Politics of Sound: Walter Benjamin’s Encounter with Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm

In my paper I will show by way of historical detour that the question of contradiction can be essential for art's political meaning. My paper focuses on Walter Benjamin's well-known essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935). I claim that paying close attention to the difficulties that Benjamin confronts when conceptualising sound cinema can be illuminating for discussing art's political meaning. My reading is structured around key example of early sound cinema, namely Russian constructivist Dziga Vertov's first sound film Enthusiasm. Symphony of Donbass (1930). The lesson I draw from reading Benjamin through Vertov can be summed as defence of contradiction for political form in art. In Work of Art essay Benjamin writes about cinema's capability to restructure urban masses in direction of Communist, not Fascist, politics, by way of spatially as well as conceptually "re-moulding" them. Thus film for Benjamin is emancipatory and empowering artistic medium for collective use. This is made possible by assemblage of cinema’s technical features: shooting, editing and projecting film as well as collective experience of cinema. For Benjamin the task of cinema is to bring art closer to people and make them use it in emancipatory way, not as single-minded mass, but as differentiated collective that is capable of dissensus. Yet there is a historical lacuna that has often been spotted in Benjamin's essay. The film industry’s direction into talking pictures in 1930's is peculiarly under-discussed in the text, although it is clear that this direction proposes threat for Benjamin's concept of film as political medium. Hollywood as well as nationalist movements utilised this change, which Benjamin acknowledges in the essay and in his letters. Yet he does not change his argument that is constructed on silent film. In an important but unpublished note to the essay he nevertheless writes that it is not so much the sound itself, but the freedom of sound - any sound - that can be assembled ("einmontieren") into film, that has emancipatory potential. Thus sound could have emancipatory potential in connection to cinema. What would this mean in light of the sound cinema of 1930's? I propose Enthusiasm to hold crucial insight on how to assemble sound to film. I will show how documental recordings of ordinary sound sources, such as factory machines, make Enthusiasm an unnerving experience. This, I claim, gives Enthusiasm’s soundtrack contradictory autonomy in relation to image. Basically this is done by Vertov's montage of sound and image that lets the industrial sound to undermine the politically dogmatic content of image. Without this contradictory element art and politics are in danger of only propping up the like-minded masses that do not take political process into new directions. Instead, as Benjamin theorised and Vertov carried out, sound can be used in cinema to activate audience by setting their ears in an immediate microcosmos of contradictory society.