Bela Balazs, Visible Man, or the Culture of Film (1924)

Abstract

Béla Balázs's two works on silent and early sound cinema, Visible Man/Der sichtbare Mensch (1924) and The Spirit of Film/Der Geist des Films (1930), were acknowledged by such contemporaries as Siegfried Kracauer and Rudolf Arnheim as seminal contributions to the ‘dramaturgy’ of early film. Yet anglophone reception of Balázs has remained dependent on his Theory of the Film, a 1952 English translation of Balázs's 1948 Hungarian text, Filmkultúra. A film müvészetfilozófiájá. The extract published here derives from a first full translation of Visible Man (Berghahn, forthcoming). In this ninety-page treatise, Balázs stakes a claim for film as an art that may restore to modernity the lost expressive capacities of the visual body. Under such headings as ‘Type and Physiognomy’, ‘The Play of Facial Expressions’, ‘The Close-Up’ and ‘The Face of Things’, he presents a typology of expressive elements which together comprise the ‘only shared universal language’, the image-language of film. This article reproduces sections from Balázs's comments on the new cinematic visibility of the human body, together with extracts from his theoretical sketches on performance, the closeup and montage.