There are many fascinating, and enigmatic, recurring images in \u201cForward March, Time\u201d the 1977 Soviet propaganda film. The one that I would like to focus on is that of the gramophone, as it appears in many different contexts throughout the film, often playing music with the words \u201cHow wonderful it is!\u201d. The most fascinating scene in which it appears occurs at around the 11th minute of the film. The gramophone plays music over a black and white sea of buildings and monuments, where the Eiffel Tower can be picked out. The gramophone morphs first into a snake with a flicking tongue, then into a gun, and finally into a tank-like gargantuan war machine that spits out both bullets and airplanes. Throughout this scene, the gramophone keeps its musicality, in some semblance at least, through its emission of sounds.<\/p>\n
As to the meaning of this image, I took the clue of the Eiffel Tower to mean that it symbolized the Communist takeover and Socialist revolution of Western Europe. The gramophone playing the idealized music of \u201cHow wonderful it is!\u201d seemed to stand for the ignorant and luxurious Western lifestyle, as told by the Soviets. Their music would be replaced by the more beautiful sounds of revolution.<\/p>\n
In general, the timing of images with sound in this movie was very intentional. I would be interested to hear what other people noticed on this point in other parts of the film.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There are many fascinating, and enigmatic, recurring images in \u201cForward March, Time\u201d the 1977 Soviet propaganda film. The one that I would like to focus on is that of the gramophone, as it appears in many different contexts throughout the film, often playing music with the words \u201cHow wonderful it is!\u201d. The most fascinating scene […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1020,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unit-10-building-the-ussr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1020"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/982\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}