Overview

This major reimagining of the history of Soviet film and its cultural impact explores the fundamental transformations in how film, through the senses, remade the Soviet self in the 1920s and 1930s. Following the Russian Revolution, there was a shared ambition for a 'sensory revolution' to accompany political and social change: Soviet men and women were to be reborn into a revitalized relationship with the material world. Cinema was seen as a privileged site for the creation of this sensory revolution: film could both discover the world anew, and model a way of inhabiting it. Drawing upon an extraordinary array of films, noted scholar Emma Widdis shows how Soviet cinema, as it evolved from the revolutionary avant-garde to Socialist Realism, gradually shifted its materialist agenda from emphasizing the external senses to instilling the appropriate internal senses (consciousness, emotions) in the new Soviet subject.

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9780253026941

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Reviews

In Socialist Senses, Widdis provides an arresting take on Soviet cinema that pushes Russian/Soviet film criticism beyond the critical frameworks of auteurism and formalism where it has long remained. * InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture (IVC) *

Outstanding and important scholarship that unites many important topics with new insights and original analysis.... nobody has tried to think about Soviet film within this theoretical frame. --Oksana Bulgakowa, author of Sergei Eisenstein: A Biography</p>

Socialist Senses shows remarkable range and matching ambitions...Widdis sets as her goal to reimagine the history of early Soviet film entirely: to tell a story as new and upending as its objects of study. * The Russian Review * This study will be of great value to those researching topics such as affect, texture, and pattern (faktura); gesture; and the body in the Soviet cultural context. * Choice * Widdis's rich and fascinating book has opened a new perspective from which to think about the Soviet cinema. * Kritika * Wonderfully illustrated, Socialist Senses will engage all scholars of the period: not only does Widdis add to the growing list of studies on Soviet senses, her work is the first to investigate touch and feeling and how they materialized on the Soviet screen. * Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema * In Socialist Senses, Widdis provides an arresting take on Soviet cinema that pushes Russian/Soviet film criticism beyond the critical frameworks of auteurism and formalism where it has long remained. * InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture (IVC) * The author's often dazzling analysis opens readers' eyes-and senses-to the vivid textures and material of the period, so much so that some might find it difficult to look at and experience early Soviet cinema in the same way again. * Slavic Review *

Author Information

Emma Widdis is Reader in Russian Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College. She is author of Visions of a New Land: Soviet Cinema from the Revolution to the Second World War and Alexander Medvedkin, and editor (with Simon Franklin) of National Identity in Russian Culture.

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