Soviet Spectatorship: Observing the Body in Physical and Visual Culture

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What distinguished the Soviet 'look' How did Soviet thinkers and artists reimagine the relationship between observer and observed Soviet Spectatorship answers these questions through an in depth exploration of Soviet physical culture and its on screen representations from the end of the Civil War to the eve of the Second World War. Samuel Goff identifies the three fundamental structures of looking surveillance, aesthetics, and spectatorship that shaped representations of the embodied Soviet subject. Close readings of understudied films such as Happy Finish (1934), The Laurels of Miss Ellen Gray (1935) and A Strict Young Man (1936), are contextualised through a theoretical analysis of the relationship between subjectivity and the body. In doing so, Goff traces the evolution of a specific Soviet 'look', examining perspectives on Soviet aesthetics and theories of body and mind, uncovering continuities within Soviet visual cultures in a period usually understood in terms of discontinuity and rupture.

Reviews

Soviet Spectatorship brilliantly combines subtle and sophisticated analysis of evolving early Soviet understandings of psychology, socialised communality, physical culture, spectatorship, beauty, gender and violence with bracingly original readings of the work of key painters and film makers of the period. -- Julian Graffy, University College London, UK

Author Bio

Samuel Goff is Affiliated Lecturer in Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK. He is Editorial Director of Klassiki, the worlds first screening service dedicated to Soviet, post-Soviet, and Eastern European film. He is a regular contributor to The Calvert Journal, the foremost English-language publication on contemporary post-socialist culture.