CEREES Lecture

 

Monday 28 April, 2025, 18:00-20:00

 

Between Sound and Silence:

Arseny Avraamov’s Symphony of Sirens in Baku (1922)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Venue: Montagu Lecture Theatre, Graduate Centre (GC601), Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road London E1 4NS

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About the Lecture:

Many of us are familiar with the city symphony films of the 1920s and 30s. We’ve seen or even taught films such as Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City or Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera in classes on the avant-garde, urbanism, and modernism. As we know, these silent films organize the visual elements of urban experience according to musical principles such as rhythm, intervals, scales, harmony, dissonance, and counterpoint. But what if we look — or, rather, listen — past the musical analogy to the sounds of ostensibly silent city symphony films? Then we will perceive something different. Rather than seeing organizational structures, we will hear the sounds of cars, trams, pedestrians, machines, voices, and musical instruments. This talk examines this under explored sonic legacy of the city symphony in terms of non-cinematic works, specifically Arseny Avraamov’s Symphony of Sirens. The Symphony of Sirens (1922) is not a film but rather a mass spectacle. Performed live in Baku, Azerbaijan, it attempted to re-sound the October Revolution through the city’s oil-producing infrastructure on November 7th, 1922. The mass spectacle, I argue, is part of a tendency to treat city space as a sonic medium. It reveals the sonic and ideological qualities of urban networks as channels for waging war, extracting resources, and colonizing space.

About the Speaker:

Dr 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, urban studies, and documentary film. His book City Symphonies: Sound and the Composition of Urban Modernity, 1913-1931has recently been published with McGill-Queen’s University Press (2024). In it, he examines 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 next project is an exploration of the metabolic exchange between the film archive and the cosmos through filmmakers such as Artavazd Peleshyan, Alexander Kluge, Deborah Stratman, and others. His articles and translations may be found in E-flux; Journal of Cinema and Media Studies; Slavic Review; Studies in Eastern-European Cinema; Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema; and Music, Sound, and the Moving Image.

Event outline:

Welcome, by Andy Willimott & Jeremy Hicks (QMUL) – 18:00

Panel Discussion – 18:05

Discussion, chaired by Natalya Chernyshova (QMUL) – 18:50

Drinks reception, meet the speaker – 19:10

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