"New Means of Enormous Power"

This chapter analyzes the disjunctive music of early Soviet sound film in relation to the concept of transgressive music, a type of accompaniment where the music is on a collision course with the images, inconsistent with a film’s objectives, and even undercutting the conscious intentions of the filmmakers. Beginning with a history of this practice in silent film, where such music-image collisions occurred with more regularity than many standard film histories have acknowledged, the chapter explores these instances in the crucial first decade of sound production, when sound and image disjunction was actively courted by Soviet filmmakers.