My first book is now available to order from Bloomsbury.
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, identifying the three fundamental ‘structures of looking’ — surveillance, aesthetics, and spectatorship — that shaped representations of the embodied Soviet subject.
Close readings of films are contextualised through a theoretical analysis of the relationship between subjectivity and the body. In doing so, the book 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.
a valuable contribution to [a] renovation of the established narrative, focusing on depictions of human bodies in the context of utopian politics... Soviet Spectatorship makes a convincing case that western-oriented theories of the “gaze”, which emphasise the private and individual, are not applicable to the Soviet case, which was so focused on collective performance and collective viewing... It is hard to overestimate the importance of artists in the early Soviet project, or the scale of their ambition. [As Goff shows], this was strikingly apparent in depictions of the body.
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 filmmakers of the period.
— Julian Graffy, University College London