Giving Voice to Silent Film: Iraida Yusupova’s Music for «Space Flight» (1935)

The practice of adding a new musical score to old silent films is common among modern composers. This is due to the desire to modernize old cinema, as well as the fact that the music accompanying silent films during their creation was often random, improvised, and therefore easily replaceable. But for successful dubbing, it is necessary to accurately understand the specifics of silent films, their artistic structure, which is fundamentally different from sound cinema. An example of successful work is the music by Iraida Yusupova for the film Space Flight (1935). This is the first Soviet science fiction film about the conquest of the Moon, with eminent scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky participating in its creation. In this work, the composer follows the rules of silent film, creatively reinterpreting them. The soundtrack to this film is a multi-layered score consisting of orchestral music, vocals (solo and choral) numbers, electronic sounds imitating noises or forming melodies, and even cues. Each of these layers is characterized not only by a specific timbre, but also by leitmotifs that run through the whole picture in a modified or unchanged form. The way this multicomponent canvas is organized is a total counterpoint at all its levels. This is a polyphony of samples — sound, arbitrarily short units of meaning that are accelerated, decelerated, superimposed on each other, and combined with other elements of the musical canvas. The second level is the polyphony of the noise layer and orchestral music. Another contrapuntal pair is a sound sequence and a video sequence. And finally, the fourth is the polyphony of styles. Stylizing the music of the 30s, Yusupova resorts to the technique of ironic detachment from the original, which shows the author's handwriting as a composer. This postmodern aesthetic makes this work original, witty, and combines the past, present, and future in one space.