Scholarship devoted to early Soviet cinema has traditionally focused on theories of montage and their manifestation in various silent films. As the story goes, early Soviet filmmakers developed sophisticated methods of editing at the expense of elaborate mise-en-scène and emotional nuance. Broad brush strokes, it has been argued, were what made silent Soviet cinema so powerful and distinct. As montage processed the material world, the eye and mind ruled supreme. And why would early Soviet filmmakers have even bothered with bodily sensation when quick cutting and montage of, say, a dialectical nature conveyed a collective vision of the revolution and the lofty goals of the Soviet state? Human feeling and depth, be it physical or emotional, were no match for a modern medium able to reconfigure material while delivering ideology in such emphatic fashion.
In Socialist Senses: Film, Feeling, and the Soviet Subject, 1917–1940, Emma Widdis sets out to establish an alternative theoretical framework for early Soviet cinema. Instead of montage, we get a hands-on, materialist approach to the era's cinema and its transition into sound and Socialist Realism. Having explored early Soviet cinema's treatment of time and space in her 2003 Visions of a New Land, Widdis has turned her keen analytical eye toward the body, touch, and sensation. Although a somewhat elusive and paradoxically intangible construct, sensation provides Widdis with a protean perspective on the era's cinema, as she probes an impressive array of early Soviet films, from revolutionary, avant-garde fare to then-popular yet now underappreciated films and other more peripheral work. Widdis acknowledges that she has no means of knowing what Soviet audiences actually sensed at the time, her discussion of sensation illuminates ways that early Soviet cinema engaged its spectators and expanded the relationship between Soviet citizens and their new world. The body and its senses, Widdis maintains, were not construed as a threat to Soviet ideals but rather “envisaged as part of a specifically Soviet refashioning of human life” (5).
Widdis's study elucidates two related impulses from the period: the ideological need to liberate the senses and the utopian desire to transform Soviet citizens’ senses. Drawing upon the work of a wide range of thinkers and theorists, from Karl Marx to Laura Marks, Widdis weaves a complex theoretical tapestry on which to base her analysis. She begins with Marx and his contention that revolution would emancipate the human senses and create new socialist senses. Also prominent is the work of the modern-day theorists Marks and Jennifer Barker, who have perceived film as something more than merely visual, as a multisensory experience reliant on touch or, in theoretical parlance, the haptic. Clear notions of a Soviet haptic emerge in Widdis's study, as she shows how comprehensively early Soviet cinema bolstered a sensory education for the Soviet public to suit the shifting cultural parameters of the 1920s and early 1930s. Early Soviet notions of texture (faktura), sensation (oshchushchenie), and what poet and theorist Sergei Tret΄iakov labeled naoshchup΄—“by touch”—prove indispensable to the discussion.
Socialist Senses probes Soviet avant-garde theory and art before expanding outward. A focus on faktura, Widdis explains, underscored Left artists’ revolutionary desire “to reformulate the relationship between the human body and the physical world” (18). The Hungarian film theorist Bela Balasz, who frequented Moscow at the time and famously “forgot his scissors” according to Sergei Eisenstein, looms large, offering an understanding of film's relationship to the “living” material world. Viktor Shklovskii, who in addition to writing a number of film screenplays and polemicizing with the likes of Dziga Vertov, argued that Soviet cinema should foster a sensorial relationship with objects. These theoretical perspectives counterintuitively lead Widdis to what might loosely be considered historical costume dramas, in particular work by the “eccentrics” of FEKS (Leonid Trauberg, Grigorii Kozintsev, and production designer Evgenii Enei) that established cinematic faktura for everyday Soviet life (byt). The FEKS film New Babylon (1929), for instance, links the past with contemporaneity through textured material, as does Abram Room's The Traitor (1926), which featured elaborate sets designed by Sergei Iutkevich (who would go on to direct Lace in 1927).
As Widdis emphasizes, a refashioning of domestic culture and its very material prevailed in early Soviet cinema. Lace, textile, boots, fur, and toys all abound in Socialist Senses, for this was the material that Soviet citizens produced, touched and encountered through film. Widdis analyzes both the neoprimitive and industrial basis of such material. The handicraft of rural Russia represented a Russian precapitalist alternative to modern industry, for decorative textiles were not anti-Soviet but part of “a new protorevolutionary model of living in the world” (116). Widdis highlights women weaving in Olga Preobrazhenskaia's and Ivan Pravov's Women of Riazan Province (1927) and the merchant woman of Iakov Protazanov's The Tailor from Torzhok, who evokes painter Boris Kustodiev's iconic merchant women (made explicit by the book's color images and ample film stills). Meanwhile, films with an urban orientation, such as Boris Barnet's Girl with a Hatbox, contrast ornate bourgeoise interiors with virtually empty proletarian spaces; the “new” Soviet man—Barnet's initially homeless Il΄ia—fills such a space with towels before practicing some fizkul΄tura and exposing his body to the era's new sensations. “The sensory and the sensual,” Widdis explains, would be “by no means the domain of the bourgeoisie alone” (114). Accordingly, modernist homemaking informs Aleksandr Rodchenko's set designs for Lev Kuleshov's Your Acquaintance (1927) and Sergei Komarov's A Doll with Millions (1928), with cinematic faktura requiring “a different kind of sensory spectatorial engagement” (219).
In the industrializing Soviet state, it stands to reason that human hands would feature in silent Soviet film. There is the celebrated hands sequence in The Man with the Movie Camera as well as the human handling of cattle entrails in Vertov's Kino-Eye, which Widdis compares to the cattle-butchering conclusion of Eisenstein's Strike: whereas Eisenstein uses material to shock viewers and penetrate their consciousness, Vertov focuses on material for its own sake and for political resonance, as he expands upon the constructivist task of transforming the relationship between Soviet citizens, tools, machinery, and material. Rather than dwelling on Vertov, however, Widdis moves on to less celebrated work. Kirik, the mute and deaf cobbler in Fridrikh Ermler's The Parisian Cobbler (1927) emerges as an emblematic figure in Widdis's analysis, for within the silence of the medium, he maintains his “instinct, sensation, and feeling” (138). Kirik's knowledge and moral sensibility derives from his craftsman's touch. Citing the work of productionist art theorist Aleksei Topkorov, Widdis explores the notion that modern technology would create a new Soviet person by reeducating the senses and revolutionizing the human eye and hand.
As part of her probing of the “primitive” sensibility of early Soviet cinema, Widdis turns her attention midway through Socialist Senses to the Soviet republics and Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijani cinema. Ethnography and orientalism factor into Widdis's discussion as do the writings of the ubiquitous Tretiakov, who in addition to theorizing about film penned screenplays for Nikoloz Shengalaia's Eliso (1928) and Mikhail Kalatozov's Salt for Svanetiia (1930). Widdis draws upon the “multisensory, embodied form of knowledge” (180) explicit in Tretiakov's naoshchup΄. Soviet engineering may overpower primitivist sensibilities at the end of Kalatozov's Svanetiia, yet what arises dialectically is a new sensorial, embodied understanding of technology. And in Amo Bek-Nazarov's Khaz-Push (1928), vivid images of poverty in Persia elicit the revolutionary energy of the east, a sensorial form of indignation also evoked by close-up images of fur in Pudovkin's Storm over Asia (1928).
But what about all those close-ups of faces so prominent in silent cinema? Although material and human touch take pride of place, Widdis is wise not to ignore the human countenance. As the utopian spirit of early Soviet cinema diminished with the rise of Socialist Realism, emotion evoked through the face began to overshadow sensation, and thus Evgenii Cherviakov's recently rediscovered My Son (1928) reveals a discernable shift from sensation to feeling (chuvstvo) of a sentimental sort. In the transitional phase into high Socialist Realism, Kozintsev and Trauberg's Alone (1930), Barnet's Outskirts (1933) and Room's collaborative effort with Yuri Olesha on A Severe Youth (1936) all convey new modes of experience that reflected an increasingly prescriptive vision of Soviet consciousness. As Socialist Realism took shape, it was primarily the child's perspective that remained as a means of fostering sensation in film. Toys, Widdis shows, thus became the material of choice in this new Stalinist landscape, whereby sensual pleasure was restricted to the very material of child's play.
Although Widdis concludes her study by exploring the sanitized jazz of Aleksandr Andrievskii's aptly named The Death of Sensation: The Robot of Jim Ripl΄ (1935), she seems at somewhat of a loss when it comes to the introduction of sound into film and its effect on Soviet spectators’ sensorial experience. Widdis is clearly drawn to those 1930s films that featured minimal sound (and she avoids the issue altogether when touching upon early sound films such as Nikolai Ekk's 1931 Path to Life). Nevertheless, Widdis's assured voice comes through loud and clear in Socialist Senses, as this impressive study proves both comprehensive and compelling. 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.
