The “subjective microphone” technique in M. Khutsiev’s film “I am Twenty”

Bliudov Daniil Vladimirovich ORCID: 0009-0009-0229-0623 Lecturer at Scenic Speech Department, Russian State Institute of Performing Arts 191028, Russia, Saint Petersburg, Mokhovaya str., 34 bludov213@mail.ru Other publications by this author

The period of the "thaw" in the history of Russian cinema was preceded by the era of "malokartinya". It peaked in 1951, when only 9 films were shot (5 of them were performances). In general, the number of films-performances in this intermediate stage has increased enormously. Cinema increasingly resembled a theater shot on film… In 1956, after the XX Congress of the CPSU, a new era began – the era of the thaw, which lasted until the end of the 1960s. It was a time of tectonic shifts in society and powerful changes in the field of art. One of the most striking and innovative films of this period is "I am twenty years old" by Marlene Khutsiev, "The Picture of hopes" ^{[3, p. 17]}, a picture with a difficult fate and unique poetics. Let's analyze several episodes of M. Khutsiev's movie.

One of the first episodes. Seryozha (Valentin Popov) leans out of the window after seeing a bosom friend of Nikolai (Nikolai Gubenko) on the balcony of a neighboring house. "Ko-olka! Fo-okin!" shouts Seryozha and whistles shrilly to the whole yard, and Nikolai, interrupting his morning exercises, responds: "Seryoga-ah!". Friends shout across the yard, not hearing each other (while the viewer can hear every word). This is a very characteristic moment for the poetics of the sound series of the film: the director always chooses a different position of the listener for the viewer, builds a kind of journey of the viewer through different acoustic spaces. By analogy with the "subjective camera", such a technique could be called a "subjective microphone" (this term was introduced into scientific circulation by Z. Lissa ^{[4, p. 209]}, but later it did not spread). Such a movement of the viewer-listener along the acoustic plans occurs by the will of the director and sound engineer, sometimes completely regardless of the planning and installation of the visual series. Similar sound selectivity is observed from the first frames of the film: for example, the viewer does not hear the conversations of the trinity strolling through the morning city. In the future, when analyzing the speech soundtrack of the film, we will see more than once how inventively the authors of the picture build this "acoustic journey" of the viewer.

Meanwhile, Nikolai and Sergey finally met in the courtyard. Their first joyful remarks are almost indistinguishable, they drown in the general noise: children's hubbub, music, bicycle calls... This is again a "subjective microphone" technique: indeed, it is not very important for us to hear every word of the characters' dialogue – the emotional content of the event is much more significant, not the meaning of the replicas comes to the fore, but the "aesthetic form of their presentation" ^{[7, p. 172]}.

Let's turn to another scene in which Sergey walks through the evening city streets. Not far from the cinema, he sees a meeting of a couple in love, involuntarily overhears their dialogue, sustained in a conversational, light manner, with somewhat "removed" diction and deliberately careless endings:

HE: Hello! (Hello!)

SHE: Oh, wait, I have a straight (straight) heart popping out (popping out)!...

HE: And what happened (happened)?

SHE: Nothing, let's go… I was so afraid…

HE: What is it?

SHE: Oh, skok right now it's time (what time is it now)?

HE: Ten (ten).

SHE: I was so afraid that you would leave…

HE: I'm used to… Well, kudam (where are we going)?...

SHE: Straight. Let's just walk around like this, okay, huh?...

Such a speech style creates an artistic illusion of "eavesdropping", spontaneity of the scene. It is important that the entire dialogue is recorded in tone and on an acoustically stable close-up, and at this time the characters move in the frame, in the end generally turning out to be on the medium-general plan with their backs to the camera. Thus, we are again faced with a "subjective microphone", a whimsical separation of sound and visible spaces. And here it is necessary to clearly separate the technical and artistic components of such a sound solution of the episode. On the one hand, in the early 1960s, it was technically impossible to provide synchronous sound recording on location (especially in a noisy city) - therefore, the subsequent dubbing of any full–scale episode turned out to be inevitable. On the other hand, the development of sound recording equipment (sensitive microphones, magnetic sound recording) already made it possible to record the voices of artists not only in close-up (as was done in the 1930s and 1940s), but to transmit nuances – from a whisper to a scream, from super-large sound to a general acoustic plan. In the film "I am twenty years old", all these possibilities of voice-over in the studio are richly used: both the detailed voiced internal monologues of the characters (D. Bakirov, with whom we agree, suggested calling the sounding internal monologue "verbal" ^{[2, p. 179]}), and large-scale recorded dialogues, and individual scenes in which voices they sound on an average or even general acoustic plan (for example, in the next episode, three friends are running down the street, hurrying to the tram, and their voices recorded in the studio sound acoustically quite reliably – on the general plan).

Thus, the filmmakers had all the tools in their hands so that a tiny exchange of remarks between two nameless lovers on the street sounded acoustically natural. But the principle of misalignment of planning in sound and image was chosen – the whole dialogue sounds on a large sound plan. This, of course, is not an accident. We see this small scene as if through Sergei's eyes, a short dialogue sounds on a large acoustic plane, since it has a meaning, as they say, "falls" into the hero. This is how the "subjective microphone" technique is implemented in the episode. The dialogue between the two lovers is not accidental, it is strung on that premonition of love that accompanies Sergei almost from the very beginning of the film. Visiting Slava, Sergei says to his friend's wife, "I would never have thought that you would marry Slavka" (quite possibly – evidence of former love / infatuation); two girls are flirting with Sergei on the dance floor, but he is clearly waiting for something real; sister Vera points to her boyfriend standing nearby; Nikolai offers to get acquainted with one of the two familiar girls, but Sergey says that he chooses the missing "third" ... And here is another episode developing this topic. Sergei unwittingly becomes a witness of someone else's happiness. It seems to us that this is why a small and seemingly random dialogue between two passers–by sounds in close-up - it thereby turns from a domestic episode into an essential event for Sergei.

And here is another important episode. The house of a random acquaintance with whom Sergey spent the night. Morning. Silence. Sergey lights a cigarette and goes to the window. In the frame there are snow–covered roofs outside the window, and outside the frame there is a dialogue between Sergei and the girl ("Are you leaving?...." - "Yes...." - "Wait, have some tea, I'll warm you up right now..." - "Don't, I'm late..." etc.). The speech is recorded very large, short awkward remarks briefly interrupt the silence, falling like drops. The characters speak softly, on the verge of a whisper. Sergey goes outside, and behind the scenes at this time we hear his telephone dialogue with his family, sounding on a very large acoustic plan:

Sergey: Drasvuy (hello)…

MOTHER: Yes?

SERGEY: Mom, it's me…

MOTHER: Yes.

SERGEY: I, you know…

mother: Where are you?

Sergey: I'm from a vending machine. You see, I was staying with a guy, and it was too late to go home…

mother: It doesn't matter, de (where) you've been delayed, you're an adult, and you can do it yourself... Only next time I ask you to still (still) call home. We haven't slept all night... Have you eaten?

Sergey: Yes. Well, I'm coming, otherwise there's already a queue here, I'm from the vending machine…

A cursory, slightly "removed" from the point of view of diction, the mother's speech is heard (and in the word "delayed" there is even a slight stutter on [h]). At the same time, her voice sounds deliberately restrained, cold, due to this, Sergey (and the viewer along with him) immediately understands how difficult an emotional night her mother spent, how much she managed to "burn out" by the time of the phone conversation.

Without any transition, Sergei's telephone conversation with his family is instantly replaced by a furious off-screen argument between Slava and his wife, Lucy. Slava is in the frame at this time, smashing the walls of houses with a stone core, we do not see the dispute itself (this, as we see it, is a conscious rejection of intra–frame "intense drama" ^{[3, p. 32]}). The altercation between the spouses is serious, the losses in diction are great (mainly in Slava's speech), but in this case the emotional content of the replicas is more important than semantic. In addition, the replicas are juxtaposed in the soundtrack with the rumbling of the excavator, the roar of the walls being broken: all these noises sometimes overlap parts of the spoken replicas, which only enhances the emotional coloring of the dialogue. Slava blurts out the words in a low, confused patter, sometimes stutters ("With-with-with Vovka"), Lucy retorts with restraint, then hot-tempered…

It is curious how the visual and sound spaces of the film freely correlate with each other in these two off-screen conversations. In the frame, Sergey has just stepped out onto a busy street after a night spent with an unfamiliar girl, and we already hear a telephone conversation from a pay phone - obviously, it will happen a little later. And in the next scene, everything is exactly the opposite – Slava is fiercely working on an excavator in the frame, and we hear a furious argument with Lucy, which happened either in the morning or the day before. Thus, within the framework of the reception of the "subjective microphone", cinema allows not only to freely choose for the viewer the point of his location in the acoustic space, but also to carry out transfers in time no less freely, overtaking the image or, on the contrary, lagging behind it.

In the next episode, the authors of the film continue to "throw" the viewer in time and space using a speech phonogram. At the beginning of the scene we see a Moscow street, a tram, and Nikolai reads Pushkin's "Autumn" behind the scenes, then switches to a prosaic verbal internal monologue: "Here we have met the New Year, another year of your life, Comrade Fokin. Let's sum up...". In the frame there are people entering the tram (Nikolai will appear among them), and a booming voice sounds behind the scenes: "Congratulations among the best employees of our laboratory, the technician–operator comrade Fokin and we reward him with a valuable gift!" - and small applause. In this case, the "subjective microphone" sends us to the memory of the last solemn event at work with Nikolai. The tangible effect of reverberation on the voice of the nameless boss can be interpreted in different ways: both as a real acoustic characteristic of some large hall in which the event took place, and as a "marker" of memory.

The soundtrack of the film contains many more examples of using the "subjective microphone" technique. This independence of the sound score from the visual one is a special, specific feature of cinema, which was developed in the 1960s. This makes the architectonics of cinematic speech fundamentally different from the architectonics of theatrical speech, where the voice is inextricably linked with the artist and with the real acoustics of the stage and the auditorium. The widest possibilities that the "subjective microphone" technique opens up for directing, however, to a certain extent can be transferred to the theater. The use of microphones, special audio signal processing devices and recorded speech phonograms in the sound score of the performance makes it possible to separate speech from the artist. And the more sophisticated microphones, loudspeakers and processing devices become, the wider the opportunities that open up to theatrical directing. Today, in the XXI century, microphone sound in the theater has become the norm rather than the exception. The roots of this phenomenon undoubtedly lie precisely in the tools discovered by cinematographers. In this regard, the direct influence of cinema speech on stage speech cannot be denied.

The film "I am twenty years old" showed the power of cinema in creating the illusion of the flow of life; the inclusion of events happening to the characters in their surrounding reality; the transmission of the feeling of "the air of time" through the screen ^{[8, p. 25]}. The mobile camera moves freely in space, then fixing the chronicle, then stealthily peeping at the characters, then forming powerful poetic pictorial images. The sound space of the film also works in the same way, combining prose documentary and high poetry (moreover, it is not only about the nature of the feelings of the characters, but also literally about the huge number of poetic texts that sound in the film). From the combination of the psychologically detailed "flow of life" and the constructed artistic imagery, the author's documentary-poetic style of Marlene Khutsiev is born ^{[3, p. 17]}.

In the sound solution of M. Khutsiev's film, new techniques inherent only in cinema are actively used: verbal internal monologue, verbal internal dialogue, parallel-sounding verbal internal monologues. And due to the reception, which we called a "subjective microphone" by analogy with a "subjective camera", in addition to intra-frame and off-frame (diegetic) sounds caused by the construction of the frame, a subjective (metadiegetic) sound plan arises in which the sound of the speech of the heroes is indirectly connected with the image, not due to the real physical position of the heroes in the frame. However, it is impossible to put an equal sign between the "subjective microphone" and the meta-aesthetic sound. Metadiegesis presupposes orientation to the inner world of the character, the metadiegetic space is understood as "a set of subjective states of the character" ^{[6, p. 37]}. The "subjective microphone" does not just allow the viewer to "connect" to the perception of one of the heroes (metadiegesis), but freely moves the viewer between differently colored real sounds inside the frame and behind the frame, between the subjective perception of several heroes. The "subject" in this case is not the character, but the viewer, who is freely moved between different sound spaces through the nature of the sound of noise, music and speech. When using the "subjective microphone" technique, the nature of the speech sound (including, say, acoustic reliability) is dictated by the director's decision, the focus of auditory attention. The reception of a "subjective microphone", thus, can guide the listener through diegetic (intra- and off-screen), non-diegetic (off-screen), metadiegetic (subjective), semidiegetic (modified intra-frame) sound spaces. It is due to the all-pervading "subjective microphone", this emerging "cross-diegesis" that it is not always possible to recognize "the difference, the boundary between the subjective space being created and the reality of the narrative" in the film of Marlene Khutsiev ^{[5, p. 21]}.

Advanced equipment and technology (in particular, magnetic sound recording) they allowed the artist to transmit the smallest, quietest nuances of sound through the microphone during the installation and tinting period. Now it is in the power of the filmmaker to bring the artist's voice closer to the audience's ear, to voice the innermost thoughts of the characters, to create a sense of conversation conducted directly with the viewer.

Being a mass and all-encompassing entertainment art, the cinema of the "thaw" period forms a new standard of audience perception of actor's speech. And now the theater must "pick up the banner" of artistic authenticity from the cinema, modify stage speech, search for a new, consonant with the era of speech style. Theatrical processes since the mid-1950s began to be involuntarily checked, correlated with the achievements, searches and discoveries of cinema ^{[1, p. 188]}.

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