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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-tuning of the Soviet subject: sound performance
in Kira Muratova's Asthenic Syndrome
Irina Sandomirskaia University College S6dert6rn Abstract Keywords

This article attempts to interpret Kira Muratova's Asthenic Syndrome (1989) Muratova from the point of view of the director's work with sound. I suggest that in com- sound performance posing the sound for the film, Muratova seeks to dissect the filmic convention that glasnost treats sound merely as an additional element, which is supposed to support the language politics illusionism of the realistic visual image by complementing it with the illusion of speech culture an accompanying realistic audio image. In order to subvert this false motivation Soviet psychiatry of sound by visuality, to highlight sound as an independent agent in the construction of meaning, and to emphasize the explosive criticalpotential 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 hearing that constitute the USSR in crisis, a society that imagines itself through audio metaphors: glasnost, related to the Russian word golos (voice), and perestroika, related to the Russian term nastroika, tuning (of a musical instrument or an acoustic device). As a result, heteroglossy receives a literalimplementation in the spoken word, which is acutely and irreparablyout of tune, alienatedfrom 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 substandardarticulation, the emphasis on hybrid or dialectalprosody and phonation, amateur declamations and recitals and other manipulations of the Soviet norms of high diction. I also explore the genealogy of Muratova's technology 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 mourningand a diagnosisof asthenia in both film as technology and in the (collective perception of the) USSR as the symbolic product of film technologies.

The second funeral of Stalin, glasnost and asthenia


In 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

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

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1.

In my analysis of perestroika I am using three etymologically related meanings of the Russian root stroi-: (1) related to building or rebuilding, as in stroit' and perestraivat', (2) related to forming ranks as in the ranks of soldiers at the military parade, cf. stroit'siav kolonnu (form a column) and perestraivat'sia(change ranks), and (3) related to acoustic harmonies, the tuning of musical instruments and acoustic devices, such as nastraivat'(tune) and nastroishchik (tuner) - the latter also being the title of one of Muratova's later films. 1 am deeply indebted to Jane Taubman (2000) for her meticulous analysis of the film, which equipped me with a perfect launching pad for my own reflection.

2.

and the subsequent re-assembly, the re-tuning, and the re-alignment' of Soviet subjectivity - admitted the need of repairs and thus tacitly acknowledged that the organic cohesion of Soviet subjectivity as it had been cultivated in the predominantly Stalinist regime no longer held: the synthesis of Sovietness in the new generation of the 1980s was dysfunctional, and so was the syntax of the language through which the Soviet subject was institutionalized. Sovietness had stopped making sense: its categories and reality - as they had been synthesized through the structures of normalized Russian language - were visibly dysfunctional. Perestroika was an attempt at structural intervention into what was already moving towards meaninglessness by accelerating (uskorenie) the nonsensical and hoping thus to force it back into sense. It is not by chance that the film that produced the most penetrating analysis of this project of the disassembly and reassembly of the Soviet meaning was given a title that leads associations directly into the mental hospital, the asylum of nonsense, Kira Muratova's Asthenic Syndrome (Astenicheskiisindrom, 1989). As I demonstrate later, the film performs this state of dissolution as it narrates it, and its performative value is connected with Muratova's approach to expression as tactility rather than representation. I argue that Muratova's experimentation in transforming filmic expression into a cinematic touch is her way of implementing the programmatic issue put forward by the avantgarde of the 1920s-1930s: cinema's power to intervene into reality by affecting the viewers' perception of reality, and thus encouraging the will to transform it. Asthenic Syndrome is narrated with the purpose of exploding narrativity as such, and therefore offering a synopsis would mean to invite the reader to follow and see together (as the Greek synopsis literally means) the techniques and effects of her subversion. Muratova glues narrative fragments together in such a way as to undermine rather than encourage the viewer's desire of synthesis. In her script the important elements are the gaps, interruptions of time and plot, as well as other misfits between episodes: she practises a critical montage of narrative patches with the purpose of displaying the seams of the patchwork on the reverse side of the fabric. Her story is put together in seemingly large, crude and hasty stitches, with rotten threads and seams full of lice, hardly holding together; the entire construction therefore threatens to open on to a void. This is achieved through a perfect mastery of filmic narrative techniques. The above-mentioned non-narratability of the film is achieved by an overproduction of narratives without beginning or end (see Jane Taubman's episode-by-episode reconstruction of the story, which is extremely helpful even for the most experienced viewer of Muratova's films when trying to make sense of her labyrinthine storytelling). 2 It is customary to divide Asthenic Syndrome into two major stories. Part 1 shows the main character, Natasha - a woman who has just buried her husband or lover - in a state of acute mourning. She acts out her trauma on the surrounding people - friends, family, colleagues, passers-by and every human being that happens to cross her path. Step after step, the grief that possesses Natasha becomes more and more destructive: she ruthlessly purges her existence of everything that had constituted the meaning of the life with the man she loved. Home, friendship, warmth and sympathy, professional achievement, social status, self-respect and simply good manners - all these
64 Irina Sandomirskaia

are cast behind in the blind fury of despair as she mourns the death of love itself. A woman abandoned in (or rather, by) love, a typical Muratova character, is portrayed in a typical Muratova style that we recognize from her earlier films, such as Brief Encounters (Korotkie vstrechi, 1967) and A Long Goodbye (Dolgoe proshchanie, 1971). As in these earlier films, what is important in Natasha's story is the backdrop against which it is set. The focus of the austere black-and-white, New Wave-styled visuality now seems to shift onto the background objects and figures: the scenes of everyday life in Odessa, the materiality of its realia (the cemetery, the tram stop, the residence project, the construction site, the hospital), its characters and especially its sounds. The social realism of the first part is brutally exploded when we discover that Natasha's story is actually a piece of fiction, and not a very successful one. 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 disappears from Asthenic Syndrome - never to return again. The viewer now follows Nikolai, an unsuccessful author suffering from a severe writer's block, as he is sleepwalking through a whole chain of Soviet institutions in his somnambulant search for inspiration and income. We thus visit a communal apartment, a class in school, a teachers' meeting, an underground artists' salon, as well as the homes of some secondary figures as Nikolai makes his way to his own home and family. The viewer visits a dog pound where Muratova presents a long, inhumanly detailed close-up of the faces (not muzzles) of dogs in cages waiting to be exterminated by the cheerful 3 staff in the presence of a compassionate and pleasurably agitated public. Eventually Nikolai is confined in a mental institution, supposedly diagnosed with 'asthenic syndrome'. Again, the character himself, the tortures of his

3.

There is an allusion to Kafka's Penal Colony, without a doubt, just as the whole of the film can be considered as a reflection on Kafka's Castle; Muratova's use of literature, however, is a topic for special study.

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


A glossolalic glasnost and the re-tuning of the Soviet subject: sound performance... 65

4. The Soviet school of minor psychiatry takes its origins in the work of Petr Gannushkin (1875-1933) whose books Klinika psikhopatii,ikh statika, dinamika,sistematika (The Clinical Theory of Psychopathies:Statics, Dynamics, and Systematization) and Klinika maloipsikhiatril (The Clinical Theory of MinorPsychiatry) were published in the early 1930s when Soviet psychoanalysis had been defeated and other, more conventional, more ideologically reliable doctrines of therapy were being developed. Gannushkin's theory of minor psychiatry as a pathology of character (behaviour) received a renaissance in the 1970s and remains a working theory in post-Soviet psychiatry and psychology in Russia. See Gannushkin (1933). 5. Associated mostly with the work of Andrei Snezhnevskii (1904-87), the architect of Soviet repressive psychiatry and for a long time director at the Serbskii Institute of Forensic Psychiatry which was affiliated to the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences and is well-known for its role in the repression of the Soviet dissident movement in the 1960s-1970s. On the linguistic construction of the USSR in Stalin's Marxism andQuestions of Linguistics, see Sandomirskaia (2006).

6.

sleepy progression through the circles of the everyday Soviet inferno are less important than the lively micro-dramas that are acted out by extras in their natural environments to create a background for the many internally unrelated episodes in the story. In the end, Nikolai is drowned in his progressing narcolepsy and his unconscious body is slowly taken away into darkness in an underground metro carriage moving to the depot. Life has abandoned him, together with the talking, swearing, love-declaring and quarrelling passengers who left the train at the terminus. I shall start my analysis by returning to the film's enigmatic title. What is asthenia? In the medical language of the 19 70s when Soviet psychiatry 4 reinvented its minor domain (malaiapsikhiatriia), i.e. therapy of neurosis and psychopathy, 'asthenia' was a term that served as a euphemism for milder and fixable, manageable forms of madness. Another uniquely Soviet term was 'slowly progressing schizophrenia' (another invention of Soviet 5 psychiatry in the 19 70s, this time major psychiatry, bol'shaiapsikhiatriia). This was a fearful diagnosis that presupposed the incapacitation of the legal subject and was therefore used against dissidents to repress direct political opposition. In distinction to that, asthenia did not convey a connotation of political protest but rather referred to minor dysfunctions of socialization, i.e. smaller, negligible breaches in the discipline of Soviet subjectivity These pathologies did not demand institutionalization and the subject was supposed to eliminate the asthenic syndrome in himself and by himself, with the help of rudimentary analysis, hypnosis or minor antidepressants. While slowly progressing schizophrenia, the 'madness' of the dissidents, implied a total rejection of Sovietness and was subject to equally total and unconditional repression (by heavy medication and confinement in isolated hospital wards), asthenia was a term for an emotional or behavioural disturbance that was identified in the colluding and collaborating intelligentsia as it arises in a minor, non-ideological conflict between the thinking subject and the symbolic regime which produces subjectivity The collapsing cohesion of such a colluding, non-oppositional subjectivity was believed to be repairable through a realignment of desires, a kind of perestroika of the soul. It is evidently this medical and political utopia of a subject thus realigning himself, by mobilizing strictly internal resources (uskorenie, or acceleration) and by slightly adapting the dominant language to the desires thus realigned (glasnost'), a diagnosis of meaning in a temporary state of weakness, that Muratova is dissecting in her remarkable film. Asthenic Syndrome bears witness to and reflects the second attempt, after Khrushchev's speech at the twentieth CPSU Congress in 1956, to deStalinize Stalin's empire, to cure the asthenia of Stalinism by opening up public language as it had been officially established since 1950, the year when Stalin's discussion on language was crowned with the official doctrine of language presented in Marxism and the Questions of Linguistics.6 There is one episode in the film that I consider to be epigraphic to Muratova's analysis 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 a momentary close-up of the body's dead face. For a short time, the viewer sees a face that produces a striking similarity to the canonic representations of Stalin. Other than this fleeting moment of uncertain recognition, there is nothing 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 the USSR. I shall take this short sequence as a starting point in my reflection concentrate about Asthenic Syndrome as a political critique and subsequently 7 on its reading as an allegory in the Benjaminian sense. I shall here return to the questions of mourning and apocalypse in Muratova. As distinct from Jane Taubman who agrees with the contemporary Soviet understanding of Muratova's apocalypsism as an expression of the end 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 also experimented with sound, or rather with the vocalization of the text of the script - as, for instance, in the seemingly arbitrary repetitions of apparently random utterances in Getting to Know the Big Wide World (Poznavaia belyi svet, 1979). Never before, however, had she used sound in such an explicitly performative way, and never before had she achieved such a level of precision in constructing the soundtrack as an allegory. When Muratova later tried to develop this technique in Chekhovian Motifs (Chekhovskie motivy, 2002), her philosophic critique gave way to a more publicistic criticism of the detestable New Russian (novyi russkii), the subject of the 'criminal capitalism' of the late 1990s. This film, I believe, was a step back (in what concerns the work with sound, but not her other methods) as compared to the experimental search of Asthenic Syndrome precisely because she gave up philosophic allegorism for the sake of a satirically distorted hyperrealistic image (for instance, the pivotal scene in the film, the wedding ceremony in the church, was filmed in real time). In the fairy tale The Sentimental Policeman (Chuvstvitel'nyi militsioner, 1992)9 and especially in The Tuner (Nastroishchik,2004) ('an easy film', in her own words), comparable sound and speech techniques produce the effect of decorative vignettes or function as signatures of the master's own hand. Asthenic Syndrome, on the contrary, was an audio-allegory of a time that imagined itself in audio-metaphors (glasnost'), a materialist analysis of glasnost as an audio-scape, a critique performed through the means of audioperformance. Therefore, instead of focusing on Muratova's outstanding (and widely discussed) narrative and visuality, I focus on Asthenic Syndrome as a work of sound art in the disguise of a naturalistic soundtrack. In doing this, I address four questions: (1) How does Muratova use sound to produce an audio-portrait of a historical era at the threshold of a radical turn? (2) What tools does she use in order to perform glasnost as materially palpable vocal textures in the soundtrack? (3) How does she critically dissect glasnost and contemporary Russian history in general by making her soundtrack act out the metaphors of glasnost's political language? (4) What are the lines of continuity in Muratova's work with fflmic sound and how can one assess the meta-fflmic level in her work, as a film about fdlmic and cinematic effects in the construction of reality? The noise of asthenic silence Graham Roberts analyses Muratova's work as a practice of Bakhtin's heteroglossy, as she 'inverts the distinction between the dominant and subordinate languages of Soviet society, marginalizing the former and prioritizing the latter' (Roberts 1997: 312). My purpose here is to illuminate the techniques of heteroglossy as these are elaborated in Asthenic Syndrome. Thus
A glossolalic glasnost and the re-tuning of the Soviet subject: sound performance... 67

7.

There is a considerable body of literature discussing Benjamin's allegory as an instrument of historical-materialist analysis of expression. It is noteworthy that in The Originof German Tragic Drama, Benjamin proposes the allegory as a means of materialist epistemological critique of the symbol. The symbol is a god-given, eternal (i.e. ahistorical) sign, while the allegory is the expression that is acutely aware of its own man-madeness, its constructedness by the human as part of human self-production and in the knowledge of the human being's fmitude as a historical subject. While symbol presupposes faith, allegory presupposes a method of knowing about self and history. Hence, the melancholy of the allegorist is not an emotional disposition, but the mode and the effect of this knowledge. Hence, also, a specific mournful eschatology, a negativism that is characteristic of the allegory as compared to the glorious positivity of the eternal symbol.

8. According to a Soviet film critic, 'in Muratova's film we clearly taste the approaching catastrophe, or rather the catastrophe that has already begun'. For this and other apocalyptic responses to Asthenic Syndrome, see Taubman (2005: 45-61, 115-16). 9. On the narrative and linguistic elements in this film that allow its analysis as a fairy tale

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

my analysis complements both Roberts' work in terms of the technology of the 'inversion' and Emma Widdis's work as she reads Muratova's visuality in Deleuzian terms by complementing her analysis of visual textures with a study of Muratova's manipulation of the audio-faktura (Widdis 2005). Muratova's work, while constructing the very special sonority in Asthenic Syndrome, can be understood if one applies the principles of audio-art which has its origins in John Cage's principles of new music (Cage 1987: 3-56). New music makes no differentiation between tone and noise, between sound produced with intention (like music in the traditional sense) or without intention (like breathing or the beating of the heart). Thus nature and culture, intentionality and non-intentionality become irrelevant. Also, the contradistinction between sound and silence is put under a question mark: what we perceive as silence, Cage says, is an audio-space filled with noise that we cannot control, and a sound artist learns to use these noises as audio-objects found in nature, objets trouvis. The borrowing of such a sound in nature and its relocation into a piece of performance is comparable to the avant-garde visual arts' strategies of displaying technical artefacts (ready-mades) in art gallery spaces, as Marcel Duchamp did with his toilets and bottle racks. Such a relocation produces a clash between the texture of the pedestrian object and the normalizing discursivity of displaying art as it is embodied in the space of the gallery. This clash allows the avant-garde artist to perform a critique 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 'sedimented invariance' in the use of music (or, with a correction for Cage, any intended sound) as language: ... chords which are always to be used in identical functions, even worn-out combinations like the steps of a cadence, themselves often merely melodic phrases that reformulate the harmony [...] Their invariance has become sedimented, a kind of a second nature.
(Adorno and Gillespie 1993: 401-14)

The language of music is produced in the hearing, Adorno says, guided by politics of hearing that materializes in the work of hearing performed by the listening subject, the subject's taste and expectations in the reception of music. Hearing is thus culturally produced: it is educated by the syntax of correct harmonies and assumes this syntax as 'a second nature'. The work of listening thus tends to the conditions of Benjamin's technological reproducibility; in Adorno's interpretation, listening is an acoustic automaton producing (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 seeing) in film. I contend that Muratova's interest in identifying and disrupting audio-insignia could originate from her collaboration with the composer Oleg Karavaichuk, who had written music scores for several of her earlier films. The following quotation shows how the young Karavaichuk's performance 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 to Asthenic Syndrome, as has been noted by Taubman in her analysis of the film's reception. Also, we should note the features of a live sound performance, not just a concert execution of a musical piece, that Karavaichuk is staging in the concert hall: A gaunt, haggard figure with a shock of flaming golden hair, he rushed onto the stage of the Palace of Culture, holding one hand in front of his face to shield it from the audience [...] As soon as his hands touched the keys [.,.], he became [...] so captivated by the music that it was terrible to watch [...I At first it seemed to evoke some weird pictures of the first stirrings of a newborn world - completely atonal in character - then jazz rhythms came into evidence, followed by grim, ironical music, to which Karavaichuk weaved his body in strange contortions and sinuous movements. Unfortunately, at the climax the pianist stopped dead, swore heartily in Russian, and raced into the wings. [...] Karavaichuk may be a sick man, but he is undoubtedly a genius. It is refreshing in a country where there is so much conformity to find a composer who throws restraint to the wind and follows his natural inclinations.
(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 of Karavaichuk's well-staged and calculated scenic gesticulation, as deceptive and provocative as the carefully staged freakishness of Muratova's Asthenic Syndrome which would produce a similar reaction in its enlightened admirers. Constructing the sound for Asthenic Syndrome, Muratova experiments with what the ear of the harmoniously tuned listener identifies as antimusic: the meaningless noise, sound produced without and against intentionality. Here, it is not experimental music ('grim and ironic') but a cacophony of violent speech that overwhelms the ear and renders it helpless in the process of trying to make sense: the audience could as well be deaf. In this way, Muratova achieves the effect that Cage considered to be the supreme objective of musical composition: silence. Importantly, as I propose to show here, such a secondary silence in Muratova's performance is a specifically linguistic one: it is produced not by the clash of acoustic harmonies, 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 achieves total silence by producing maximum noise, and traditional music is only one of them. The music accompanying a few episodes in Asthenic Syndrome consist entirely of Adorno's 'sedimented insignia': a fragment of a Schubert quartet (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 the 1980s), and the no less popular 1920s American waltz Chaquita. In the world of the audience, these pieces possess automatic recognizability in combination with no identity at all. They are as recognizably faceless - or as facelessly recognizable - as the mass of episodic figures that populate Asthenic 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
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10. Compare the notion of the double articulation of language in structural linguistics, that is, sound articulated into meaningful phonemes and reality articulated

destiny. These are also the only figures in the film played by professionals. All the rest of the individuals are accidental and tangential; their stories remain unclarified, their fates unfollowed and their names ungiven anonymous characters and as anonymous actors - invariably recognized as something too familiar, too well known to be identified, named or remembered. Such are the people who live in the universe of the film, and such is the sound that accompanies the eventual implosion of this in effect surprisingly vital, even aggressive world that is filled to the brim with the deafening noises (in other words, Cage's silence) of intended violence and unintended hilarious enjoyment.

into meaningful
components by morphemes.

Emancipation of dissonance and haptic sonority


The silence of Muratova's asthenic world speaks in tongues: it is overflowing with voices, accents, juicy dialectal intonations, vernacular, socio- and idiolectal tones and timbres, squeaky pitches, individual defects of pronunciation and speech impediments, artificial manneristic articulations, yells, murmurs, whispers, lisps and sighs. This is the sound material that Muratova works with, selecting, arranging and montaging the voices as if working on a piece of Cagian score. She is seeking the subversion of tonality, i.e. the predictable harmony of sedimented (speech) sounds, the tearing off of the insignia of the phonetic laws and the orthoepic norms. In doing this work of emancipating dissonance, Muratova identifies and explores several lines of resistance. First, she challenges orthoepy, the norm of pronunciation, 'the relationship between pronunciation and a system of writing or spelling' (Oxford English Dictionary). In its hegemonic relation to orality, the orthoepic norm subjects the work of the speech organs to the discipline of a system of writing and thus dominates the body in the production of normalized, correct speech sounds. The emancipation of dissonance in this anti-orthoepic dimension reveals a conflict in speech production between body and system, a bio-politic in language: a potential conflict between the physiological status of the organs of speech and the demands of the system; between the orality of speech production and the normative regulation of written discourse. The second line of resistance as identified in Muratova'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 emerges between phonation and articulation:the making of (not necessarily meaningful) sounds and the demand for articulate, intelligible speech (in film). This is, therefore, the line that demarcates sense from non-sense and language from noise: the articulate word, that is, a flow of speech that is divisible into meaningful fragments, thus opposes itself to the world of inarticulate gibberish. Distinct articulation produces a distinctly articulated, systematically organized and intelligible reality. 10 Articulation is a threshold that is supposed to divide humanness from animality (human speech vs animal sounds), 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 giving of voice to the people. Muratova understands this literally and translates the metaphors of glasnost into the materiality of vocality, 'the possession or 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, acoustic and articulatory faktura1" - the structure of material as it reveals itself to the touch of the beholder, and as opposed to signification as it appeals to the intellect of the interpreter. She is playing with the tactility of speech uttered 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 the sounds of language as a work of haptic sonority. Hapticity is a term developed in visual semiotics and relates to the visual effects on the surface of the image that cannot be reduced to the structures of signification and do not represent the discursive content of the picture. Hapticity is an element of expression that 'touches' the eye instead of representing a concept or narrating an intelligible story. In its semiotic understanding, it is the gesture and the trace left on the surface of the visual object by the hand of the master, a physical presence of the human being in the materiality of a symbol. In Laura Marks's formulation, hapticity produces 'the skin of the film': film as 'membrane that brings its audience in contact with the material forms of memory' (Marks 2000: 242) and thus allows the message to escape the censuring interference of discourse. 12 As distinct from visual semiotics, where hapticity is a well-established phenomenon, nothing similar seems to have been worked out in relation to film sound, and Laura Marks resolutely excludes film sound from her analysis of the skin of film when she says that the 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 in relation to sound is even more relevant when one conceives a work of sound art as an effect of corporeality: as sound caressing or hurting the ear.14 What is at issue is a direct contact between the sound wave and the ear drum. Just as in visual haptics, sound contains a discursive message combined with a non-discursive intervention into the same message, a confirmation and a disruption of the rules of tonality; a confirmation of the hegemony of the orthoepic 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 the body of the listener. Since the orthoepic norm, just like tonality in traditional music, is the product of the discipline of the ear, late Soviet filmgoers were quite correct in evaluating Muratova's effort as quite violent, which sealed her reputation as not only a socially pessimistic, but also a very aggressive, 'unfeminine' director.' 5 Indeed, instead of catering for the expectations of naturalistic cinematography, instead of accompanying image with sound for a fuller illusionistic effect, the spoken word in Asthenic Syndrome attacks the hearing as if with the intention of disrupting the hearing by cutting the ear (compare the programmatic scene of the cutting of the eye in An Andalusian Dog by Salvator Dali and Luis Bufiuel, 1929). By making her soundtrack physically difficult for the audience to digest, Muratova is faithfully following the lessons of Sergei Eisenstein, his idea of film montage as tactile counterpoint. Eisenstein never reduced tactility to haptic visuality but implied the ability of the film to physically affect the audience whether in the composition of the narrative, visuality or sound."6 Muratova follows the Bufhuel/Dali example and the Eisenstein doctrine faithfully, and not without an ironic exaggeration.
A glossolalic glasnost and the re-tuning of the Soviet subject: sound performance... 71

11. On the tactile character of Muratova's visuality, see Widdis (2005). Faktura (translated from Russian as 'texture') was theoretically developed by futurism and the Russian avant-garde. For a critical history of the Russian concept of faktura see Buchloh (1984: 82-119). However, the tactile qualities in a piece of visual art were already appreciated as early as the seventeenth century in Venice, by the connoisseurs of painting who inspected the surface of the canvas with their fingers to recognize and admire the unique signatures of the master's hand as left in the brushwork, when painters were inventing new compositions of paint to make their painted surfaces 'speak' to the touch (Sohm 1991: 6-9). 12. On hapticity in visual representation, see also Gandelman (1991). 13. The subjectivity and meaning produced in the act of touching, the role of the touch in the construction and communication of meaning, its eros and pathos is analysed in Nancy and Derrida (2005). 14. See Russian expressions that describe the physical contact between sound and hearing in the act of listening: kasat'sia slukha (to touch one's hearing), laskat' slukh (to caress one's hearing) and rezat' slukhlukho (to cut one's hearing/ear).

15. The subjects of cruelty and nonfemininity regularly occur in Muratova's recent interviews, see for example, Shevelev (2005). On Muratova's 'cruelty' and the parallel between her work and Antonin Artaud, see below. 16. On the tactility of counterpoint, see Eisenstein's fragments in Neravnodushnaia priroda,2, (Eisenstein 2006: 310-506). 17. In order to align my analysis with the critical terms suggested by Adorno (tonality and atonality) and in order to achieve more cohesion with the starting point of my reflection on the connotation of perestroika as re-tuning a musical instrument, I simplify here the function of prepared piano in the production of music by reducing it to the tone. It is not only atonality that plays a role but also, and predominantly, rhythm. Rhythm in Muratova, however, is an important effect that embraces her narrative, visual and audio techniques and requires a separate discussion. The parallel between her construction of rhythm and the use of prepared piano by a new composer remains relevant, notwithstanding. 18. Kul'tura rechi (speech culture) began to evolve as an official doctrine of language in the mid-1930s when the constructivist linguistics of the early Soviet period were defeated by an

Being aggressive towards the audience, seeking to perform its message directly against the sensitivity of the body of the spectator, the film uses the audience as a musical instrument, a kind of prepared piano (as in the practices of Cage and Erik Satie before him). The prepared piano is obtained first by de-tuning the instrument in order to re-tune it again in a different way (hence my third etymology of 'stroi-' in perestroika noted above). Cage used to achieve the effect of out-of-tuneness by inserting everyday metal objects like nails and screws between the strings. This is comparable to Muratova's technique in producing the film's audio-skin as she makes her actors stutter, stammer, lisp and yell something vaguely articulate 17 through the discursivity of the script. Muratova's soundtrack is by no means an additional element to complement the illusionism of the image with a fuller illusionism of sonority. The sound is a world on its own rights, as carefully produced and responsibly thought through as the work of the camera. It is possible not only to watch the film, but also to listen to it as if it were an opera, it could be a perfect movie for the blind. But also for the deaf, those whose ears are blocked with the 'sedimented insignia' of discourse. Muratova's phonic/acoustic haptics slow down the easy flow of discourse generation to attract attention to the conditions of the production of speech. She thus makes us think about the act as such of speaking or listening: the politics of the emancipated vocality of glasnost whose freedom remains proclaimed but impracticable. Con furore: profane lips speaking in vernacular tongues Muratova's careful work on audio-faktura (and therefore, importantly, her own method of constructing the audio fact) would be merely an interesting effect if it did not challenge the phonic normativity as it had been for a long time 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 the 1930s-1970s were being established in parallel to the increasing control over the ideological correctness of the message. 'Stage speech' (stsenicheskaia rech') was a discipline taught to professional actors, radio announcers and propagandists.' 9 As an object of training, stsenicheskaia rech' presupposed a radical purging of natural speech of all local and idiosyncratic impurities, all impediments, mispronunciations and other faults. The standard pronunciation was found in the traditions of the Maly Theatre in Moscow. Individual speech-making idiosyncrasies like lisping and neurotic ,speech defects' like stammering were supposed to be eliminated by professionally trained speech therapists (one such session is presented in a piece of staged documentary footage in the prologue to Tarkovsky's Mirror (Zerkalo, 1975) where it serves as a philosophic epigraph to the whole of the work.) Stage speech was quite intolerant towards all traces of the local origin of speech: dialectisms in vocabularies as well as local accents were branded as 'uncultured' and subject to elimination, thus cleansing the speaking body of the traces of its genealogy and biography. As an object of theoretical reflection, stsenicheskaia rech' was constructed as the absolute exemplification of correct phonation, an organic product of the historical development of the norm of the literary Russian language, a symbol of an uninterrupted cultural tradition, and a marker of the natural coherence
72 Irina Sandomirskaia

between the Russian tradition of high culture and the norms of socialist culturedness as taught to the Soviet individual (Ozhegov 1974: 276-85). Stsenicheskaia rech' was supposed to serve as the norm in the relationship between the spoken word and the written text, between the sound and the letter 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, proceed from the expectations of the listener to hear stage speech in film and theatre, that is a faithful oral reproduction according to an established set of phonation rules of the written word of the script. In Muratova's film, the vernacular 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, excentricity in every meaning of the word. Odessa is Muratova's image of 'a black hole, the absolute province', 20 the end of the world, as it was also for the exiled Pushkin in the 1820s and as the territory that later on became Odessa had been for Ovid a thousand years earlier. Odessa was 'a hole' long before it became Odessa, a metaphysically ex-centric space, a symbol for all remoteness and exclusion. Hence, the everyday intonations and the syntax of everyday speech, heavily Ukrainianized but not Ukrainian (Odessa is an international 'backwater'); a not entirely Russian vocabulary, intonation patterns and articulation characteristic of (and recognizable for the audience as) the 'Odessa dialect'. Muratova's common people often speak in surzhik, a language that is believed by the purists to be a bastardized semi-language, either a corrupted Russian or a corrupted Ukranian. One notices that specific 'Odessa' singsong prosody that is often reproduced in 'Odessa' jokes or when mocking Jewish speech, as well as high pitch/volume/speed that one associates especially with the speech of South Russian women (a figure that is emblematic of 'unculturedness' in the eyes of Moscow), massive Ukrainianization in the pronunciation of Russian sounds, and a specific soft intoning which for the audience signifies both the lyrical and comic connotations of South Russian and/or Jewish provincialism. While normalized language unifies, vernacular produces difference, an innocent, but infectious and therefore dangerous violation of the unitary orthoepic norm. Linguistic, ethnic, gender and class dissonances, as well as those between the centre and periphery that are usually suppressed by the cultivated stage speech of the 'academic' actor, become strikingly obvious in vernacular performance. Even before this speech is analysed for its ideological content, these (from the point of view of Soviet ideology) inexistent splits manifest themselves with all clarity in the phonic peculiarities of the film's speech practices. Before the ideological correctness of speech can be put to the test, already the richness of forbidden vernacular expressions and modulations signals the insecurity of the orthoepic norm with its civilizational centripetal claims. Another trick to make the speech faktura audible is staging the enunciation by 'profane' voices of correct, 'cultured' written texts. An effect of the collapse of kul'turnost' is achieved through the use of non-professional
A glossolalic glasnost and the re-tuning of the Soviet subject: sound performance... 73

increasingly dogmatic and patriotic normative language science. The author of the first prescriptive Soviet dictionary of the Russian language (project started 1934), Dmitrii Ushakov (1873-1942), was also the strongest proponent of the idea of superimposing a unifying orthoepic norm onto the heteroglossia of the multilingual and multiethnic USSR in the education of the masses, which would be the final stage of the Cultural Revolution. Sergei Ozhegov (1900-64), another outstanding Soviet language planner and normalizer, described speech culture as 'a struggle': 'During the Soviet period, questions of language normalization, of regulation of language usage and pronunciation received an increased social meaningfulness and acquired the character of the struggle for the improvement of speech culture, for the correctness and exactitude of language, for its clarity and purity, for the skilled usage [by the speaking subject] of all expressive means of language' (Ozhegov 1974: 255). On the history of normalization of the spoken word in the USSR, see Gorham (2003); on post-Soviet purism and its roots in Soviet normalization, see Ryazanova-Clarke (2006). 19. Stsenicheskaia rech' (stage speech) is defined by the Soviet encyclopaedia as 'one of the main means in the theatrical

performance of drama. The actor who masters stage speech opens up the inner world, the social, psychological, ethnic and everyday character of
the character. [...] it

implies the sonority, flexibility and volume of voice, the development of breathing techniques, and the articulate and clear diction and intonational
expressiveness. [...]

During the Soviet period, the technique of stage speech is one of the most prominent disciplines taught at theatre schools and studios' ('Stsenicheskaia rech") 20. On the provinciality of Odessa as a meaningful factor in her fflm-making, see 'Kruglyi stol...' (2004). 21. On the use of nonprofessionals and the effects of the actorly faktura see (Plungian 2005).

actors, people from the street, passers-by, occasional visitors to the film studio, and family, neighbours and acquaintances.2 1 Muratova systematically abuses the normative routines of film-making by demonstrating her disregard for the rules of casting. By letting profane voices articulate professionally authored texts, she achieves the critical effect of the transposition of a readymade. The plane of expression (the vernacular phonics) is agglutinated to a plane of content that belongs to high culture, thus revealing the politics of high diction that remain invisible when a professional text is performed in a professional 'actorly' way. Such is, for example, the long sequence presenting the teachers' conference at school (see Taubman 2000: 35-36). The director is addressing his colleagues with a prepared speech about the new requirements that perestroika is presenting the school with: to educate the young generation as free creative subjects, to emancipate teaching from the shackles of routine and ideological clich6s. The teachers receive the director's speech merely as yet another bureaucratic intervention from above. The director is impersonated (rather than played) by a non-professional actor with a recognizable appearance of the provincial idealist intelligentsia, his speech precisely the kind of verbiage that during glasnost was produced on an almost routine basis in newspapers and on television. It is a clich6d discourse of the critique of another clich6d discourse. The response of the teachers, all picturesquely provincial non-professionals, the complaints and fears that they express instead of greeting the newly received freedom, all seem to be compiled out of the material of 'letters to the editor', also a popular and quite clich6d genre of 'criticism from below' that flourished in the press of the glasnost period. The work of the body as it struggles with phonation creates a dissonance to the uninterrupted flow of the officially approved text, its readymade, mechanically reproduced message. The dissonance is contained in the breakdown of the orthoepic norm: a carefully prepared piece of editorial, or a no less carefully worded 'letter to the editor' receives a profane voicing that mocks and undermines the gravity, the high diction of its message. Profane phonation in the delivery of canonized speech strikes the audience immediately as a gross misuse of literacy, as enlightenment gone wayward, an apocalypse of culture. Muratova is obviously enjoying this effect when she opens the film, right after a meticulous demonstration of a garbage bin, with another episode of profane declamation. A chorus of three very 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 to read carefully through the Work of Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy and everyone would understand absolutely everything. And everyone would become kind and intelligent.
(Taubman 2000: 4)

As if satirizing her own quite sincere sadness, her disappointment in literature that never succeeded in its mission of saving the world, Muratova makes her babushkas memorize and recite this piece in a desynchronized, but eager and cheerful chorus of voices. At the end of the film, two girls (representing one and the same character, Masha) cheerfully intone in two voices
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Irina Sandomirskaia

Figure 2: Asthenic Syndrome. Photo courtesy of Iskusstvo kino archive. a highly theatrical, stylistically very clich6d monologue that contains a declaration of Masha's love for the main character: 'Nikolasha, I love thee...' (Taubman 2000: 39-40). The sarcastic Muratova stages this episode in a mental hospital. Thus multiplied, doubled and tripled, de-synchronized and echoing itself, the profane voice is doing its best to reproduce a piece of high diction. The effect is quite devastating: cultured writing intoned in vernacular appears as profoundly false, mad, vain and absurdly artificial - including, quite sadly, Tolstoy himself, the genius of sincerity, the paragon of seriousness, the worst enemy of any artifice, and Muratova's favourite author. However, it would be a mistake believing (as Muratova wants us to believe) that Asthenic Syndrome is a documentation of the natural, genuine and authentic language of the masses. On the contrary, vernacular speech and profane diction are even more constructed, more cultivated by the director than scenic speech is in an ordinary soundtrack. Muratova uses nonprofessional actors and tells them to 'act naturally': a demand that contains a logical contradiction. This results in a gross over-usage of the idea of acting by the amateur, a piece of pathetic over-performance, a crooked image of all scenic behaviour in the mirror of a conscientious but helpless non-professional theatre. At the same time, Muratova preserves the naive enjoyment of a non-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 immense and the non-actors mobilize all their power of imagination to achieve 'real acting', presenting us with a naive embodiment of what they imagine is professional stage speech and professional stage habitus. Such performance becomes over-statement and over-articulation; all the clich6s of professional performance (in Russian: naigrysh) appear as in a magnifying glass, in a hyperbole of theatricality. The actors seem to be learning scenic speech in front of our eyes. Very long pauses between syntagms, a very slow speed of speech, an exaggeratedly clear division between syllables, over-emphasized logical stresses, hyperbolized upwards and downwards tone movements, pitch variations that transform meaningful intonations (questions, statements, expressions of doubt, surprise, etc.) into singing, and other grotesque elements are used in more or less rehearsed, more or less improvised, shorter or longer exchanges. Sometimes ornamented with double and triple repetitions of quite meaningless fragments of text, this over-conscientious execution gives speech an effect of pathological mannerism, obsessive rambling. It is an outstanding illustration of what Lacan felicitously designated with the neologism ]a lalangue, the erotic pleasure of producing meaningless 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, not only the scenic naturalism in 'actorly' speech reveals its original unnaturalness, but also the natural itself, as it is embodied in the profanity of phonation, becomes essentially abnormal. One such miniature is a tiny monologue performed by a nameless actress who plays the mother of an episodic character in the scene in the communal apartment (Taubman 2000: 19-22). Her task is to answer the door and inform the visitor that her son Misha is not at home. Dressed like a silent film prima donna, her hair over-done, her cheeks over-rouged, and her eyelashes heavy with clotted mascara, she represents the image of over-compensation, an insane kitschy excess. To top it all, she intones her cues singing out every syllable 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 to make her high tones too high and her low tones too low, she puts an unneeded stress on every syllable, she does not reduce unstressed vowels (as normal Russian speech does), and she produces excessively long pauses after every phrase. The dramatic rolling of the painted eyes follows the mannerisms of phrasing and prosody, its grotesquely steep falls and rises. Contrasting with the over-elaborate artifice of the phonics is the mundane style of communication (answering the door) and the everyday phraseology of the conversation, the subject of which, however, the murder of an unknown Kolia, contradicts the unexciting genre of communication but in an 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 of the shrewd Muratova. She makes the actress play the marionette instead of 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 of phonation, she dissects the very idea of realistic film acting. The phonetic marionette in Muratova's film is as much a critique of the actors' clich6s
76 Irina Sandomirskaia

as it is a respectful and sorrowful homage to film's original nature in eccentric theatre, the withering remnants of silent movies (Charlie Chaplin and Aleksandra Khokhlova), the bodily texture and the techniques of live performance in front of the camera. 22 Recalling again Cage's concept of silence as sound, she reproduces the silence of silent movies through the over-performed sonority of a sound film. While a silent movie does a pantomime of action, Muratova adds to this a phonic pantomime of pseudo-communication. Both her actors and she herself visibly enjoy this work of the dehumanization of the speaker through performing an automaton of speech, and a dysfunctional one at that. The pleasure of acting the marionette is almost palpable in Muratova's extras as they engage in artistic declamation while acting the street scenes, the conversations at the cemetery, in the food line or at the bus stop. Two fleshy women, looking almost identical in their head scarves and discussing how they love their dogs and hate their worthless husbands, repeat the same conversational turn, with the same artificial intonations, with the same wording several times in a row (Taubman 2000: 18-19). Sometimes, there are longer pieces of speech which sound like thoroughly - too thoroughly - rehearsed improvised monologues (improvisation does not in principle mean lack of rehearsal), like the one delivered in the same episode by an old lady in the street who cheerfully relates the sad story of how her hopes were deceived as she was dreaming of getting herself a companion, a sweet little dog (sobatchka, she says, with an endearing, 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, narcissistic, self-conscious, show-offish performance: it is detested by the realistic director as 'provincial/amateur theatre'. All this garbage, according to Muratova, is film's best friend, the object of collecting, cultivating and displaying. 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, perishable and in need of preservation on film.23 This rotten human dust is the stuff she works with: slowed down, reiterated and magnified in amateur performance, actorly automatisms create the aura of essentially human weakness and fragility, the feeling of the fleeting momentariness of human existence which Muratova is so eager to preserve on celluloid. It is the marionette, the automaton at the heart of the human being that creates humanness in Muratova's characters - and this is what creates the crucial difference between critique in Muratova, who loves her marionettes, and Adorno, who sees the marionette as the insignia of reaction and seeks the demystification of the automaton. Such an automaton is not given to the animals - nor are they blessed with the playful enjoyment of the automaton in humanness. As there is no marionette inside the dog's being, there is, therefore, no automatic reproduction of that being, and no togetherness with others as automatically reproducible beings. While the mortality of the human is redeemed in the immortality of the narcissistic marionette, the death of a dog at the dog pound is beyond redemption: 'This is not talked about, this is not shown, this lies beyond the discussion about good and evil' (Taubman 2000: 36-37; modified translation), Muratova comments in a piece of titling, as if not only the words and images, but the voice itself fails her.
A glossolalic glasnost and the re-tuning of the Soviet subject: sound performance... 77

22. Muratova speaks in many interviews about her dream of making a silent movie and about her love for Charlie Chaplin, see for example, Goncharova (2006). 23. Actors are '...living human beings. They can get sick, they can die, you see, they can simply vanish. [...] These are living beings that are subject to decay and disappearance. My principal desire is, as I tell my actors, "to herd you all and transpose you on celluloid as soon as possible" (zagnat' v plenku). In fact, to kill them, if you know what I mean' (Kira Muratova in an interview with Goncharova (2006)).

24. Produced in 1985 at the Ermolova Theatre in Moscow, directed by Valerdi Fokin. A contemporary critic describes the period as '...febrile, chaotic, ecstatic and vociferous (golosistye) times. The playwrights were appealing to the audience: "Speak! Do speak!" The characters in the play were giving an order: "Fight!" The performance was a noisy call to struggle for truth, and the audience with leftist sympathies were ecstatically joining the characters in the play' (Lyndina 1999).

In comparison with the muteness of the dog that is doomed to extermination, the prattle of the human marionette, the buzz of living, the hum of nonsensical, insane, narcissistic conversation starts to feel relaxing and reassuring: 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 created through the interplay of automatisms: idiosyncratic speech mannerisms, in the plane of expression, coupled with the utter commonplaces of clich6d discourse in the plane of content. This is a curious kind of communication, a perversion of 6ffentlichkeit: here, language is not used for the production of meaningful, intelligible utterances but instead an utterance becomes an extension of the subject's physical presence. Words work like sonar: the sound transmitted from one body reflects from the surrounding bodies and returns to the original source, not as a reply but as a response of the ambience, a confirmation that the speech-emitting body is not alone among other speech-emitting bodies. Speech knits a tightly woven network of touches (or blows, which is much more often the case).

A glossolalic glasnost
Glasnost, the realigning of Stalinist language to the changing realities of a system crisis, was to act as the symbolic fuel of perestroika: the opening up of the public language and the upgrading of its defunct subjectivity. Seeking to extract the energy needed for the progress of perestroika in a certain emancipation of political speech, glasnost produced quite a strong movement in favour of the speaking voice. In the collective imagination, emancipated vocality came to represent freedom as such. One of the groundbreaking theatre performances of that time was called Govoril ('Speak!').24 Numerous political posters were also encouraging the citizens to speak out. The voice of the leader of perestroika, his very manner of speech with his popular (and populistic) substandard South Russian accent and soft singing intonations together with the peculiar lexical coinages, became emblematic of his whole rule as they were reproduced in thousands of private jokes and parodies. Vocality became a symbol to designate change and freedom, primarily the freedom of speech, the encouragement to voice opinions, to speak out, which also automatically meant 'to tell the truth'. The emancipation of the voice, however, requires not only the utterance of messages but also their reception by the ear of the listener: as meaning is ultimately produced in listening, there is no use in any freedom of speech if there is no one to do the work of hearing. A veritable furore of vocalization, glasnost also produced a bitter frustration in the collective hearing, as the Soviet ear was not capable of making any sense at all from this furore. It is exactly in the hearing, i.e. in the reception of glasnost and the individual responses to its message, that the project was encountering the greatest resistance: the collective ear of the Soviet citizen, educated to listen to the voice of administrative command, refused to trust the new vocality of emancipation that was being produced by the Gorbachev supporters among the freedom-loving (quite vocal and verbose) intelligentsia of the mid- and late 1980s. The furore of vocality was encountered by the asthenia of understanding.

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Irina Sandomirskaia

It is certainly the furore of glasnost, the naYve emancipatory pathos of the verbose pro-Gorbachev intelligentsia that the mischievous Muratova is mocking in Asthenic Syndrome. It is a teasing, sometimes melancholy, but most of the time vicious and cruel Muratova that confronts the glossolalic glasnost, especially if one considers cruelty in the sense of another artist of (audio-)performance, Antonin Artaud, who constructed sound in his theatre of cruelty as tactile violence against the public, an intervention in the placidity of the audience watching the spectacle in the safe enclosure of a theatre hall.2 5 Muratova's film is a mockery of her own class, probably of her own self, and definitely of her audience, the enlightened 'intelligent' hopelessly stuck in metaphysical provinciality, a subject in exile from history, isolated from the centres of economic, political, or symbolic life, and doomed to discern 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 impov6 And it is a subject that erishment of experience in technological modernity." the excess of speech: on choking time at the same in its existential poverty is to give vent opportunity any seeking feverishly and having too much to say erupts subject the of non-vocality, years to the speech pent up in her by the the conwith either no connection into volcanic outbursts of speaking with or for for herself no sense making audience, of an text or with the presence the others. And such is also the film viewer, the one whose safety (to paraphrase Artaud) is protected by the screen and who in his vanity dreams of himself as being different from the glossolalic poor devils he sees on the screen, a subject who imagines himself to be in the centre, capable of making sense, and privileged in pronouncing judgements. To tease the smugness of her spectator, Muratova is using her Artaud-inspired theatre of cruelty, both in visual and sonic terms. She presents the cultivated eye of the Soviet arthouse film public with the unthinkable, indecent sights of rotten rubbish, overcrowded muddy cemeteries, deformed nudes, the madness of the everyday of the communal apartments and the scenes of extermination of stray dogs in a dog pound. In a comparable manner, Muratova's image of vocality in Asthenic Syndrome is a representation of the vocal landscape of glasnost and at the same time a diagnosis of vocality as something that essentially is non-language. Such a glasnost is hysteria: [...] strings of meaningless syllables made up of sounds taken from those familiar to the speaker and put together more or less haphazardly [...] Glossolalia is language-like because the speaker unconsciously wants it to be language-like. Yet in spite of superficial similarities, glossolalia fundamentally is not language.
(Nickell 1993: 108)

25. On Artaud and his practice of cruelty in sound, see Hollier (1997: 27-37). 26. The impoverishment of experience through technology lies at the foundation of Benjamin's philosophy of the media and is discussed in his essays Experience andPoverty (1933) and other texts from 1936 dedicated to the problems of art and technology in Benjamin (1999: 731-35 and 2002: 143-66).

Thus, the hysterical glossolalia of glasnost is unholy, it is not inspired by Pentecost, and its shamanistic practices only pretend to replace the Stalinist language (the second burial of Stalin as discussed at the beginning of my analysis.) What comes in the stead of Stalin, however, is no language at all, but a pantomime of communication whose meaning finds itself disempowered and in a state of morbid asthenia.

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

79

27. A detailed description of the scandal that Asthenic Syndrom produced in distribution has been provided by Taubman (2000, 2005). This episode gives Muratova's film the outstanding status of the first work of art banned by censorship after the dismantling of its official institutions by Gorbachev.

A meta-filmic apocalypse
The critical response to Asthenic Syndrome when it finally, after a long struggle with distribution, 27 did reach the screens, was as unanimously ecstatic as it was terrified. Muratova was proclaimed an undisputed genius, and her film was as indisputably acknowledged to be the ultimately true story of the ultimate Soviet apocalypse. Muratova's apocalyptic film conceals a lot of tongue-in-cheek, fingerscrossed merriment behind its frightening, cruel images: she both shares the catastrophic expectations of her class and is amused by the bizarre expression that these expectations, well-grounded as they might be, receive in the furore of emancipated public speaking. However, merriment notwithstanding, the strong sense of apocalyptism in Asthenic Syndrome should not be neglected. Muratova's premonition of collapse is not only caused by the half-heartedness of Gorbachev's reform. It is at this point that I would challenge the interpretation of the film as a divination of the end of the USSR by underlying its methodological connections to the mournful allegory in Benjamin (see above). Asthenic Syndrome contains a very important statement about the doom of the USSR, but not merely as a geopolitical or economic reality - rather, and primarily, as a specifically filmic construction, as a cinematic attraction, and a project of bio-politics as this was originally conceived and experimented with in Soviet avant-garde film in the 1920s. It has been convincingly shown by Deleuze (1986) that avant-garde film with its camera techniques and montage has contributed considerably to the creation of the automaton of the mass individual: a technological prosthesis of seeing and later hearing that aimed at the constitution of the collective body of 'the new man', the mass individual, the subject of the history of the twentieth century. Even though Deleuze never refers to Walter Benjamin, his theory of the automaton correlates with the latter's theory of distraction (Zerstreuung) (Benjamin 2002: 101-33; 141-42). In his analysis in the 1930s, Benjamin claims that, given the devastating economic and political effects of World War I, Man is no longer capable of mobilizing experience for orientation in the new reality of crisis, inflation, the imminence of a new world war and revolution. The fatal impoverishment of experience reveals itself on a level that underlies that of understanding, language, memory and knowledge, in other words, a level that precedes the conditions of subjectivity and determines the ability of being answerable in action. This is the level of the immediate experience of the body, sensitivity and perception. It is in its perception that the impoverished individual is defeated and paralysed as subject. And it is the task of progressive art, and especially film, to compensate the individual for this severe impairment of sensitivity. Film's historical and political mission, according to Benjamin, is to create a new sensibility for the mass individual, to help him gain a new vision of himself, his class identity and the critical understanding of reality. Avant-garde film must mobilize all its technical potential in order to ensure the solidarity of seeing (and hearing) for the working class and thus to organize it towards resistance against fascism with its 'aestheticization of history' that inevitably culminates in a new world war. Like Deleuze after him, Benjamin situates the meaning and the event of film not in the expression by the film-maker, but in the perception of the audience, and this is also how Adorno analyses musical 'insignia' and
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what Cage does in his sound performances. It is in the vision and in the hearing, not in the making, that film actually happens and becomes a reality. The politics of perception thus become the primary object of artistic 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 biopower (compare the empowerment of proletarian vision as a recurrent motive in the writing of Dziga Vertov and his work on the 'symphony' of seeing and hearing in his first sound film, The Symphony of Donbass (Entuziazm: Simfoniia Donbassa, 1931)). The avant-garde film also claims a revolutionary redefinition of space: a geopolitical empowerment of the proletariat through the technological enhancement of their vision with the help of camera work and montage. The avant-garde's most important geopolitical project is, of course, Vertov's One Sixth of the World (Shestaia chast' mira, 1926), a film in which a filmic USSR is being constructed with the help of the 'interval' and other techniques that Vertov invents to help the proletarian masses to appropriate, to accept the USSR in their symbolic possession, to become the subjects of Soviet economy and politics through a technologically enhanced collective vision of the Kino-eye. If there is an apocalyptism in Muratova's Asthenic Syndrome, it refers to the catastrophe of a specifically filmic project, the bio-political and geopolitical 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 perception of the audience. In this sense, Muratova has to be given her due not only as an interpreter of the Soviet historical project, but primarily as an attentive analyst of the avant-garde, a critic of the utopia of film in general. Importantly, while criticizing film's pretensions, Muratova employs those very technologies (in my case, the technologies of sound) that film has developed in its own search for the utopian cinematic USSR. Asthenic Syndrome is a critical judgement of film, and not merely proclaimed but also performed through film's own techniques. The performative value of her (audio)-performance is unique. This is what creates Muratova's enigma and the 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 Liberalisation and Literary Development in Russia in the 1920s and 1990s', University of Bergen, Norway.

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Deleuze, Gilles (1986), Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Eisenstein [Eizenshtein], Sergei (2006), 'Neravnodushnaia priroda', in Naum Kleiman (ed.), Neravnodushnaiapriroda, 2 (0 stroenii veshchei), Moscow: Muzei kino and Eizenshtein-Tsentr, pp. 310-506. Gandelman, Claude (1991), Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gannushkin, Petr (1933), Klinika psikhopatii, ikh statika, dinamika, sistematika. Moscow: Sever, available at http://www.psychiatry.ru/library/lib/show.php4?id=6 Accessed 2 September 2007. Goncharova, luliia (2006), 'Moe - nemoe kino. Mechtaiu akterov zagnat' v plenku', (interview with Muratova), Moskovskii komsomolets, 22 November, available at http://www.mkl.ru/blogs/idcmk/2006/11/22/mk-dafly/86911/ and http://www. inoekino.ru/artcKM.html Accessed 25 November 2007. Gorham, Michael (2003), Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language, Culture, and the Politics of Voice in Revolutionary Russia, DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. Hollier, Denis (1997), 'The Death of Paper, Part Two: Artaud's Sound System', October, 80, pp. 27-37. 'Kruglyi stol s uchastiem Kiry Muratovoi' (2004), Polit.ru, 24 January, http://www.geocities.com/rusatg/archive/polit476121.htm Accessed 5 September 2007. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques (1990), The Violence of Language, London and New York: Routledge. Lyndina, El'ga (1999), Oleg Men'shikov, Moscow: Panorama, available at http://www.menshikov.ru/bio/bio_tie.html Accessed 5 September 2007. Marks, Laura (2000), The Skin of the Film: InterculturalCinema, Embodiment, and Sensation. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc and Derrida, Jacques (2005), On Touching (trans. Christine Irizarry), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nickell, Joe (1993), Looking ForA Miracle: Weeping Icons, Relics, Stigmata, Visions and Healing Cures, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books. Ozhegov, S.I. (1974), Leksikologiia. Leksikografiia. Kul'tura rechi. Moscow: Vysshaia shkola. Plungian, Nadia (2005), 'Ia otkloniaius' i otvetvliaius", (interview with Muratova), Polit,ru, 14 April, available at http://www.arthouse.ru/attachment. asp?id=541 Accessed 5 September 2007. Roberts, Graham (1997), 'Look Who's Talking: The Politics of Representation and the Representaion of Politics in Two Films by Kira Muratova', Elementa, 3, pp. 309-23. Ryazanova-Clarke, Lara (2006), "'The Crystallization of Structures": Linguistic Culture in Putin's Russia', in Ingunn Lunde and Tine Roesen (eds), Landslide of the Norm: Language Culture in Post-Soviet Russia, Bergen: Slavica Bergensia, 6, pp. 64-79. Sandomirskaia, Irina (2006), 'Iazyk-Stalin: Marksizm i voprosy iazykoznaniia kak lingvisticheskii povorot vo vselennoi SSSR', in Ingunn Lunde and Tine Roesen (eds), Landslide of the Norm: Language Culture in Post-Soviet Russia, Bergen: Slavica Bergensia, 6, pp. 263-91.

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Seaman, Gerald (1961), 'Reports from Abroad. Gerald Seaman from Leningrad', The Musical Times, 102 (1420), pp. 367-68. Shevelev, Igor (2005), 'Kira Muratova: Zhenshchiny zhestoki', Rossiiskaia gazeta, 8 April, available at http://www.rg.ru/2005/04/08/muratova.html Accessed 25 November 2007. Sohm, Philip (1991), Pittoresco: Marco Boschini, his Critics and their Critiques of Painterly Brushwork in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Italy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 'Stsenicheskaia rech", in Bol'shaiasovetskaia entsiklopediia, available at http://slovari. yandex.ru/dict/bse/article/00076/83600.htm Accessed 7 September 2007. Taubman, Jane A. (2000), Asthenic Syndrome: Asteniteskij Sindrom, Trowbridge: Flicks Books. (2005), Kira Muratova: Kinofile- Filmmaker's Companion4, London: I.B. Tauris. Widdis, Emma (2005), 'Muratova's Clothes, Muratova's Textures, Muratova's Skin', KinoKultura 8, available at http://www.kinokultura.com/articles/apr05widdis.html Accessed 5 September 2007. Zvonkine, Eug6nie (2007), 'The structure of the fairy tale in Kira Muratova's The Sentimental Policeman', Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 1: 2, pp. 131-46. Suggested citation Sandomirskaia, I. (2008), A glossolalic glasnost and the re-tuning of the Soviet subject: sound performance in Kira Muratova's Asthenic Syndrome', Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 2: 1, pp. 63-83, doi: 10.1386/srsc.2.1.63/1 Contributor details Irina Sandomirskaia is Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Baltic and Eastern European Studies, University College S6dert6rn (Sweden). She received her doctoral degree in theoretical linguistics and continued working in feminist theory and discourse analysis. Her research includes a socio-lingual analysis of Soviet documents of everyday life, a study of discursive practices in Russian and Soviet patriotic language, and numerous contributions to contemporary art theory. Her recent research is connected with the bio-politics of language, including the individual strategies of constructing subjectivity in writing against the background of language planning and management in Stalin's USSR; the linguistic conditions of deaf-blindness and the 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

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TITLE: A glossolalic glasnost and the re-tuning of the Soviet subject: sound performance in Kira Muratovas Asthenic Syndrome SOURCE: Stud Russ Sov Cinema 2 no1 2008 The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the publisher: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals.php?issn=17503132

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