Event
Between Sound and Silence: Arseny Avraamov's Symphony of Sirens in Baku (1922) and Moscow (1923)"
Public Lecture Followed by Conversation with Kartik Nair
The city symphony is typically considered a classic silent film genre. Notable examples include Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927) and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929). This talk examines the underexplored sonic legacy of these films. The city symphony, I argue, is part of a wider tendency that sought to treat urban space as a sonic medium. I make this argument using the example of Arseny Avraamov’s Symphony of Sirens, a mass-spectacle that sought to resound the October Revolution through the oil infrastructure of Baku (1922) and the cityscape of Moscow (1923). I investigate how the symphony’s idealistic conception of proletarian unity collided with the geographic, social, and sonic realities of the cities it sought to compose. What emerges is an account of Avraamov’s symphony as an attempt to reproduce the spirit of the October Revolution in terms of an urban framework in which the networks for waging war, extracting resources, colonizing space, and transmitting sound made use of overlapping channels.
Daniel Schwartz is an associate professor in Russian and German Cinemas at McGill University. His research focuses on the intersection of sound studies, Russian and German cinema, and documentary film. His book City Symphonies: Sound and the Composition of Urban Modernity, 1913-1931 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024) explores the unheard sonic dimensions of ostensibly “silent” city symphony films by drawing attention to city-symphonic experiments outside the cinema, particularly those in music, mass spectacle, and radio. His articles may be found in Cinema Journal, Slavic Review, Studies in Eastern-European Cinema, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, and Music, Sound, and the Moving Image.
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Co-sponsored by Temple's School of Theater, Film and Media Arts and Penn's Cinema & Media Studies.