Between Cineanthropology and Distraction: Revisiting Béla Balázs’ Visible Man at 100 Paul Dobryden & Ervin Malakaj November 2024 Book Reviews Issue 111 Béla Balázs (1884–1949) is known as the great theorist of the cinematic face. For the Hungarian writer and critic, film captured the expressivity and singularity of the human face in a way no other medium could. Indeed, the moving image in close-up seemed to render faces with such intensity that it collapsed appearance and essence; the emotions that faces expressed no longer seemed to be something interior, but rather continuous with and immediately legible on the face itself. Balázs claimed, moreover, that film offered this experience of vivid surface legibility not just when representing faces but extended it to the entirety of the visible world. Faces, gestures, living bodies, inanimate things – all of these become expressive surfaces when framed in a moving image. Balázs described this all-encompassing expressiveness with the term “physiognomy.” Film exhibited (or did it produce?) the physiognomy of faces, objects, crowds, and landscapes with infinitely more precision than language ever could, a claim Balázs only confirmed in his repeated attempts to put physiognomies into words. His theory of cinema as a medium of the face has long since entered the canon of “classical” film theory, and has been taken up by many subsequent theorists, such as Gilles Deleuze, Gertrud Koch, and Thomas Elsaesser. Balázs’s 1948 book Theory of the Film, originally published in Hungarian and until relatively recently his only book of film theory to be fully translated into English, secured the author’s canonical status. Theory of the Film, however, took up and revised ideas that first took theoretical shape in his German-language books Visible Man, or The Culture of Film, published in 1924, and The Spirit of Film, published in 1930. These books finally appeared in full English translation by Rodney Livingstone in 2010, in an edition edited and introduced by Erica Carter. Returning to Visible Man a century after its publication, and after over half a century of “modern” film theory, one is struck by the way its attenuated reception filtered the book’s concepts and style. The book is both more and less than a theory of film – making it surprisingly resonant (if untimely), given the uncertain status of film theory in a post-cinematic world. Film was only one of Balázs’s passions. Throughout his career, he maintained broad intellectual interests that frequently reached beyond cinema. Fascinated by modern life, Balázs was an erudite cultural commentator with literary ambitions. His extensive journalistic work across Europe produced writing on topics such as the rise of nationalism, intellectual life in times of duress, travel, radio plays, and art history. As an artist, he wrote novellas, dramas, fairy tales and – likely among the forms of writing outside his film criticism for which he is most well-known today – librettos and screenplays. The latter include work on Béla Bartók’s opera Herzog Blaubarts Burg (Bluebeard’s Castle, 1918), G.W. Pabst’s film Die Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera, 1931), and Leni Riefenstahl’s film Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light, 1932). In 2010, Jack Zipes issued a new translation of Balázs’s 1922 fairy tale collection Der Mantel der Träume (The Cloak of Dreams: Chinese Fairy Tales) and drew renewed interest to Balázs’s broader creative work. Early on in his intellectual career, and particularly through his friendship with Georg Lukács, Balázs also developed a commitment to a socialist internationalism that he would nurture throughout his life and which he hoped to capture in some of his writing. With Lukács’s support, Balázs was part of the culture ministry during the short-lived Hungarian socialist republic in 1919, the abolishment of which led to Balázs’s exile in Vienna. Visible Man was first published in the Austrian capital, and a second edition appeared two years later in Halle, Germany. When it was initially published in 1924, Balázs had been working steadily as a film and culture columnist for the daily Viennese newspaper Der Tag – his first steady job after a period marked by precariousness in exile. The job provided some financial stability, but also helped secure his reputation as a cinema commentator prominent enough to warrant a publication contract for a book on the topic. Moreover, many of the columns he wrote for Der Tag served as material for Visible Man. The book replicates some columns in part, some in full; other sections present revised arguments about topics he had treated in the column. Visible Man is in many ways a complex product of the interplay between the journalistic, literary, and philosophical or theoretical forms of writing with which Balázs was simultaneously engaged. These varied writerly projects were certainly part of an intellectual program, but they were also informed by the material necessities of life as an underemployed writer. Taking stock of Visible Man today, we should keep in mind not only Balázs’s intellectual and political commitments but his need to make a living and generate material for publication. These concurrent impulses produced a writing practice less hospitable to systematic theorizing than to pursuing fascinations with specific techniques, effects, or forms of cultural modernity, including those of film. Given film’s relative novelty as a medium, the critical language required to discuss it was still emerging in the 1920s, as Balázs was well aware: “The concept of film theory is a concept that must now be forged” (p. 5), he writes in the opening pages of Visible Man. Pundits were still debating whether a medium so thoroughly driven by commercial impulses and technological innovation could even be called “art.” To what ends should film be theorized? What would a film theory look like, and who would be its audience? These were open questions, which required Balázs to think in the most foundational terms. The book’s preface addresses no less than three potential readerships – the sceptical “philosophers of art,” filmmakers, and film audiences – an indication less of Balázs’s ability to decide on an audience than on the recognition that the theory of film he wished to write simply did not have a place within existing critical discourse. Readers familiar only with Balázs’s enthusiasm for close-ups, faces, and the physiognomy of things may be surprised by the scope of Visible Man’s theoretical frame. Taking its name from the book’s title, the introductory chapter offers a sweeping narrative of human transformation by way of media-technological change. Balázs argues that in a culture defined by the printed word, the human being’s capacity for expression has dwindled. Once upon a time, people could embody interiority directly through gesture and facial expression; with the advent of print, however, that ability has atrophied. “The word seems to have taken men by brute force; over-rigid concepts have obliterated much, created an absence which we now feel keenly… The culture of words is dematerialized, abstract and over-intellectualized; it degrades the human body to the status of a biological organism” (p. 11). Even more worrying, this culture “has similarly damaged the soul that the body should express” (p. 12). Cinema offers the possibility of redemption from this fallen state. The moving image is “giving culture a new turn towards the visual and the human being a new face” (p. 9), Balázs writes. Not only does film convey bodily expression in an especially vivid way, as a medium that can be reproduced and distributed at a mass scale it can teach audiences across the globe “the new language of gestures” (p. 11). Film and the “universal language” of the body promise an anthropological transformation, a new form of human culture and human being itself grounded in bodily expressivity. Going far beyond what we might think of as film theory, the chapter is perhaps more properly characterized as a speculative media anthropology, which suggests that the human being is co-constituted by the media technologies through which it expresses itself. Moreover, it suggests that humanity changes – qualitatively transforms, even – when those technologies change. In Balázs’s assessment, cinema has the potential to standardize and even improve the human being at the level of the species: cinema’s universal language of gestures, he writes, “contains the first living seeds of the standard white man who will one day emerge as the synthesis of the mix of different races and peoples. The cinematograph is a machine that in its own way will create a living, concrete internationalism” (p. 14). Balázs tempers this discourse in Theory of the Film, perhaps because of its eugenic and racist implications. While Erica Carter and others have grappled with the book’s racial discourse, its eugenic dimension has yet to be unpacked. These apparently vestigial aspects of Visible Man are what demand careful rereading, however, not in order to dismiss the book but to help reanimate for today the matrix of desires and anxieties out of which what we now call film theory emerged. Critical reading of Balázs’s text may also shed light on contemporary concerns with the ability of new media technologies to both reproduce and transform the human being. Visible Man’s image of a “living, concrete internationalism” also expresses Balázs’s hope that the new culture of film would be a step toward political transformation in line with his socialist commitments. The opening chapter depicts cinema as an avatar of revolutionary capitalism, whose drive toward accumulation dissolves all traditional structures and constraints. Balázs reasons that, because film production is capital intensive, profitability requires that films be distributed internationally, to the widest possible audience. In the process, as global audiences internalize the standard psychological tropes and gestural language of film storytelling, cinema would break down the linguistic, ethnic, and national barriers that have customarily divided them. Presumably, this would help lay the foundation for a political revolution. However, given Balázs’s insistence that the bodies of particular actors reveal the possibilities of cinematic art with particular intensity, Visible Man can also be understood as a theory of the movie star and the star’s relation to audiences. Stars, by definition, exude an aura of uniqueness that sets them apart from other performers. Stardom is then less grounded in a shared gestural language than in a refined individuality conveyed via gesture and embodied presence that cinema culture makes available for consumption. Balázs particularly admires what he describes as the unmatched styles of Charlie Chaplin and Asta Nielsen. Their presence in any scene is marked by the performers’ capacities to channel an inner essence and make it available for audience recognition and engagement. In this process, cinema stages for audiences intimate moments through which viewers apprehend stars’ essence, bringing to the encounter their own understanding of the world and fusing it with that of the star. Notwithstanding Balázs’s claims about the internationalist potentiality of cinema, engagement with gestures is then at the very least also a deeply individual process. Visible Man, while maintaining moments of confident theorizing, is then also expansive and multifaceted. Here, Balázs’s text provides occasions to think critically about the tenuous relation between the monumental anthropological and political stakes of the medium outlined in the book’s introduction, on the one hand, and the subsequent chapters that comprise what he calls “Sketches for a Dramaturgy of Film.” The latter are characterized less by their coherence from one chapter to the next – they range in topic from “The Play of Facial Expressions” and “The Close-Up” to “Nature and Naturalness” and “Visual Linkage” – than by the associative quality of two chapters “about film” positioned next to one another. The book concludes in yet another genre, chapters on Chaplin and Nielsen that Balázs calls “portraits.” Such a diverse combination of formats (prefatory addresses, sketches, portraits) calls attention to Balázs’s own compilation and editing of previous writing to produce material for the book. Alongside claims about human transformation and the birth of a universal language, then, the book contains a wealth of observational and exploratory writing about particular filmic techniques, subjects, and perspectives. This is theory in a mode characterized more by distraction, fascination, and attachment rather than systematization, which opens up diverging and potentially conflicting paths. In one sense, perhaps, this mode of theorizing fails to live up to the grand ambition of the book’s anthropological frame. Rather than frustrating readers, however, the book’s syncretic style actually positions them to produce their own responses to some of the questions his book raises. In not reconciling tensions among his ideas, Visible Man makes them available for its readers as generative sites for additional theorizing about film and media culture. Balázs’s distracted theorizing becomes a means by which to critique the hierarchical impulses of the cine-anthropology announced in the opening of Visible Man while attending to the formal potentialities of the book. In outlining a theoretical system only to leave it behind, Balázs does not so much fail as much as the disjunction between theoretical modes stimulates engagement with the text’s ideas and prompts further exploration. The heterogeneity of Visible Man serves as a heuristic to think further about the position of cinema in relation to human life, gesturing beyond the framework Balázs himself provides. And it is in this that Visible Man feels most relevant for us today. Béla Balázs, Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory—Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, Erica Carter, ed., Rodney Livingstone, transl. (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010). Original edition: Béla Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films (Viena & Leipzig: Deutsch-Österreichischer Verlag, 1924). Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the participants of the workshop, “Visible Century: Béla Balázs’s Visible Man at 100,” which took place September 6–7, 2024, at the University of Virginia. Some ideas included here benefited greatly from their input.
