Soviet Spectatorship

An exploration of Soviet physical culture in film and other visual media, examining how the unique Soviet 'gaze' offers new perspectives on the aesthetics of the body.

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.