Soviet Spectatorship: Observing the Body in Physical and Visual Culture, 1921-1939

Abstract:

Interwar Soviet visual culture was a realm of bodily observation and critique. My research explores Soviet physical culture and its representation in fiction and non-fiction film, painting, and photography from 1921-1939, in order to answer the question: what distinguished the Soviet look? And how did Soviet thinkers and artists reimagine the relationship between observer and observed? Bringing together the study of physical and visual culture, it traces the evolution of ‘spectatorship’ as a specifically Soviet form of the ‘gaze’ that offers new perspectives on Soviet thinking on psychology, aesthetics, gender, and violence.

Reading fizkul’tura through its framing in visual media deepens our understanding of just what was at stake in the relationship between private bodies and the public sphere. This material represents a rich but sorely underutilised resource for scholars of Soviet subjectification. With its distinctive structuring of bodily action and observation, fizkul’tura was both conceived of and, crucially, represented in ways that corresponded to a concomitant reimagination of the social function of visual cultures.

This talk will introduce my research into the ‘structures of looking’ that shaped representations of the embodied Soviet subject in the 1920s and ‘30s. Examples from newsreels, painting, and fiction films including Happy Finish (Kolomoitsev, 1934), The Laurels of Miss Ellen Gray (Zheliabuzhskii, 1935) demonstrate how, in tracing the evolution of the Soviet 'look', we can uncover continuities within Soviet visual cultures and theories across a period usually understood in terms of discontinuity and rupture.

Bio:

Samuel Goff is a former Affiliated Lecturer in Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge and the Editorial Director of the film platform Klassiki.

Image credit: A collage of the Soviet Spectatorship Cover by Samuel Goff and an old image of men spectating