Lost in Translation? Early Soviet Sound Film Abroad

Abstract

Soviet films of the silent era famously shook the world. After its 1926 Berlin premiere, Battleship ‘Potemkin’ was said to have ‘left an indelible mark in the history of world cinema’.¹ It was the most prominent of a number of Soviet films to have done so, including those of Pudovkin and Dovzhenko. This influence is normally assumed to have ended with the transition to sound, and an attendant change in film style. Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov’s 1928 ‘Statement on Sound’ ends by warning that talkies will result in the end of ‘the international nature of cin­ema’ with film ‘imprisoned within national markets’.² The consensus is that this is precisely what happened: British film historian Ian Christie has characterized the transition to sound in the Soviet Union as a shift from an‘internationalist’ cinema to a‘domestic mass medium’.³ Christie asserts that the‘international propaganda role of Soviet cinema dwindled in importance’, linking this purported shift to triumph of the doctrine of Socialism in one Country.⁴ The American distributors for Soviet film, Amkino, summed up the temporary demise of the company during the Nazi–Soviet pact in 1940 as follows: ‘Soviet talkies have always been less popular than Soviet silent films.’ According to this view, the coming of sound was a ‘catastrophe’ for Soviet film, triggering an instant slump in foreign acclaim.⁵ The purported loss of Soviet films’ popularity abroad is typically associated with their inferior quality and less challenging aes­thetic form.⁶ This was the view of British documentary pioneer John Grierson, writing in 1935,⁷ and the judgement of posterity seemingly concurs: while Soviet silents are widely seen and discussed to this day, early Soviet sound films are generally ignored outside Russia itself, where it is Soviet silent films that tend to be neglected.