This innovative volume challenges the ways we look at both cinema and cultural history by shifting the focus from the centrality of the visual and the literary toward the recognition of acoustic culture as formative of the Soviet and post-Soviet experience. Leading experts and emerging scholars from film studies, musicology, music theory, history, and cultural studies examine the importance of sound in Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet cinema from a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives. Addressing the little-known theoretical and artistic experimentation with sound in Soviet cinema, changing practices of voice delivery and translation, and issues of aesthetic ideology and music theory, this book explores the cultural and historical factors that influenced the use of voice, music, and sound on Soviet and post-Soviet screens.

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Lilya Kaganovsky is Associate Professor of Slavic, Comparative Literature, and Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is author of How the Soviet Man Was Unmade.

Masha Salazkina is Research Chair in Transnational Media Arts and Culture at Concordia University, Montreal. She is author of In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein's Mexico and has published in Cinema Journal, Screen, October, and KinoKultura.

Featuring essays from both established and emerging scholars, the volume will be of great use across disciplines in film studies, musicology, Russian studies, history, and cultural studies. It will be especially valuable for Soviet film scholars interested in the Stalinist period.

Choice

Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema is an important book. It contains rich case studies, important theoretical insights, and an admirable interdisciplinary and international focus. Most important, it . . . should serve as a foundational text in the field of Russian/Soviet sound studies.

Kritika

Sound, Speech, Music augurs exciting avenues of inquiry in film and media studies. The volume's multidisciplinary perspectives, often woven with rich cultural analysis, contribute to a larger discourse in the humanities and social sciences. In coeditor Salazkina's words, 'The contributions here are meant to provoke a conversation that may change the way we look at the history of our modernity'. . . . Undoubtedly, they will.

Film Quarterly

The essays here on sound and speech may . . . be considered pioneering, while the essays on music are a welcome addition to a small body of scholarship. Taken together, these pieces open a range of possibilities for future research.

Slavic Review

The stellar and insightful scholarship of . . . virtually every essay . . . thus makes good on Salazkina's introductory call for more 'exploration[s]s of the relationship between technology and the aesthetics of production, reception, and consumption of film' in regard to Soviet and post-Soviet sound, while also laying the foundation for even more exhaustive future work.

Cineaste