Daniel Schwartz

Daniel Schwartz is an assistant professor in Russian and German Cinemas at McGill University. His research focuses on the intersection of sound studies, Russian and German cinema, urban studies, and documentary film. His book City Symphonies: Sound and the Composition of Urban Modernity, 1913-1931 has been published with McGill-Queen’s University Press (2024). In it, he explores the unheard sonic dimensions of ostensibly “silent” city symphony films by drawing attention to city-symphonic experiments outside the cinema, particularly those in music, mass spectacle, and radio. His articles may be found in Cinema Journal; Slavic Review; Studies in Eastern-European Cinema; Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema; and Music, Sound, and the Moving Image.

Selected Publications:

Book

City Symphonies: Sound and the Composition of Urban Modernity, 1913-1931. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024.

Articles

“Savage Youth: Documentary and Desire in the Cinema of Dinara Asanova,” in Sexuality, Nudity, and the Body in Soviet Cinema, edited by Birgit Beumers, Catherine Géry, Eugénie Zvonkine (in production).

“Did I Hear Right? Resounding Archival Images in the Films of Sergei Loznitsa” Re/Framing Eastern European Cinema, edited by Yuri Leving (in production).

“As (Un)Seen from Space: Soviet Collapse and the Unwatchable in Andrei Ujică's Out of the Present.” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 63, 2 (2024): 76-95. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2024.a919192.

“Absurd Justice: Documenting the Show Trial in Sergei Loznitsa’s The Trial (2018),” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 17, 2 (2023): 94-112. DOI: 10.1080/17503132.2023.2202071

“Documentary Without Borders: Salomé Lamas’s Extinction and the Orientalism of Post-Soviet Borders and Space,” Studies in Eastern European Cinema 12, 3 (2021): 237-259. DOI: 10.1080/2040350X.2020.1822586

“Between Sound and Silence: The Failure of the ‘Symphony of Sirens’ in Baku (1922) and Moscow (1923)” Slavic Review 79, 1 (Spring 2020): 51-75.

“Sounding the Inaudible: Rethinking the Musical Analogy in the City Symphonies of Walter Ruttmann and Dziga Vertov,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 12, 1 (Spring 2018): 1-31.