Free | No ticket required

Mead Witter School of Music Musicology Colloquium Series
Co-sponsored by the Center for Russia, East Europe & Central Asia (CREECA)

Humanities Building
Room 2441

Matthew Kendall presents:
The End of Fidelity: Learning to Speak Soviet in Kheifits and Zarkhi’s  His Name is Sukhe-Bator (1942)

This talk explores the sonic representation of ethnic alterity in the mid-century Soviet Cinema. By presenting a case study of Iosif Kheifits and Aleksandr Zarkhi’s 1942 film, His Name is Sukhe-Bator, I show that cinematic representations of the Soviet state’s complex nationalities policy were as indebted to ideology as they were to the material constraints of sound recording. In the talk, I tell a story about the emergence and ossification of a variety of techniques for producing and listening to vocal recordings in the mid-century Soviet Union. These techniques guided the Russian sound engineers who aimed to depict a sonic form of ethnic difference in the cinema, but as I show, recorded vocal performances on the Soviet screen had little in common with the ethnic or class identities they alleged to represent. Instead, they were indebted to a set of rules that had taken root within the industry and practice of Soviet sound recording, which overlooked sonic realism and produced something else entirely. The larger frame of the talk thus tells a story about how sound recording in the Soviet Union aided a project of cultural visibility that eschewed particularity, and how sound recording molded Soviet popular culture’s representations of diversity into shapes that were, paradoxically, as emancipatory as they were constraining.

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Matthew Kendall is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research broadly explores the various intersections, relationships, and rivalries that formed between literary writing, popular filmmaking, and mechanical recording technologies in the 20th century, and he has published on topics including Soviet 3D cinema, Russian digital games, and the history of Soviet sound recording in Russian Review, Russian Literature, and Slavic Review. His book project, Revolutions per Minute, is a cultural history of Soviet sound recording that explores this recording technique’s impact on literary and cinematic production in the first half of the Soviet century.