Between gesture and physiognomy: ‘universal language’ and the metaphysics of film form in Béla Balázs’s Visible Man

Abstract

For a significant contingent of classical film theorists, what we now call multilingualism went by the old-fashioned name of ‘the curse of Babel’ – that mythical scattering of tongues from which the universally understood language of silent cinema promised to redeem humanity. This familiar trope of film as a ‘universal language’, which reached its peak by the 1920s, was not limited to the conceits of early film theorists and critics but had a broad cultural currency in popular discourse and industrial self-promotion. Perhaps the most famous instance is D. W. Griffith’s pronouncement: ‘We have gone beyond Babel, beyond words. We have found a new universal language, a power that can make men brothers and end war forever. Remember that!’1 While turned towards the future, such ‘motion picture millennialism’ can also be seen – in both its US and European variants – as an essentially reactionary response to linguistic difference as a perceived threat to the ‘monolingual paradigm’ of the previous century.2 Maybe Babel’s curse lay ahead, not behind. And the investment in the messianic power of film as a ‘universal language’ expressed fundamentally a desire to ward it off by placing monolingualism on a new footing – the universal ‘mother tongue’ of cinema.