Bela Balazs

Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image is a rich exploration of the choreographic in cinema.  It traces the history of the dancefilm form from some of its earliest manifestations in the silent film era, through the historic avant-garde, musicals and music videos to contemporary experimental short dancefilms. In so doing it also traverses some of the most significant collaborations between dancers, choreographers, and filmmakers.  Bringing film theory and dance theory into dialogue, the book argues that the combination of dance and film produces cine-choreographic practices that are specific to the dancefilm form. As whole, the book thus presents new models of cinematic movement that are historically informed and interdisciplinary in nature.  An extensive companion website provide key video illustrations and links to online resources.

In the early cinema era, there were a lot of authors who inquired into the nature of this new medium, taking into account both its artistic value and its specificity. Among the various approaches, the theories of Bela Balázs stands out, who maintains in his work Visible Man, or the Culture of Film (Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films, 1924) that the film has the potential to redeem the curse of Babel since it uses a universal language. Thus, it goes so far as to affirm that it is the first time that a language of this type exists, since it is articulated from facial expressions and physical gestures. And that is the reason why it is so important: it is perfectly opposed to the hegemony of the written text, that diminishes the immediate expression and reduces the possibility of expression of the mother tongue of humanity, that is, of the primordial language.
Similar positions are those defended by Louis Delluc, Ricciotto Canudo or Vachel Lindsay, arguing the latter that the cinema offers a universal language through image-writing. That is what led him to assimilate it to hieroglyphic images, stating that it can lead the viewer towards a new vision-gaze. This universality of language was not only valued by the early film theory: it was also analyzed by the semiotic theory, standing out the figure of Christian Metz, who studied whether we should refer to the cinema as a language or language system. Therefore, the purpose of this communication is to assess how it has been speculated about the potential of cinema as a suppressor of language barriers, as a new communication system and as a universal language.

This essay examines the contrasting visions of the expressive powers of the human face—both from neuroscientific approaches rooted in Darwin which argue for a codified system of six basic emotions universally recognized (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise) and from the visual arts of cinema, television and portraiture painting that rely on facial close-ups to represent an emotional fluidity that is always subjective. As a means of reconciling the two approaches, it turns to the current study of infants by developmental psychologists (like Peter Mundy and Daniel Stern) who stress the importance of an infant's ability to read the mother's face, which facilitates joint attention, the acquisition of verbal language and social interactions with the world. Although Stern's imaginative dialogues sound literary and subjective, his description of the infant's encounter with the mother's face is actually consistent with the explanation by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (1999) of how consciousness is first launched in the ―core self.‖ By treating the mother's face as the crucial object in the infant's early development and by perceiving this encounter awash in reflective feelings (which Damasio distinguishes from basic emotions shared with other species), he helps explain the dichotomy between the two systems of emotive facial expressions: reading the specific codified emotions (in humans and other species) versus experiencing the flow of (what Damasio calls) ―background feelings‖ that continuously play across the human face. By emphasizing the theories of Béla Balázs and films of Ingmar Bergman and Chick Strand, which literally teach us how to read these background feelings moving across the human face, this essay claims facial close-ups do not distract us from our social circumstances or political action as Walter Benjamin argued. Instead they can have an ideological edge in a wide range of genres as they enable us to see this emotional engagement in joint attention both as a form of interpellation and as a means of survival—not only for infants but for all those engaged with the visual narrative arts.

Towards the end of Denis Villeneuve's Arrival (2016), linguist Louise Banks has a breakthrough encounter with the Heptapod aliens come to save humanity and finally understands the nature of the tool/weapon/gift they have been trying to bequeath it: ‘The weapon is their language... When you really learn it, you begin to perceive time the way that they do... But time, it isn't the same for them, it's non-linear’. In her subsequent book on the subject, Banks dubs the perception-altering Heptapod as ‘the universal language’. This reference (intentional or not) to early film theoretical debates reads as an instance of post-cinematic atavism that aligns with Villeneuve’s positioning of cinema as a still wondrous audiovisual medium and his nostalgic coding of Banks' encounter with the aliens as an encounter with cinema (the Heptapods are nicknamed Abbott and Costello, they appear in black and white, they communicate with Banks through a cinema-like screen in a cinema-like space, mostly visually, and so on). In this article, I argue that Arrival reflects on cinema's relation to multilingualism by repurposing not only film theory's early investment in the ‘universal language’ thesis—including the idea that cinema teaches us to see and experience anew—but also the aesthetics correlated with that thesis, in particular close-ups, temporal manipulation and various expressions of an avant la lettre haptic or embodied visuality. This operation implicates language in the film's fetishistic erasure of the future in favour of a return to the past. In doing so, it substitutes a potentially multilingual paradigm with a deeply monolingual one and eschews a (post-)cinematic model that might be capable of accommodating rather than eradicating linguistic difference. Yet it is precisely through this web of atavistic disavowals that Arrival inadvertently, or in spite of itself, asks how a future cinema might both formulate and formalize its response to a truly, and post-anthropocentrically, multilingual world.

Balazs was theorizing a phenomenological epistemology for cinema based in aesthetics that was heavily dependent on hermeneutics, affect, performance, corporeality and audience reception. In some ways this is very surprising given that post-structuralism’s most prominent forefather figures (Marshall McLuhan, Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, and others) were not pushing at the frontier of these areas of discourse until several decades after Balazs. Balazs’s early work was produced during a period of accelerated technological development, where the mobile apparatus (or unhinged camera), stereoscopic film, colour film, widescreen format and synchronous sound emerged as more than just experiments in advancing the medium’s capacities to represent and present life, both realistically or abstractly. This may help in explaining Balazs’s many prognostications on film theory in the contemporary moment as well as revealing how Balazs accurately predicted the value of the medium as a popular cultural form.

*Everything uploaded to my Academia.edu in 2017 is considered a draft. I was required to do regular graduate course work for the first year of my doctoral studies and took the opportunity to play out some personal theories. It's all a prolegomenon for a bigger project down the road and these ideas will require a more rigourous distillation to be of real value to the scholarly community.

*Junior Yr Undergrad *Annotated Bibliography* The most compelling concept that was developed throughout my research related to the work of Metz and Balazs regarding the inherent self-conscious character of film and its ability to raise a double naturally through identification with the spectator. Although, I was not able to find a translated edition of Irzykowski’s The Tenth Muse, I did find some references to it that lead me to believe the work could be a valuable addition to my research with regard to understanding Metz’s theories of identification in film.

For Gaston Bachelard, movement is key to air’s visibility. In Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement ([1943] 2001), he suggests that air not only moves: it inspires. Though Bachelard’s work on the imagination of the elements is concerned with poetic language, it is so intimately bound up with materiality, movement and a “potential for becoming” that it lends itself well to cinema. Each of the elements (alone or in shifting combinations) will bestow its own sensuous continuity and dynamism upon particular “groups of images”.

Through an analysis of Robert Eggers’ The VVitch: A New England Folktale (2015), this article examines how the materiality of earth and air has a special role to play in folk horror. My contention is that mood in the cinema often involves a making visible of the air and that The VVitch is particularly invested in moody, imaginative interminglings between air, atmosphere and the environment.

When did the sentimental start to mean ‘awful’? Why are so many popular mainstream films dismissed for their sentimentality, and are there any meaningful differences between the sentimental and the melodramatic? These are some of the questions addressed in Charles Burnetts’ illuminating genealogy of the concept as both a literary genre and an aesthetic philosophy, a tradition that prefigures the advent of film yet serves as a vital framework for understanding its emotional and ethical appeal. Examining eighteenth century ‘moral sense’ philosophy as a neglected but still important intellectual area for film theory, and drawing on case studies of film sentimentality during the early, classical and post-classical eras of US cinema, Improving Passions is an innovative exploration of the sentimental tradition as both theatrical genre and cultural logic.
Key features

- Examines eighteenth century ‘moral sense’ philosophy and ‘sensibility’ as neglected, but important, intellectual areas for film theory

- Provides case studies of film sentimentality during early, classical and post-classical eras of US cinema, focusing specifically on issues of critical reception

- Engages with speculation by classical and contemporary film theorists about the ethical and affective possibilities of film

- Examines new approaches to ‘affect’ in film and media philosophy that draw directly on, and reconfigure, a sentimental aesthetics

This article takes up the question of cinematic multilingualism by tracing a fantasy of its negation in early film theory. The widespread trope in the 1920s of film as a ‘universal language’ can be understood as a reaction to various threats to the ‘monolingual paradigm’ of the previous century, and perhaps no film theorist took this trope further than Béla Balázs. In Visible Man (1924), Balázs pushes the idea to its paradoxical limit with a theory of film as not just the antidote to linguistic differences (‘Babel’s curse’) but the antinomy of verbal language qua language. This theory depends upon an underlying metaphysics of the filmic image in which, Balázs writes, ‘the body becomes unmediated spirit, spirit rendered visible, wordless’. ‘Physiognomy’ is the name Balázs gives to this metaphysics. It is conceptualized in Visible Man through an ontology of film as the immediate expression of essence in sensible form, one which depends in turn upon a never fully successful attempt to sever cinematic gesture from verbal language and subsume it within Balázs’s transcendental notion of ‘physiognomy’. Giorgio Agamben’s writings on gesture in film suggest a path to ‘overcoming’ Balázs’s metaphysical picture. Because gesture bears the irreducible traces of historicity and difference, its presence at the heart of Balázs’s theory ultimately undoes the fantasy of a universal (mono)language along with the metaphysics of ‘physiognomy’ that would sustain it.

*course design + syllabus* In brief summary, the preparation of a proposed syllabus for examining the textuality of the xenomorph reveals an expansive discourse on the Alien franchise and its key figure. The Alien franchise is ever-growing , lending strength to the thesis that the xenomorph is a rich textual object of media. After completion of the reading list and assignments, the goal would be to turn to Henry Jenkins’s work on ‘fan-text poaching’ in order to distinguish the hermeneutical relationship between ‘fan texts’ and ‘franchise texts’. The xenomorph can potentially be shown to have a varied textual quality (both open and closed) depending on the media and texts in which the xenomorph is represented and discussed. This claim could prove to be valuable to the general discourse on textuality, semiotics and hermeneutics.

This paper examines the role of physiognomy in early film through the theoretical writings of Béla Balázs and the animated films of Lotte Reiniger. Departing from Johann Caspar Lavater’s conception of physiognomy as a science of stasis, I argue that Balázs reconceived the field—via Goethe—as an art of motion. Lotte Reiniger played a key and rarely examined role in Balázs’s film theory. By mobilizing the physiognomic line through the cut of the scissors, Reiniger developed a body of work that recast the silhouette as a dynamic entity whose expressive choreography reveals the influence of dance on early animation.

Literary works generally portray historical and social changes of their times besides of their aesthetical values. These writings also interpret the ideas which influenced the most. This makes them a form of contemporary documentation (Zeitdokument or Zeitroman), which helps to understand a specific era. In the 20th century, Georg Lukács, the Marxist theorist and philosopher, was a significant thinker, whose attitude, character, and ideas influenced many other philosophers and artists. The aim of this paper is to outline Lukács’s development of thinking from the point of view of his contemporaries. To this end, I discuss four literary writings in this paper: these four works represent an era from Lukács’s life and thinking. The almost unknown feuilleton of Béla Balázs published in 1911 idealizes the young Lukács and portrays him as a quixotic thinker, who belongs to another sphere, another “caste”. In the turn of 1921-1922, the novel of Emma Ritoók entitled Spiritual Adventurers was published, which represented the generation of pathfinders negatively and disillusioned, as they tried to calculate the redemption of the individuals with some mystical philosophical ideas. Anna Lesznai’s novel, In the Beginning was the Garden, is a significant opus with two volumes which outlines the troubled times of Hungarian history and recreates the historical events from the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 to the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic and the first years of emigration. The two novels portray Lukács as a pathfinder who stands at a crossroads between theory and political praxis. Ritoók’s novel judges this struggle and interprets it in a caricatured way, while Anna Lesznai represents Lukács’s dilemma and decision as a sacrifice. The fourth work is The Interview by István Eörsi, which was published first in 1983 and is a very personal writing. Eörsi’s writing is a drama or rather an “absurd documentary play”, where Eörsi evokes his old Master, who is not the great thinker and philosopher, who he once was. The mind struggles as it still tries to create and work, but the body fails and Lukács got lost in the maze of his own thinking. The student wants to face his old Master, trying to get answers to his own dilemmas about Lukács, but his physical inability makes it almost impossible to communicate with him. All these four works represent Lukács in different phases and they take a very specific glance at a significant œuvre. However, these works deserve the consideration not just from the point of view of Lukács’s significance, but because of their literary value. The literary works mentioned here are on the periphery of the literary canon and the rediscovering of these writings could bring new aspects not just for literary studies, but for the history of philosophy and ideas as well.

Galley proofs (please quite the final published version). Published in Mester, Béla; Smoczyński, Rafał (eds.). Lords and Boors – Westernisers and ‘Narodniks’ : Chapters from Polish and Hungarian Intellectual History. Budapest, Gondolat Publishers, Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute of Philosophy (2020) 286 p. pp. 184-203. , 20 p.
© Bettina Szabados (Institute of Philosophy of the Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest, Hungary) and/or the publisher (2020). Unauthorized reproduction or posting to other websites is not allowed. All Rights Reserved! Scientific use only!

This essay examines the contrasting visions of the expressive powers of the human face—both from neuroscientific approaches rooted in Darwin which argue for a codified system of six basic emotions universally recognized (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise) and from the visual arts of cinema, television and portraiture painting that rely on facial close-ups to represent an emotional fluidity that is always subjective. As a means of reconciling the two approaches, it turns to the current study of infants by developmental psychologists (like Peter Mundy and Daniel Stern) who stress the importance of an infant's ability to read the mother's face, which facilitates joint attention, the acquisition of verbal language and social interactions with the world. Although Stern's imaginative dialogues sound literary and subjective, his description of the infant's encounter with the mother's face is actually consistent with the explanation by neuroscientist Ant...

In this article, I examine how Lynch’s strange worlds create inter-sensory experiences of mood (Chion 2006, 170). Concentrating my analysis on Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), I propose that mood can function as a brief audio-visual flash in Lynch (a shorting of the senses) or it can function in a more sustained fashion, becoming a vital component of one of Lynch’s ‘forever’ scenes (Chion 2006, 92-93). 

By way of mood, Lynch will often disrupt our ‘normal’ visual and spatial coordinates. In these moments, the expressivity of light, sound, colour, music, rhythm and audio-visual texture is key. In what follows, I first of all explore Lynch’s moody introduction to Fire Walk with Me, detailing his longstanding love of the mysterious by way of the Blue Rose.  To better develop an inter-sensory account of film mood, I return to Béla Balázs’s early film theory. For Balázs, mood or what he terms “atmosphere” makes for a mobile and material flow that moves between bodies and things (2010, 44).  Bringing Balázs’s account of mood to bear on Lynch’s film, I examine the sensuality and the persistence of film mood in the ‘forever’ scene of the Pink Room. 

Finally, I bring the recurrence of electricity in Fire Walk with Me together with Daniel Stern’s concept of “vitality affects” (2000, 54). While Stern is concerned with the inter-subjective processes of childhood development, his work alerts us to the importance of sensory patterning.  For this article, mood offers us a productive means by which to understand Lynch’s film as a privileging of mood and sensation above seriality. In Fire Walk with Me, Lynch patterns mood and its inter-sensory effects as electric.

This essay examines the contrasting visions of the expressive powers of the human face—both from neuroscientific approaches rooted in Darwin which argue for a codified system of six basic emotions universally recognized (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise) and from the visual arts of cinema, television and portraiture painting that rely on facial close-ups to represent an emotional fluidity that is always subjective. As a means of reconciling the two approaches, it turns to the current study of infants by developmental psychologists (like Peter Mundy and Daniel Stern) who stress the importance of an infant’s ability to read the mother’s face, which facilitates joint attention, the acquisition of verbal language and social interactions with the world. Although Stern’s imaginative dialogues sound literary and subjective, his description of the infant’s encounter with the mother’s face is actually consistent with the explanation by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (1999) ...

In 1925, having recently excused himself from his professional obligations to pursue writing full-time, Robert Musil reviewed Béla Balázs’s newly published book on film, Der sichtbare Mensch. The review praises Balázs’s theoretical achievement, though it excludes almost all mention of the cinematic images that inspired Balázs’s reflections. Balázs discusses how the silence of the silent cinema allows viewers to directly experience the expressive power of surfaces and bodies, what he calls the physiognomic character of the visible world. In his review, Musil shifts attention from cinema to literature, and challenges his readers to imagine the non-verbal register of “das Physiognomische” as a possibility for the modern novel.

My paper explores this idea as it is worked out in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. It examines the ways in which the expressive possibilities of the face interact with the various social, psychological, and literary discourses the novel speaks. Using “der Fall Moosbrugger” as a kind of case study, I analyze how the image of the murderer’s face disrupts the continuity of narrative and produces a kind of textual “tic”—summoning ellipses, triggering stutters, and kindling all kinds of fantasies and defenses. Still, if Moosbrugger’s case defies narration, its disarticulation of habitual perception and common sense also opens up a space for the novel’s essayistic digressions and counter-factual abstractions. Musil’s reading of Balázs, I argue, invites us to ground his concept of “Möglichkeitssinn” in a kind of empiricism, a “physiognomy” if not a “phenomenology” of perception. If the novel takes an interest in “[was] ebensogut anders sein könnte,” the gap between facial image and linguistic sign inspires this sense of possibility.

Should we choose to link the thematic and stylistic tendencies of post-9/11 North American cinema to the contemporary moment, ambiguous representation embodies the current difficulty of making sense of things in the face of a war that is at once perpetual and ‘disappearing’ (Mueller, 2004: 1). In other words, the convoluted motivations, methods and outcomes of “the war on terror” have produced a culture of uncertainty and dread, culminating in images without easily discernible meaning. Where traces of conflict are depicted, our ability to judge things clearly is significantly clouded. This chapter shall consider one particular technique used for this clouding of judgement: the erasure of discernible meaning in images of the human face. Approaching the face of Joaquin Phoenix’s “Freddie Quell” in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012), I wish to consider the film’s affectivity and expressivity of postwar trauma as an ethical challenge to the spectator.

Die Arbeit erschließt Kriminalfernsehen erstmals umfassend als Forschungsgegenstand. Sie entwirft, ausgehend vom frühen Kracauer, ein modifiziertes ideologiekritisches Modell, das, mehr als die Kulturindustriethesen der 'Dialektik der Aufklärung', eine differenzierte Beurteilung der Unterhaltungsfunktion von massenmedialen Artefakten gestattet.

Im Mittelpunkt der Untersuchung steht der konkrete Zusammenhang von ästhetischer Konstruktion und ideologischem Gehalt der Kriminalfernsehserien. An ihm lassen sich spezifische ästhetische Prinzipien der Gattung verdeutlichen, die zu Verdrängung, Ausgrenzung oder Nivellierung von gesellschaftlich prekären Wirklichkeitsgehalten führen.