What external sounds were there to interfere with the film show? In the improvised cinema theatres of the 1900s noises came mainly from outside the building:
Rows of attentive heads Beneath the magic beam.
But from the door come muffled sounds, The noise of carriages and feet,
A distant, constant, call.45
In the 1910s film accompaniment was often overlaid with music coming from an orchestra in the foyer:
It’s a holiday and the foyer is full of expectant cinemagoers. The proprietor is joyfully rubbing his hands and orders the orchestra to strike up and keep everyone happy. The sounds of a rollicking tune, clearly audible in the auditorium, mingle with the mournful melody illustrating the death of the heroine on the screen. Not a single voice is raised in protest —after all, this is the cinematograph.46
I do not, however, propose to include all external noises in the category of acoustic interferences, only those incidental sounds that happened to affect the reception of the image. The main factor here was the presence or absence of music. Since music was the acoustic norm of a silent film show, the most serious interference with the reception of silent films was silence itself. As Roman Jakobson demonstrated in 1933, music in silent films served as a constant reminder that the acoustic dimension of the action [das akustische Ding]
was not relevant.47 The corollary of this was that the absence of music ‘switched on’ our expectations as to
diegetic (i.e. narrative) sound. Skilful accompanists knew how to make use of it. Sometimes music or sound effects were withheld to make the audience ‘listen’ to the diegesis:
For example, someone picked up a huge pile of plates and began to swing them round and round, until finally—of course—they suddenly fell and smashed without a sound. The audience roared with laughter, but only at seeing something like that happen without hearing any noise.48
One of the main things that activated diegetic sound expectations in silent films was the spontaneous reaction of the audience. Here are two reminiscences selected at random from many: one from the actor Alexander Werner, the other from the director Voldemars Puce:
The audience often argued among themselves and discussed the plots noisily, adding their own ‘live illustration’, which was always unexpected, highly expressive and original.49
The viewers were never at a loss for pithy interjections: they shouted, applauded loudly, egged on the heroes and booed the villains. Whenever they thought a picture lacked sound or text they did their best to provide their own sound effects. In the love scenes they would encourage a fainthearted lover and express their approval of decisive action. When lovers kissed on the screen loud smacking noises resounded all round the auditorium and people tried to time their kisses to synchronise exactly with those on the screen. When this happened there would be laughter and applause throughout the auditorium.50
For some observers this kind of response was in itself a fascinating part of the spectacle. This was certainly the case with the Symbolist poet Alexander Blok, whose visits to the cinema were part of his ‘urban slumming expeditions’. Blok was captivated both by the city folklore element in films and by the touch of folklore in the responses of the audiences. But another aspect was also important: early cinema (particularly the Pathé company, which dominated the European film market before the First World War) was a powerful catalyst of cultural exchange. Cinema imported images and themes into Russia that were quite new to the Russian mass audience. Cinema auditoria were places where bizarre cross-cultural encounters occurred. In Blok’s notebook for 6 March 1908, we find a record of the following incident: ‘On the screen a toreador fighting a duel. A woman’s voice: “Men are always brawling”.’51 Since the message behind the
whole entry is somewhat elusive, it has been discussed by literary historians interested in Blok’s attitude to popular culture.52 At a seminar on Blok held at Tartu in 1980, Roman Timenchik drew attention to the fact
that the incident recorded by Blok also featured in Georgi Chulkov’s 1908 poem ‘A Living Photograph’, in which the real incident (witnessed at the same show or heard from Blok) is furnished with a fictional context:
Two bull-fighters duel over a lovely Spanish girl. Oh, you silly, swarthy landsmen of Cervantes! But just look at the people bewitched by the scene: The lad from the shop with his mouth open wide, The corseted lady fit to explode,
The sullen tart staring, moist-eyed, at the screen. But the passion-mad toreadors cross their swords And a high, clear woman’s voice rings out:
‘Men are always brawling’.53
There is a slight incongruity between the mental image invoked by the Russian word for ‘brawling’ [derutsya] and the scene it was used to describe. What could have fascinated Blok and Chulkov was the ingenuous essentialism of the remark which reduced the refined tradition of the duel with rapiers (the film was apparently an early screen version of Carmen or Blood and Sand) to a more familiar notion—a straightforward street brawl.
In the 1910s cinemagoing in the larger cities was no longer the prerogative of the urban lower classes, but audience reactions and attitudes remained very much the same. Uninhibited behaviour became part of cinema’s specifically democratic style, and cinema thus established for itself a very special place in urban culture. As the press of the day liked to point out, one and the same person behaved quite differently at the cinema and at the theatre:
What a difference there is in the way people behave at the theatre and at the cinema! At the theatre you dare not even whisper; the briefest comment to your neighbour brings angry ‘shushings’ from those around you. But in the cinema!… The chords of the piano, the melancholy, nasal sounds of the harmonium accompanying the tragic passages, the constant murmuring, whispering and calling—all so graphically revealing the character of the audience—blend into a single seamless whole, into one integral ‘idea’ of cinema: that darkened auditorium with its shadows flickering and fading before your eyes.54
We see an extreme form of the public taste for ‘live illustration’ in a tragic event that took place at the end of 1910. In January 1911 extracts from Pskov newspapers appeared in the cinema press under the heading ‘Suicide in the cinema’:
On 27 December a shot rang out during a performance of the film Student Years at the Modern cinematograph in Pskov. It coincided with the screen suicide of a doctor; he had just identified the body of a drowned girl as that of his first love. The audience assumed that the shot had been arranged by the management in order to heighten the effect of the scene, but it was fired by one M.Bykhovsky, from the town of Krestsy. He was taken to the local hospital, where he died soon after without regaining consciousness. According to the paper Pskov Life, a piece of paper was found in his pocket; on it was written: ‘Please do not accuse anyone of my death. It was hard to go on living after Lev Tolstoy had passed away. It was hard to carry on fighting for freedom. Goodbye, dear mother, brothers, sister and comrades. M.V.Bykhovsky’.55