Soviet Spectatorship: Observing the Body in Physical and Visual Culture

Goff, Samuel/ Beumers, Birgit (Editor)/ Kaganovsky, Lilya (Editor)

ISBN 10: 1350411205 / ISBN 13: 9781350411203

Published by Bloomsbury USA Academic, 2026

About this Item

264 pages. 8.50x5.43x1.00 inches. In Stock.

Seller Inventory # x-1350411205

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Soviet Spectatorship: Observing the Body in Physical and Visual Culture
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Academic
• Publication Date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350411205
• ISBN 13: 9781350411203
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Brand New
• Weight: 0.45 kilograms

About this title

Synopsis

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 Authors

Samuel Goff is Affiliated Lecturer in Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK. He is Editorial Director of the film platform Klassiki, and a former editor at The Calvert Journal.

Birgit Beumers is Professor Emerita in Film Studies at Aberystwyth University, UK, and currently holds a DFG-funded research grant on Central Asian film industries at the University of Passau, Germany. Her publications include A History of Russian Cinema (2009) and Performing Violence (with Mark Lipovetsky, 2009). She has edited a number of volumes, including The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov (2011, with Nancy Condee), and Cinema in Central Asia: Rewriting Cultural Histories (with Michael Rouland and Gulnara Abikeyeva, 2013), and Sexuality, Nudity and the Body in Soviet Cinema (with Eugénie Zvonkine and Catherine Géry, 2026). She is editor of the online journal KinoKultura and of the scholarly journal Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema.