Soviet Spectatorship

Observing the Body in Physical and Visual Culture

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by Samuel Goff

Type

Studies

Subject

Countries > Russia / USSR

Keywords

Soviet cinema, body

Publishing date

2024

Publisher

Bloomsbury Academic

Collection

KINO - The Russian and Soviet Cinema

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 264 pages
5 ¾ x 8 ¾ inches (14.5 x 22 cm)

ISBN

978-1-350-41116-6

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Book Presentation:
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.

About the Author:
Birgit Beumers, PhD, is a senior lecturer in the Department of Russian Studies at the University of Bristol, Bristol, England. She is editor of the online journal KinoKultura, which is devoted to contemporary Russian film.

Press 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

See the publisher website: Bloomsbury Academic