Socialist Senses Film, Feeling, and the Soviet Subject, 1917}}}1940 [Hardcover]

In a major reimagining of the history and cultural impact of Soviet film, noted film scholar Emma Widdis 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 as film could both discover the world anew and model a way of inhabiting it. Drawing on an extraordinary array of films, 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.

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

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.

In this original and captivating study, Widdis gives us an entirely new way of looking at early Soviet cinema. Widdis' sharp eye for detail and sure hand in applying theory gives us a work of film analysis at its best.

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.

Widdiss rich and fascinating book has opened a new perspective from which to think about the Soviet cinema.

A brilliant and pionlCÓ