Constructing the sound for Asthenic Syndrome, Muratova experimentswith what the ear of the harmoniously tuned listener identifies as anti-music: the meaningless noise, sound produced without and against inten-tionality. Here, it is not experimental music ('grim and ironic') but acacophony of violent speech that overwhelms the ear and renders it help-less in the process of trying to make sense: the audience could as well bedeaf. In this way, Muratova achieves the effect that Cage considered to bethe supreme objective of musical composition: silence. Importantly, as I pro-pose to show here, such a secondary silence in Muratova's performance is aspecifically linguistic one: it is produced not by the clash of acoustic har-monies, but by the clash of utterances in a dialogue that is dysfunctional:weakened, emotionally impoverished and disempowered.

Indeed, there can be different strategies through which one achievestotal silence by producing maximum noise, and traditional music is onlyone of them. The music accompanying a few episodes in Asthenic Syndromeconsist entirely of Adorno's 'sedimented insignia': a fragment of a Schubertquartet (a piece of popular classics), a fragment of Strangers in the Night(performed by the James Last orchestra that was popular in the USSR in the1980s), and the no less popular 1920s American waltz Chaquita. In theworld of the audience, these pieces possess automatic recognizability incombination with no identity at all. They are as recognizably faceless - oras facelessly recognizable - as the mass of episodic figures that populateAsthenic Syndrome. It is only the two main characters, Natasha and Nikolai,who seem to possess the likeness of a life story, a face, a character and a

A glossolalic glasnost and the re-tuning of the Soviet subject: sound performance... 69

10. Compare the notion destiny. These are also the only figures in the film played by professionals.of the double All the rest of the individuals are accidental and tangential; their storiesarticulation oflanguage in structural remain unclarified, their fates unfollowed and their names ungiven -linguistics, that is, anonymous characters and as anonymous actors - invariably recognizedsound articulated into as something too familiar, too well known to be identified, named ormeaningful phonemesand reality articulated remembered. Such are the people who live in the universe of the film, andinto meaningful such is the sound that accompanies the eventual implosion of this in effectcomponents by surprisingly vital, even aggressive world that is filled to the brim with themorphemes. deafening noises (in other words, Cage's silence) of intended violence and

unintended hilarious enjoyment.

Emancipation of dissonance and haptic sonorityThe silence of Muratova's asthenic world speaks in tongues: it is overflow-ing with voices, accents, juicy dialectal intonations, vernacular, socio- andidiolectal tones and timbres, squeaky pitches, individual defects of pronun-ciation and speech impediments, artificial manneristic articulations, yells,murmurs, whispers, lisps and sighs. This is the sound material thatMuratova works with, selecting, arranging and montaging the voices as ifworking on a piece of Cagian score. She is seeking the subversion of tonal-ity, i.e. the predictable harmony of sedimented (speech) sounds, the tearingoff of the insignia of the phonetic laws and the orthoepic norms.

In doing this work of emancipating dissonance, Muratova identifies andexplores several lines of resistance. First, she challenges orthoepy, the normof pronunciation, 'the relationship between pronunciation and a system ofwriting or spelling' (Oxford English Dictionary). In its hegemonic relation toorality, the orthoepic norm subjects the work of the speech organs to the dis-cipline of a system of writing and thus dominates the body in the productionof normalized, correct speech sounds. The emancipation of dissonance inthis anti-orthoepic dimension reveals a conflict in speech productionbetween body and system, a bio-politic in language: a potential conflictbetween the physiological status of the organs of speech and the demands ofthe system; between the orality of speech production and the normative reg-ulation of written discourse. The second line of resistance as identified inMuratova's work lies between the phonic and the acoustic aspects of speech,its modes of production (phonation) and the effects of reception in hearing.And, dependent on the two aspects above, a third line of resistance emergesbetween phonation and articulation: the making of (not necessarily meaning-ful) sounds and the demand for articulate, intelligible speech (in film). Thisis, therefore, the line that demarcates sense from non-sense and languagefrom noise: the articulate word, that is, a flow of speech that is divisible intomeaningful fragments, thus opposes itself to the world of inarticulate gibber-ish. Distinct articulation produces a distinctly articulated, systematicallyorganized and intelligible reality. 10 Articulation is a threshold that is sup-posed to divide humanness from animality (human speech vs animalsounds), communication from non-communication (speech vs breathing,groans or shrieks), and human voices from mechanical noises.

Glasnost (from the Russian golos, voice) proclaimed itself as the givingof voice to the people. Muratova understands this literally and translatesthe metaphors of glasnost into the materiality of vocality, 'the possessionor exercise of vocal power', according to the Oxford English Dictionary. She

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dedicates herself to an exploration of glasnost's orthoepic, phonic, acousticand articulatory faktura1" - the structure of material as it reveals itself tothe touch of the beholder, and as opposed to signification as it appeals tothe intellect of the interpreter. She is playing with the tactility of speechuttered and perceived, the pleasure of the word as it is spoken and heard,but not at all necessarily comprehended.

One can think such work on the production of audio-fakturas out of thesounds of language as a work of haptic sonority. Hapticity is a term devel-oped in visual semiotics and relates to the visual effects on the surface of theimage that cannot be reduced to the structures of signification and do notrepresent the discursive content of the picture. Hapticity is an element ofexpression that 'touches' the eye instead of representing a concept or narrat-ing an intelligible story. In its semiotic understanding, it is the gesture andthe trace left on the surface of the visual object by the hand of the master, aphysical presence of the human being in the materiality of a symbol. InLaura Marks's formulation, hapticity produces 'the skin of the film': film as'membrane that brings its audience in contact with the material forms ofmemory' (Marks 2000: 242) and thus allows the message to escape the cen-suring interference of discourse. 12 As distinct from visual semiotics, wherehapticity is a well-established phenomenon, nothing similar seems to havebeen worked out in relation to film sound, and Laura Marks resolutelyexcludes film sound from her analysis of the skin of film when she says thatthe domain of audio-objects is too extensive to be included in her study(Marks 2000: xv-xvi).13 In the meantime, the problematic of the touch inrelation to sound is even more relevant when one conceives a work of soundart as an effect of corporeality: as sound caressing or hurting the ear.14 Whatis at issue is a direct contact between the sound wave and the ear drum. Justas in visual haptics, sound contains a discursive message combined with anon-discursive intervention into the same message, a confirmation and adisruption of the rules of tonality; a confirmation of the hegemony of theorthoepic norm - and a resurrection against its despotic rule. Like language,sound is discipline; like touch, it is erotic and therefore potentially disruptive.

In immediately touching the ear, sound exerts physical force over thebody of the listener. Since the orthoepic norm, just like tonality in tradi-tional music, is the product of the discipline of the ear, late Soviet film-goers were quite correct in evaluating Muratova's effort as quite violent,which sealed her reputation as not only a socially pessimistic, but also avery aggressive, 'unfeminine' director.' 5 Indeed, instead of catering for theexpectations of naturalistic cinematography, instead of accompanyingimage with sound for a fuller illusionistic effect, the spoken word inAsthenic Syndrome attacks the hearing as if with the intention of disruptingthe hearing by cutting the ear (compare the programmatic scene of thecutting of the eye in An Andalusian Dog by Salvator Dali and Luis Bufiuel,1929). By making her soundtrack physically difficult for the audience todigest, Muratova is faithfully following the lessons of Sergei Eisenstein, hisidea of film montage as tactile counterpoint. Eisenstein never reduced tac-tility to haptic visuality but implied the ability of the film to physicallyaffect the audience whether in the composition of the narrative, visualityor sound."6 Muratova follows the Bufhuel/Dali example and the Eisensteindoctrine faithfully, and not without an ironic exaggeration.

11. On the tactile charac-ter of Muratova'svisuality, see Widdis(2005). Faktura(translated fromRussian as 'texture')was theoreticallydeveloped by futurismand the Russianavant-garde. For acritical history of theRussian concept offaktura see Buchloh(1984: 82-119).However, the tactilequalities in a pieceof visual art werealready appreciatedas early as theseventeenth centuryin Venice, by theconnoisseurs ofpainting whoinspected the surfaceof the canvas withtheir fingers to recog-nize and admire theunique signatures ofthe master's hand asleft in the brushwork,when painters wereinventing newcompositions of paintto make their paintedsurfaces 'speak' tothe touch (Sohm1991: 6-9).

12. On hapticity in visualrepresentation, seealso Gandelman(1991).

13. The subjectivity andmeaning produced inthe act of touching,the role of the touchin the constructionand communication ofmeaning, its eros andpathos is analysed inNancy and Derrida(2005).

14. See Russianexpressions thatdescribe the physicalcontact betweensound and hearing inthe act of listening:kasat'sia slukha (totouch one's hearing),laskat' slukh (to caressone's hearing) andrezat' slukhlukho (tocut one'shearing/ear).

A glossolalic glasnost and the re-tuning of the Soviet subject: sound performance... 71

15. The subjects ofcruelty and non-femininity regularlyoccur in Muratova'srecent interviews,see for example,Shevelev (2005). OnMuratova's 'cruelty'and the parallelbetween her workand Antonin Artaud,see below.

16. On the tactility ofcounterpoint, seeEisenstein's fragmentsin Neravnodushnaiapriroda, 2, (Eisenstein2006: 310-506).

17. In order to align myanalysis with the crit-ical terms suggestedby Adorno (tonalityand atonality) and inorder to achievemore cohesion withthe starting point ofmy reflection on theconnotation of pere-stroika as re-tuning amusical instrument, Isimplify here thefunction of preparedpiano in the produc-tion of music byreducing it to thetone. It is not onlyatonality that plays arole but also, andpredominantly,rhythm. Rhythm inMuratova, however,is an important effectthat embraces hernarrative, visual andaudio techniques andrequires a separatediscussion. The paral-lel between herconstruction ofrhythm and the useof prepared piano bya new composerremains relevant,notwithstanding.

18. Kul'tura rechi (speechculture) began toevolve as an officialdoctrine of languagein the mid-1930swhen theconstructivist linguis-tics of the earlySoviet period weredefeated by an

Being aggressive towards the audience, seeking to perform its messagedirectly against the sensitivity of the body of the spectator, the film uses theaudience as a musical instrument, a kind of prepared piano (as in the prac-tices of Cage and Erik Satie before him). The prepared piano is obtainedfirst by de-tuning the instrument in order to re-tune it again in a differentway (hence my third etymology of 'stroi-' in perestroika noted above).Cage used to achieve the effect of out-of-tuneness by inserting everydaymetal objects like nails and screws between the strings. This is comparableto Muratova's technique in producing the film's audio-skin as she makesher actors stutter, stammer, lisp and yell something vaguely articulatethrough the discursivity of the script. 17

Muratova's soundtrack is by no means an additional element to comple-ment the illusionism of the image with a fuller illusionism of sonority. Thesound is a world on its own rights, as carefully produced and responsiblythought through as the work of the camera. It is possible not only to watchthe film, but also to listen to it as if it were an opera, it could be a perfectmovie for the blind. But also for the deaf, those whose ears are blocked withthe 'sedimented insignia' of discourse. Muratova's phonic/acoustic hapticsslow down the easy flow of discourse generation to attract attention to theconditions of the production of speech. She thus makes us think about theact as such of speaking or listening: the politics of the emancipated vocalityof glasnost whose freedom remains proclaimed but impracticable.

Con furore: profane lips speaking in vernacular tonguesMuratova's careful work on audio-faktura (and therefore, importantly, herown method of constructing the audio fact) would be merely an interestingeffect if it did not challenge the phonic normativity as it had been for a longtime established in film and theatre and in public speaking in general(radio, TV, public oration). Elaborated as part of the Stalinist doctrine of'speech culture' (kul'tura rechi),I8 the techniques of correct phonation in the1930s-1970s were being established in parallel to the increasing controlover the ideological correctness of the message. 'Stage speech' (stsenich-eskaia rech') was a discipline taught to professional actors, radio announcersand propagandists.' 9 As an object of training, stsenicheskaia rech' presup-posed a radical purging of natural speech of all local and idiosyncraticimpurities, all impediments, mispronunciations and other faults. The stan-dard pronunciation was found in the traditions of the Maly Theatre inMoscow. Individual speech-making idiosyncrasies like lisping and neurotic,speech defects' like stammering were supposed to be eliminated by profes-sionally trained speech therapists (one such session is presented in a pieceof staged documentary footage in the prologue to Tarkovsky's Mirror(Zerkalo, 1975) where it serves as a philosophic epigraph to the whole of thework.) Stage speech was quite intolerant towards all traces of the local ori-gin of speech: dialectisms in vocabularies as well as local accents werebranded as 'uncultured' and subject to elimination, thus cleansing thespeaking body of the traces of its genealogy and biography. As an object oftheoretical reflection, stsenicheskaia rech' was constructed as the absoluteexemplification of correct phonation, an organic product of the historicaldevelopment of the norm of the literary Russian language, a symbol of anuninterrupted cultural tradition, and a marker of the natural coherence

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between the Russian tradition of high culture and the norms of socialistculturedness as taught to the Soviet individual (Ozhegov 1974: 276-85).Stsenicheskaia rech' was supposed to serve as the norm in the relationshipbetween the spoken word and the written text, between the sound and theletter of the alphabet, between writing and the physical nature of the voice.

Challenging the hyper-correctness of the doctrinal stsenicheskaia rech',Muratova practises at least three techniques of phonetic biomechanics,thus producing several kinds of audio-textures. All of these, however, pro-ceed from the expectations of the listener to hear stage speech in film andtheatre, that is a faithful oral reproduction according to an established setof phonation rules of the written word of the script. In Muratova's film, thevernacular seems to revolt and strike back, the periphery ('provincial'dialects) taking its revenge over the repressive centre.

This periphery in revolt can be subsumed under the general title of'Odessa', the toponymic for dominatedness, exile from the centre, ex-centricity in every meaning of the word. Odessa is Muratova's image of 'ablack hole, the absolute province', 20 the end of the world, as it was also forthe exiled Pushkin in the 1820s and as the territory that later on becameOdessa had been for Ovid a thousand years earlier. Odessa was 'a hole'long before it became Odessa, a metaphysically ex-centric space, a symbolfor all remoteness and exclusion.

Hence, the everyday intonations and the syntax of everyday speech,heavily Ukrainianized but not Ukrainian (Odessa is an international 'back-water'); a not entirely Russian vocabulary, intonation patterns and articula-tion characteristic of (and recognizable for the audience as) the 'Odessadialect'. Muratova's common people often speak in surzhik, a language thatis believed by the purists to be a bastardized semi-language, either a cor-rupted Russian or a corrupted Ukranian. One notices that specific 'Odessa'singsong prosody that is often reproduced in 'Odessa' jokes or when mockingJewish speech, as well as high pitch/volume/speed that one associates espe-cially with the speech of South Russian women (a figure that is emblematicof 'unculturedness' in the eyes of Moscow), massive Ukrainianization in thepronunciation of Russian sounds, and a specific soft intoning which for theaudience signifies both the lyrical and comic connotations of South Russianand/or Jewish provincialism.

While normalized language unifies, vernacular produces difference, aninnocent, but infectious and therefore dangerous violation of the unitaryorthoepic norm. Linguistic, ethnic, gender and class dissonances, as wellas those between the centre and periphery that are usually suppressed bythe cultivated stage speech of the 'academic' actor, become strikingly obvi-ous in vernacular performance. Even before this speech is analysed for itsideological content, these (from the point of view of Soviet ideology) inex-istent splits manifest themselves with all clarity in the phonic peculiaritiesof the film's speech practices. Before the ideological correctness of speechcan be put to the test, already the richness of forbidden vernacular expres-sions and modulations signals the insecurity of the orthoepic norm withits civilizational centripetal claims.

Another trick to make the speech faktura audible is staging the enunci-ation by 'profane' voices of correct, 'cultured' written texts. An effect ofthe collapse of kul'turnost' is achieved through the use of non-professional

increasingly dogmaticand patriotic norma-tive language science.The author of thefirst prescriptive Sovietdictionary of theRussian language(project started 1934),Dmitrii Ushakov(1873-1942), wasalso the strongestproponent of the ideaof superimposing aunifying orthoepicnorm onto theheteroglossia of themultilingual andmultiethnic USSR inthe education of themasses, which wouldbe the final stage ofthe CulturalRevolution. SergeiOzhegov (1900-64),another outstandingSoviet language plan-ner and normalizer,described speech cul-ture as 'a struggle':'During the Sovietperiod, questions oflanguage normaliza-tion, of regulation oflanguage usage andpronunciationreceived an increasedsocial meaningfulnessand acquired thecharacter of thestruggle for theimprovement ofspeech culture, for thecorrectness and exac-titude of language, forits clarity and purity,for the skilled usage[by the speaking sub-ject] of all expressivemeans of language'(Ozhegov 1974:255). On the historyof normalization ofthe spoken word inthe USSR, seeGorham (2003); onpost-Soviet purismand its roots in Sovietnormalization, seeRyazanova-Clarke(2006).

19. Stsenicheskaia rech'(stage speech) isdefined by the Sovietencyclopaedia as 'oneof the main meansin the theatrical

A glossolalic glasnost and the re-tuning of the Soviet subject: sound performance... 73

performance ofdrama. The actor whomasters stage speechopens up the innerworld, the social, psy-chological, ethnic andeveryday character ofthe character. [...] itimplies the sonority,flexibility and volumeof voice, the develop-ment of breathingtechniques, and thearticulate and cleardictionand intonationalexpressiveness. [...]During the Sovietperiod, the techniqueof stage speech is oneof the most prominentdisciplines taughtat theatre schoolsand studios'('Stsenicheskaiarech")

20. On the provinciality ofOdessa as a meaning-ful factor in herfflm-making, see'Kruglyi stol...'(2004).

21. On the use of non-professionals and theeffects of the actorlyfaktura see (Plungian2005).

actors, people from the street, passers-by, occasional visitors to the filmstudio, and family, neighbours and acquaintances.2 1 Muratova systemati-cally abuses the normative routines of film-making by demonstrating herdisregard for the rules of casting. By letting profane voices articulate pro-fessionally authored texts, she achieves the critical effect of the transposi-tion of a readymade. The plane of expression (the vernacular phonics) isagglutinated to a plane of content that belongs to high culture, thusrevealing the politics of high diction that remain invisible when a profes-sional text is performed in a professional 'actorly' way.

Such is, for example, the long sequence presenting the teachers' confer-ence at school (see Taubman 2000: 35-36). The director is addressing hiscolleagues with a prepared speech about the new requirements that pere-stroika is presenting the school with: to educate the young generation as freecreative subjects, to emancipate teaching from the shackles of routine andideological clich6s. The teachers receive the director's speech merely as yetanother bureaucratic intervention from above. The director is impersonated(rather than played) by a non-professional actor with a recognizable appear-ance of the provincial idealist intelligentsia, his speech precisely the kind ofverbiage that during glasnost was produced on an almost routine basis innewspapers and on television. It is a clich6d discourse of the critique ofanother clich6d discourse. The response of the teachers, all picturesquelyprovincial non-professionals, the complaints and fears that they expressinstead of greeting the newly received freedom, all seem to be compiled outof the material of 'letters to the editor', also a popular and quite clich6dgenre of 'criticism from below' that flourished in the press of the glasnostperiod. The work of the body as it struggles with phonation creates a disso-nance to the uninterrupted flow of the officially approved text, its ready-made, mechanically reproduced message. The dissonance is contained in thebreakdown of the orthoepic norm: a carefully prepared piece of editorial, ora no less carefully worded 'letter to the editor' receives a profane voicing thatmocks and undermines the gravity, the high diction of its message.

Profane phonation in the delivery of canonized speech strikes the audi-ence immediately as a gross misuse of literacy, as enlightenment gone way-ward, an apocalypse of culture. Muratova is obviously enjoying this effectwhen she opens the film, right after a meticulous demonstration of agarbage bin, with another episode of profane declamation. A chorus of threevery happy babushkas, one holding a volume of War and Peace in her hand,recite an autobiographic fragment by Muratova herself about Tolstoy:

In my childhood, in my early youth, I thought it's enough for everyone toread carefully through the Work of Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy and everyonewould understand absolutely everything. And everyone would become kindand intelligent.

(Taubman 2000: 4)

As if satirizing her own quite sincere sadness, her disappointment in litera-ture that never succeeded in its mission of saving the world, Muratovamakes her babushkas memorize and recite this piece in a desynchronized, buteager and cheerful chorus of voices. At the end of the film, two girls (repre-senting one and the same character, Masha) cheerfully intone in two voices

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Figure 2: Asthenic Syndrome. Photo courtesy of Iskusstvo kino archive.

a highly theatrical, stylistically very clich6d monologue that contains a dec-laration of Masha's love for the main character: 'Nikolasha, I love thee...'(Taubman 2000: 39-40). The sarcastic Muratova stages this episode in amental hospital. Thus multiplied, doubled and tripled, de-synchronized andechoing itself, the profane voice is doing its best to reproduce a piece of highdiction. The effect is quite devastating: cultured writing intoned in vernacu-lar appears as profoundly false, mad, vain and absurdly artificial - including,quite sadly, Tolstoy himself, the genius of sincerity, the paragon of serious-ness, the worst enemy of any artifice, and Muratova's favourite author.

However, it would be a mistake believing (as Muratova wants us tobelieve) that Asthenic Syndrome is a documentation of the natural, genuineand authentic language of the masses. On the contrary, vernacular speechand profane diction are even more constructed, more cultivated by the direc-tor than scenic speech is in an ordinary soundtrack. Muratova uses non-professional actors and tells them to 'act naturally': a demand that contains alogical contradiction. This results in a gross over-usage of the idea of acting bythe amateur, a piece of pathetic over-performance, a crooked image of allscenic behaviour in the mirror of a conscientious but helpless non-professionaltheatre. At the same time, Muratova preserves the naive enjoyment of anon-actor who is asked to act in front of the camera, and to 'act natural' and

A glossolalic glasnost and the re-tuning of the Soviet subject: sound performance... 75

'for real'. The pleasure and the excitement of making a movie are immenseand the non-actors mobilize all their power of imagination to achieve 'realacting', presenting us with a naive embodiment of what they imagine is pro-fessional stage speech and professional stage habitus. Such performancebecomes over-statement and over-articulation; all the clich6s of professionalperformance (in Russian: naigrysh) appear as in a magnifying glass, in ahyperbole of theatricality. The actors seem to be learning scenic speech infront of our eyes. Very long pauses between syntagms, a very slow speed ofspeech, an exaggeratedly clear division between syllables, over-emphasizedlogical stresses, hyperbolized upwards and downwards tone movements,pitch variations that transform meaningful intonations (questions, state-ments, expressions of doubt, surprise, etc.) into singing, and other grotesqueelements are used in more or less rehearsed, more or less improvised, shorteror longer exchanges. Sometimes ornamented with double and triplerepetitions of quite meaningless fragments of text, this over-conscientiousexecution gives speech an effect of pathological mannerism, obsessiverambling. It is an outstanding illustration of what Lacan felicitously desig-nated with the neologism ]a lalangue, the erotic pleasure of producing mean-ingless but sonorous sounds, the la-la, the blaha-blaha (Lecercle 1990:37-40). The effect is that in the conversion of /a langue into/a lalangue, notonly the scenic naturalism in 'actorly' speech reveals its original unnatural-ness, but also the natural itself, as it is embodied in the profanity of phona-tion, becomes essentially abnormal.

One such miniature is a tiny monologue performed by a nameless actresswho plays the mother of an episodic character in the scene in the communalapartment (Taubman 2000: 19-22). Her task is to answer the door andinform the visitor that her son Misha is not at home. Dressed like a silent filmprima donna, her hair over-done, her cheeks over-rouged, and her eyelashesheavy with clotted mascara, she represents the image of over-compensation,an insane kitschy excess. To top it all, she intones her cues singing out everysyllable as if her text were a difficult music score that she can hardly read.The pleasure that is written on the face of the actress performing this task(and taken in a close-up) obviously has no borders. She is doing her best tomake her high tones too high and her low tones too low, she puts anunneeded stress on every syllable, she does not reduce unstressed vowels (asnormal Russian speech does), and she produces excessively long pauses afterevery phrase. The dramatic rolling of the painted eyes follows the manner-isms of phrasing and prosody, its grotesquely steep falls and rises.Contrasting with the over-elaborate artifice of the phonics is the mundanestyle of communication (answering the door) and the everyday phraseologyof the conversation, the subject of which, however, the murder of anunknown Kolia, contradicts the unexciting genre of communication but inan absurd way explains the rolling of the eyes and the tragic phonic theatre.

The actress, inexperienced as she is but eager to act as artistically(khudozhestvenno) as possible, is necessarily a marionette in the hands ofthe shrewd Muratova. She makes the actress play the marionette insteadof playing the role itself: the woman is acting out the clich6 of the actor,the automaton of artistic performance. In her display of the mannerisms ofphonation, she dissects the very idea of realistic film acting. The phoneticmarionette in Muratova's film is as much a critique of the actors' clich6s

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as it is a respectful and sorrowful homage to film's original nature ineccentric theatre, the withering remnants of silent movies (CharlieChaplin and Aleksandra Khokhlova), the bodily texture and the tech-niques of live performance in front of the camera. 22 Recalling again Cage'sconcept of silence as sound, she reproduces the silence of silent moviesthrough the over-performed sonority of a sound film.

While a silent movie does a pantomime of action, Muratova adds tothis a phonic pantomime of pseudo-communication. Both her actors andshe herself visibly enjoy this work of the dehumanization of the speakerthrough performing an automaton of speech, and a dysfunctional one atthat. The pleasure of acting the marionette is almost palpable inMuratova's extras as they engage in artistic declamation while acting thestreet scenes, the conversations at the cemetery, in the food line or at thebus stop. Two fleshy women, looking almost identical in their head scarvesand discussing how they love their dogs and hate their worthless hus-bands, repeat the same conversational turn, with the same artificial into-nations, with the same wording several times in a row (Taubman 2000:18-19). Sometimes, there are longer pieces of speech which sound likethoroughly - too thoroughly - rehearsed improvised monologues (impro-visation does not in principle mean lack of rehearsal), like the one deliv-ered in the same episode by an old lady in the street who cheerfully relatesthe sad story of how her hopes were deceived as she was dreaming of get-ting herself a companion, a sweet little dog (sobatchka, she says, with anendearing, preciously old-fashioned hardening of ch- instead of the soft ch'-as dictated by the orthoepic norm).

The worst enemy of psychological realism is the actor's clich6d, narcissis-tic, self-conscious, show-offish performance: it is detested by the realisticdirector as 'provincial/amateur theatre'. All this garbage, according toMuratova, is film's best friend, the object of collecting, cultivating and dis-playing. Narcissism is the essence of the actor's being, the nature of acting.The actorly Narcissus is at the very core of the acting human being, perish-able and in need of preservation on film.23 This rotten human dust is thestuff she works with: slowed down, reiterated and magnified in amateur per-formance, actorly automatisms create the aura of essentially human weak-ness and fragility, the feeling of the fleeting momentariness of humanexistence which Muratova is so eager to preserve on celluloid. It is the mari-onette, the automaton at the heart of the human being that creates human-ness in Muratova's characters - and this is what creates the crucialdifference between critique in Muratova, who loves her marionettes, andAdorno, who sees the marionette as the insignia of reaction and seeks thedemystification of the automaton. Such an automaton is not given to theanimals - nor are they blessed with the playful enjoyment of the automatonin humanness. As there is no marionette inside the dog's being, there is,therefore, no automatic reproduction of that being, and no togethernesswith others as automatically reproducible beings. While the mortality of thehuman is redeemed in the immortality of the narcissistic marionette, thedeath of a dog at the dog pound is beyond redemption: 'This is not talkedabout, this is not shown, this lies beyond the discussion about good and evil'(Taubman 2000: 36-37; modified translation), Muratova comments in apiece of titling, as if not only the words and images, but the voice itself fails her.

22. Muratova speaks inmany interviewsabout her dream ofmaking a silent movieand about her lovefor Charlie Chaplin,see for example,Goncharova (2006).

23. Actors are '...livinghuman beings. Theycan get sick, they candie, you see, they cansimply vanish. [...]These are livingbeings that are subjectto decay anddisappearance. Myprincipal desire is, as Itell my actors, "toherd you all andtranspose you oncelluloid as soon aspossible" (zagnat' vplenku). In fact, to killthem, if you knowwhat I mean' (KiraMuratova in aninterview withGoncharova (2006)).

A glossolalic glasnost and the re-tuning of the Soviet subject: sound performance... 77

24. Produced in 1985 atthe Ermolova Theatrein Moscow, directed byValerdi Fokin. Acontemporary criticdescribes the period as'...febrile, chaotic,ecstatic and vociferous(golosistye) times. Theplaywrights wereappealing to theaudience: "Speak!Do speak!" Thecharacters in theplay were giving anorder: "Fight!" Theperformance was anoisy call to strugglefor truth, and theaudience with leftistsympathies wereecstatically joiningthe characters in theplay' (Lyndina 1999).

In comparison with the muteness of the dog that is doomed to extermina-tion, the prattle of the human marionette, the buzz of living, the hum ofnonsensical, insane, narcissistic conversation starts to feel relaxing andreassuring: as long as humanness is automatic, such a human being -pathetically voluble, naYvely self-conscious and manipulable - is immortal,since the marionette has no death.

Thus, the audio-faktura of speaking in Asthenic Syndrome is createdthrough the interplay of automatisms: idiosyncratic speech mannerisms,in the plane of expression, coupled with the utter commonplaces of clich6ddiscourse in the plane of content. This is a curious kind of communication,a perversion of 6ffentlichkeit: here, language is not used for the productionof meaningful, intelligible utterances but instead an utterance becomes anextension of the subject's physical presence. Words work like sonar: thesound transmitted from one body reflects from the surrounding bodies andreturns to the original source, not as a reply but as a response of the ambi-ence, a confirmation that the speech-emitting body is not alone amongother speech-emitting bodies. Speech knits a tightly woven network oftouches (or blows, which is much more often the case).

A glossolalic glasnostGlasnost, the realigning of Stalinist language to the changing realities of asystem crisis, was to act as the symbolic fuel of perestroika: the opening up ofthe public language and the upgrading of its defunct subjectivity. Seeking toextract the energy needed for the progress of perestroika in a certain eman-cipation of political speech, glasnost produced quite a strong movement infavour of the speaking voice. In the collective imagination, emancipatedvocality came to represent freedom as such. One of the groundbreaking the-atre performances of that time was called Govoril ('Speak!').24 Numerouspolitical posters were also encouraging the citizens to speak out. The voice ofthe leader of perestroika, his very manner of speech with his popular (andpopulistic) substandard South Russian accent and soft singing intonationstogether with the peculiar lexical coinages, became emblematic of his wholerule as they were reproduced in thousands of private jokes and parodies.Vocality became a symbol to designate change and freedom, primarily thefreedom of speech, the encouragement to voice opinions, to speak out, whichalso automatically meant 'to tell the truth'.

The emancipation of the voice, however, requires not only the utterance ofmessages but also their reception by the ear of the listener: as meaning is ulti-mately produced in listening, there is no use in any freedom of speech if thereis no one to do the work of hearing. A veritable furore of vocalization, glasnostalso produced a bitter frustration in the collective hearing, as the Soviet earwas not capable of making any sense at all from this furore. It is exactly in thehearing, i.e. in the reception of glasnost and the individual responses to itsmessage, that the project was encountering the greatest resistance: the collec-tive ear of the Soviet citizen, educated to listen to the voice of administrativecommand, refused to trust the new vocality of emancipation that was beingproduced by the Gorbachev supporters among the freedom-loving (quitevocal and verbose) intelligentsia of the mid- and late 1980s. The furore ofvocality was encountered by the asthenia of understanding.

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It is certainly the furore of glasnost, the naYve emancipatory pathos of theverbose pro-Gorbachev intelligentsia that the mischievous Muratova ismocking in Asthenic Syndrome. It is a teasing, sometimes melancholy, butmost of the time vicious and cruel Muratova that confronts the glossolalicglasnost, especially if one considers cruelty in the sense of another artist of(audio-)performance, Antonin Artaud, who constructed sound in his theatreof cruelty as tactile violence against the public, an intervention in the placid-ity of the audience watching the spectacle in the safe enclosure of a theatrehall.2 5 Muratova's film is a mockery of her own class, probably of her ownself, and definitely of her audience, the enlightened 'intelligent' hopelesslystuck in metaphysical provinciality, a subject in exile from history, isolatedfrom the centres of economic, political, or symbolic life, and doomed to dis-cern the signs of such a life in occasional remote echoes. It is a poor subject,both in terms of income and in Walter Benjamin's deeper sense of the impov-erishment of experience in technological modernity."6 And it is a subject thatin its existential poverty is at the same time choking on the excess of speech:having too much to say and feverishly seeking any opportunity to give ventto the speech pent up in her by the years of non-vocality, the subject eruptsinto volcanic outbursts of speaking with no connection either with the con-text or with the presence of an audience, making no sense for herself or forthe others.

And such is also the film viewer, the one whose safety (to paraphraseArtaud) is protected by the screen and who in his vanity dreams of himselfas being different from the glossolalic poor devils he sees on the screen, asubject who imagines himself to be in the centre, capable of making sense,and privileged in pronouncing judgements. To tease the smugness of herspectator, Muratova is using her Artaud-inspired theatre of cruelty, both invisual and sonic terms. She presents the cultivated eye of the Soviet art-house film public with the unthinkable, indecent sights of rotten rubbish,overcrowded muddy cemeteries, deformed nudes, the madness of theeveryday of the communal apartments and the scenes of exterminationof stray dogs in a dog pound. In a comparable manner, Muratova's image ofvocality in Asthenic Syndrome is a representation of the vocal landscape ofglasnost and at the same time a diagnosis of vocality as something thatessentially is non-language. Such a glasnost is hysteria:

[...] strings of meaningless syllables made up of sounds taken from thosefamiliar to the speaker and put together more or less haphazardly [...]Glossolalia is language-like because the speaker unconsciously wants it to belanguage-like. Yet in spite of superficial similarities, glossolalia fundamen-tally is not language.

(Nickell 1993: 108)

Thus, the hysterical glossolalia of glasnost is unholy, it is not inspired byPentecost, and its shamanistic practices only pretend to replace theStalinist language (the second burial of Stalin as discussed at the begin-ning of my analysis.) What comes in the stead of Stalin, however, is no lan-guage at all, but a pantomime of communication whose meaning findsitself disempowered and in a state of morbid asthenia.

25. On Artaud and hispractice of cruelty insound, see Hollier(1997: 27-37).

26. The impoverishmentof experience throughtechnology lies atthe foundation ofBenjamin's philosophyof the media and isdiscussed in his essaysExperience and Poverty(1933) and othertexts from 1936dedicated to theproblems of art andtechnology inBenjamin (1999:731-35 and 2002:143-66).

A glossolalic glasnost and the re-tuning of the Soviet subject: sound performance... 79

27. A detailed descriptionof the scandal thatAsthenic Syndromproduced indistribution hasbeen provided byTaubman (2000,2005). This episodegives Muratova's filmthe outstandingstatus of the first workof art banned bycensorship after thedismantling of itsofficial institutionsby Gorbachev.

A meta-filmic apocalypseThe critical response to Asthenic Syndrome when it finally, after a long strug-gle with distribution,27 did reach the screens, was as unanimously ecstaticas it was terrified. Muratova was proclaimed an undisputed genius, and herfilm was as indisputably acknowledged to be the ultimately true story of theultimate Soviet apocalypse.

Muratova's apocalyptic film conceals a lot of tongue-in-cheek, fingers-crossed merriment behind its frightening, cruel images: she both shares thecatastrophic expectations of her class and is amused by the bizarre expres-sion that these expectations, well-grounded as they might be, receive in thefurore of emancipated public speaking. However, merriment notwithstand-ing, the strong sense of apocalyptism in Asthenic Syndrome should not beneglected. Muratova's premonition of collapse is not only caused by thehalf-heartedness of Gorbachev's reform. It is at this point that I would chal-lenge the interpretation of the film as a divination of the end of the USSR byunderlying its methodological connections to the mournful allegory inBenjamin (see above). Asthenic Syndrome contains a very important state-ment about the doom of the USSR, but not merely as a geopolitical or eco-nomic reality - rather, and primarily, as a specifically filmic construction, asa cinematic attraction, and a project of bio-politics as this was originallyconceived and experimented with in Soviet avant-garde film in the 1920s.

It has been convincingly shown by Deleuze (1986) that avant-gardefilm with its camera techniques and montage has contributed considerablyto the creation of the automaton of the mass individual: a technologicalprosthesis of seeing and later hearing that aimed at the constitution of thecollective body of 'the new man', the mass individual, the subject of the his-tory of the twentieth century. Even though Deleuze never refers to WalterBenjamin, his theory of the automaton correlates with the latter's theory ofdistraction (Zerstreuung) (Benjamin 2002: 101-33; 141-42). In his analy-sis in the 1930s, Benjamin claims that, given the devastating economic andpolitical effects of World War I, Man is no longer capable of mobilizing expe-rience for orientation in the new reality of crisis, inflation, the imminenceof a new world war and revolution. The fatal impoverishment of experiencereveals itself on a level that underlies that of understanding, language,memory and knowledge, in other words, a level that precedes the condi-tions of subjectivity and determines the ability of being answerable inaction. This is the level of the immediate experience of the body, sensitivityand perception. It is in its perception that the impoverished individual isdefeated and paralysed as subject. And it is the task of progressive art, andespecially film, to compensate the individual for this severe impairment ofsensitivity. Film's historical and political mission, according to Benjamin, isto create a new sensibility for the mass individual, to help him gain a newvision of himself, his class identity and the critical understanding of reality.Avant-garde film must mobilize all its technical potential in order to ensurethe solidarity of seeing (and hearing) for the working class and thus toorganize it towards resistance against fascism with its 'aestheticization ofhistory' that inevitably culminates in a new world war.

Like Deleuze after him, Benjamin situates the meaning and the event offilm not in the expression by the film-maker, but in the perception of theaudience, and this is also how Adorno analyses musical 'insignia' and

Irina Sandomirskaia80

what Cage does in his sound performances. It is in the vision and in thehearing, not in the making, that film actually happens and becomes areality. The politics of perception thus become the primary object of artis-tic intervention for the avant-garde, as is also the case in Muratova's work.

For the Soviet film avant-garde, however, it is not only a project in bio-power (compare the empowerment of proletarian vision as a recurrentmotive in the writing of Dziga Vertov and his work on the 'symphony' ofseeing and hearing in his first sound film, The Symphony of Donbass(Entuziazm: Simfoniia Donbassa, 1931)). The avant-garde film also claims arevolutionary redefinition of space: a geopolitical empowerment of the pro-letariat through the technological enhancement of their vision with thehelp of camera work and montage. The avant-garde's most importantgeopolitical project is, of course, Vertov's One Sixth of the World (Shestaiachast' mira, 1926), a film in which a filmic USSR is being constructed withthe help of the 'interval' and other techniques that Vertov invents to helpthe proletarian masses to appropriate, to accept the USSR in their symbolicpossession, to become the subjects of Soviet economy and politics througha technologically enhanced collective vision of the Kino-eye.

If there is an apocalyptism in Muratova's Asthenic Syndrome, it refers tothe catastrophe of a specifically filmic project, the bio-political and geopolit-ical automaton of Sovietness as it had been produced by the avant-garde.The disaster happens primarily to the USSR as a cinematic effect in the per-ception of the audience. In this sense, Muratova has to be given her due notonly as an interpreter of the Soviet historical project, but primarily as anattentive analyst of the avant-garde, a critic of the utopia of film in general.Importantly, while criticizing film's pretensions, Muratova employs thosevery technologies (in my case, the technologies of sound) that film hasdeveloped in its own search for the utopian cinematic USSR. AsthenicSyndrome is a critical judgement of film, and not merely proclaimed but alsoperformed through film's own techniques. The performative value of her(audio)-performance is unique. This is what creates Muratova's enigma andthe lasting significance of Asthenic Syndrome in cinematography.

A preliminary version of this article was presented at BASEES in 2006 on a panel

organized by the research project 'The Landslide of the Norm: Linguistic Liberalisationand Literary Development in Russia in the 1920s and 1990s', University of Bergen,Norway.

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Suggested citationSandomirskaia, I. (2008), A glossolalic glasnost and the re-tuning of the Soviet

subject: sound performance in Kira Muratova's Asthenic Syndrome', Studies inRussian and Soviet Cinema 2: 1, pp. 63-83, doi: 10.1386/srsc.2.1.63/1

Contributor detailsIrina Sandomirskaia is Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Baltic andEastern European Studies, University College S6dert6rn (Sweden). She received herdoctoral degree in theoretical linguistics and continued working in feminist theoryand discourse analysis. Her research includes a socio-lingual analysis of Soviet docu-ments of everyday life, a study of discursive practices in Russian and Soviet patrioticlanguage, and numerous contributions to contemporary art theory. Her recentresearch is connected with the bio-politics of language, including the individual strate-gies of constructing subjectivity in writing against the background of language plan-ning and management in Stalin's USSR; the linguistic conditions of deaf-blindness andthe manufacturing of a deaf-blind subjectivity a case study in Soviet special education.Contact: Professor Irina Sandomirskaia, CBEES, University College Sbdertbrn,SE-4189 Huddinge, Sweden.E-mail: Irina.Sandomirskaja@sh.se

A glossolalic glasnost and the re-tuning of the Soviet subject: sound performance... 83

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TITLE: A glossolalic glasnost and the re-tuning of the Sovietsubject: sound performance in Kira Muratova’s “AsthenicSyndrome”

SOURCE: Stud Russ Sov Cinema 2 no1 2008

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