A01=Matthew Kendall
acoustic media studies
Author_Matthew Kendall
Category=ATFN
Category=DD
Category=NHD
cinema apparatus theory
cinematic sound theory
Communist film policy
Eastern European film studies
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
forthcoming
history of sound technology
Russian literature and cinema
socialist realism cinema
sound engineering history
Soviet literature and sound
Product details
- ISBN 9781501790898
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Dec 2026
- Publisher: Cornell University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Revolutions per Minute offers the first comprehensive, cultural account of sound recording's impact on Soviet creative production. By examining how a variety of sound recording devices, formats, and experiences sparked major changes to concepts of authorship, attention, archive, and representation in the USSR, Matthew Kendall uncovers how Soviet writers and filmmakers gleaned inspiration from these tools when they forged new art for a new world. Through an analysis of popular Soviet literature and films that draws connections to voice memos, ethnographic field recordings, listener surveys, and the burgeoning recording industry, Revolutions per Minute foregrounds sound recording as a legible and important technique of Soviet modernity.
Across fifty years of examples, Kendall demonstrates that sound recording offered novel pathways through the contradictions of Soviet life, thanks to its paradoxical ability to objectively capture the world and remake it at the same time. Revolutions per Minute thus expands the boundaries of analysis for Soviet literature and cinema, and by making space for failure, imprecision, and incoherence, Kendall highlights an overlooked dimension of art and technology's intersection in the Soviet Union.
Matthew Kendall is Assistant Professor in the Department of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago.
