The New Woman and the ekphrastic poetics of Bela Balazs

Abstract

Film studies has long acknowledged the centrality to the discipline of the female subject as historical protagonist, symbolic representation and theoretical construct. My contribution to this dossier suggests, however, that there remains work to be done on the relation between early film theory and early twentieth-century femininity. Femininity, more pointedly, can be considered from both a historical and a symbolic standpoint as a structuring element within early film theory. I elaborate this argument here in a discussion of the early writings of Béla Balázs: specifically of the two interwar treatises, Visible Man (1924) and The Spirit of Film (1930), in which Balázs explored the part played by film and cinematic perception in the formation of new social subjects. As Balázs wrote in The Spirit of Film, ‘the substrate of [the film medium's] development is the subject, the human subject, man in his social being’.1 After his turn to Marxism towards the end of World War I, Balázs's primary commitment was to the working class as that ‘subject … in his social being’ who was destined to become the collective agent of historical change. Yet his own life trajectory suggests the significance for Balázs of a second emergent historical protagonist: the New Woman, whom we know from feminist history to have become by the turn of the century a second global agent of social, economic and cultural change.2 Political feminism was formative for Balázs: he wrote an early essay on feminism, and worked alongside feminist activists in the short-lived Budapest Commune of 1919. He nurtured lifelong and intellectually formative relationships with women artists and intellectuals, among them Anna Lesznai, the writer and illustrator who helped to shape Balázs's thinking on cinema as a fairy-tale mass popular art, as I discuss below.3 Similarly ubiquitous in Balázs's early writings are references to the popular female stars who embodied the New Woman's emancipatory ideals as well as her frustrated desires – Lilian Gish, Pola Negri, Suzanne Desprès and, most famously, Asta Nielsen. But the New Woman's pervasive presence in Balázs's writing is not yet matched by a full understanding of her heuristic significance as image and female muse. In what follows, I therefore take Balázs's writings on female star performance as a point of entry for a discussion of the generative – because, I suggest, ekphrastic – relation in which his film theory stands to the New Woman as image, cinema icon and myth.