"All the major silent-film theorists – such as Munsterberg, Balázs, Kulehshov, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Rotha – tend to resemble each other in two respects: 1) they generally – with the possible exception of those like Vertov – see the role or value of film to be its capacity to make art, and (2) their different theories of art – with the possible exception of those like Victor Freeberg – are generally anti-mimetic in their fundamental bias, that is, they all demand divergence between artworks and represented real things as a criterion of art." (1)
Carroll argues that Balázs values cinema insofar as the medium is able to meet the traditional criterion of art. As indicated by works such as The Visible Man (Der sichtbare Mensch, 1924) and Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art (2) Balázs takes this criterion to involve the creative use of techniques to stylise the world and express the inner consciousness of the individual artist or, more broadly, the human subject. In other words, what Balázs prizes is the act of exploiting the medium’s properties. This is not only in order to materialise the internal psychological and metaphysical qualities of characters but also anthropomorphise inanimate objects. In this respect, Carroll suggests that Balázs promotes an anti-mimetic definition of film art based on “showing all the ways that film diverge[s] from a perfect recording of reality”.(3)
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| Béla Balázs |
Carroll also says that Balázs consistently demands of filmmakers that they ‘allow the emergence of expressive or formal qualities’ within pro-filmic material. (4) In other words, by transforming for artistic purposes whatever stands before the camera, Balázs feels that the inner life of the filmmaker – and the inner lives of audience members – can be expressed. As Carroll argues, this proposition partly rests on the claim that a filmmaker can leave a trace of their inner personality or unconscious desire in the filmed material. This proposition is problematic because it assumes that expressive qualities within art works are always, on some level, symptomatic of the personality and attitude of the artist. However, as Carroll says, it is possible for an art work to express particular qualities which are not necessarily reflective of an artist’s inner self.
What I would like to do is take up one issue with Carroll’s characterisation of Balázs film philosophy. Carroll fails to note that Balázs concept of expression in cinema is characterised by a dialectical interrelationship between, on the one hand, individual expression and, on the other hand, historical and social determination. What this means is that, for Balázs, the expressive qualities that an image projects should, ideally, involve both a subjective component i.e. what a film represents as the particular, individual experiences of a character, and an objective component i.e. what within a film is presented as the historical and social reality that shapes and restricts these individual experiences. For Balázs, it is the ways such subjective and objective components interact and synthesise that produces expression in film (or, as he often prefers to say, produces physiognomy). As such, Balázs advocates that films should disclose the individual, psychological realities of characters vis-à-vis such things as ideology and class tradition.
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| Greta Garbo (5) |
In critical and popular film literature, the work of Balázs is routinely associated with silent cinema, physiognomy and the close-up. While these are key areas of his film philosophy rarely has enough attention been paid to what Balázs actually means by the term physiognomy. By film physiognomy or what he sometimes refers to as film's 'visible spirit' Balázs basically means the following: spectators are able to read a soul from objects, characters and other entities on screen. In a very general sense, Balázs means by soul qualities pertaining to both the interior world of the human psyche, such as different thoughts and feelings, and innate, inner conditions of human perception. What is meant by these latter qualities includes the different human experiences of space and time that film can show. One of the presumptions in books such as The Visible Man and Theory of the Film is that pro-filmic material always potentially has emotional content and always potentially contains psychological and perceptual meaning, even if the camera is recording a world emptied of human characters. In other words, within every filmic image there is a humanised reality in the waiting, no matter how dormant or hidden this reality might be and how much exaggeration and distortion might be needed to draw this reality out.
In order to appreciate Balázs’ notion of film physiognomy, however, it is also necessary to consider what Balázs means by human. Jerome Stolnitz has argued that for Balázs the human is comprised of the complex characteristics of an individual soul or interior, psychological reality. Quoting from Theory of the Film Stolnitz says that these characteristics consist of “emotions, moods, intentions, and thoughts”. (6) Stolnitz argues that what matters for Balázs is the “quality, impulses, interaction” of these characteristics, which are varied and contradictory and which modulate over time. (7) Without clearly stating it, Stolnitz is referring to what Balázs calls in Theory of the Film the “‘polyphonic’ play of features”, which he defines as “a sort of physiognomic chord” which consists of “a variety of feelings, passions, and thoughts...synthesised in the play of the features as an adequate expression of the multiplicity of the human soul”.(8) Stolnitz suggests that it is the dynamic interplay between thoughts, intentions and feelings that is central to Balázs idea of film physiognomy. Moreover, Stolnitz argues that the reason this interplay is important is because it is only when film discloses the complexities and intricate changes of the individual soul that film is elevated to a genuinely humanistic art.
Stolnitz is assuming here that Balázs is a humanist; specifically a humanist who believes that art is only art if it deals with individual reality. Moreover, Stolnitz says that Balázs’ humanism is based on Aristotelian principles and that, therefore, Balázs is a classical humanist. As is common practice, Stolnitz uses the term Aristotelian as a short-hand way to encapsulate the humanism of classical antiquity. This is a problematic practice for a number of reasons, including the fact that insofar as humanistic elements can be said to have existed in ancient Greek society, not every thinker from that society who had humanistic values can simply be subsumed under the name of Aristotle. For such reasons, I take Stolnitz to simply mean that Balázs believes in the proposition that art is only art if it deals with individual, human reality; this is a proposition that, broadly speaking, can be taken as humanistic. I am not saying that concepts central to Balázs’ notion of what is human, such as physiognomy, cannot on some level be traced back to ancient Greek thought. Rather, I am suggesting that to whatever extent Balázs is a humanist his humanism cannot be simply labeled classical. For one thing, his ideas about what is human also come from German Idealist philosophy and German Romantic literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. (9)
I would also argue that Stolnitz is overplaying the degree to which individualism is foundational to Balázs’ notion of what is human. For example, in Theory of the Film Balázs at one point discusses the history of what he says are two dominant styles in Western art: the ‘epic’ and the ‘intimate’. By the ‘epic’ Balázs means art that makes general claims about human existence and which represents the world in terms of things like social tradition and class ideology. By the ‘intimate’ Balázs means art that focuses on the psychology of individual characters and which represents the world in terms of what is private and personal. Balázs says that up until the beginning of the nineteenth century these two dominant styles were combined and interrelated within individual art works. However, he claims that these two styles started to become distinct with the rise of the middle classes: "In former times art knew nothing of the contrast between the epic and the intimate, the great and the small, the universally valid and the merely private. Such differentiation between private experience and socially significant event in the mode of presentation is a phenomenon specific to bourgeois art. This brought about on the one hand the purely introspective ‘chamber’ art devoid of all social connections and on the other the decorative generalizations of the epic form which glosses over all individual traits."(10)
This contention that before the rise of the middle-classes in the nineteenth century art knew nothing of the distinction between the individual and the social rests on Balázs’ reading of history. This historical reading, heavily influenced by his understanding of Marxist ideas as well as his Romantic utopianism, views the nineteenth century as a period which intensified the development of a number of problems inherent within modern capitalism. One of these problems is the fragmentation and atomisation of social groups and communities into agglomerations of isolated individuals. Moreover, these individuals are alienated from each other and from the world around them. For Balázs, this changing social reality is reflected in the art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He says that this art presents dichotomies between the individual and the social and the particular and the universal. For various reasons, Balázs feels that, even though cinema is a contemporary art form, it is a medium that has the potential to overcome such fragmentation and alienation, provided films interrelate and synthesise what, under the conditions of capitalism, has become separated. (11)
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| October (1928) |
In terms of cinema, Balázs sees the ‘epic form’ illustrated in certain films from the post-revolutionary, Soviet montage movement of the 1920s. He suggests, for example, that because Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov’s October (1928) focuses on a cross-section of classes and masses rather than on individual characters, it fails to achieve proper universal significance. For Balázs, cinema only really becomes art when it shows how things like history and class are manifested in private human destinies and in the “characteristic physiognomies” of individual expression.(12) Put another way, cinema is only art if it “turn(s) the particular into something universal”.(13) Therefore, while Balázs is interested in the various, contradictory and changing facets of an individual soul that can be revealed through close-ups and other filmic techniques, he is also equally interested in what such internal individualization reveals about ideology and social life. For films which are “purely introspective” and present no “social connections” also equally fail to achieve the revelation of the universal through the individual. (14)
What ultimately produces physiognomy in film for Balázs is the dialectical interaction between the subjective (particular) and the objective (universal). (15) By the universal Balázs means that which is brought about by the objective reality of history and culture; put another way, the universal represents laws of human consciousness. For example, social tradition and class ideology can both be seen as involving what a film represents as the historically created relations and circumstances that define the conditions of a character’s existence. While these universal laws of consciousness are not reducible to what is subjective and personal they are, at the same time, laws which are reflected in the individual subject. What is more they are laws which are given visible and physical form through individual expression and gesture. This again does not mean that such laws are reducible to the visible and physical. Rather, they are laws that are reflected in the visible and physical. The overall point for Balázs is that the particular and the universal can be combined and blended within an individual face and body. He makes this clear in another section that Stolnitz does not refer to: “One of the tasks of the film is to show us, by means of ‘microphysiognomics’,(16) how much of what is in our faces is our own and how much of it is he common property of our family, nation or class. It can show how the individual traits merge with the general, until they are inseparably united and form as it were nuances of one another”.(17)
Endnotes
1. Noël Carroll, Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory, Princeton, New Jersey:Princeton University Press, 1988, pg. 27.
2. This book was originally published in 1952. It contains many sections and passages from The Visible Man as well as another one of Balázs’ earlier works The Spirit of the Film (Der Geist des Films, 1930).
3. Carroll, pg. 176.
4. Carroll, pg. 27.
5. In Theory of Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, Balázs says that Greta Garbo's beauty is an elevated beauty. It is a beauty, in other words, that is not only individual but also metaphysical: 'Greta Garbo's beauty is a beauty of suffering; she suffers life and all the surrounding world. And this sadness, this sorrow is a very definite one: the sadness of loneliness, of an estrangement which feels no common tie with other human beings' (286).
6. Jerome Stolnitz, ‘Balázs: The Dilemmas of Humanism in the Movies’ Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 10, Issue 2, April 1976, pg. 27.
7. Stolntiz, pg. 27
8. Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone, New York: Dover Publications, 1970, pg. 64.
9. For a discussion about Balázs relationship to German Idealism and Romanticism see Gertrud Koch’s ‘Béla Balázs: The Physiognomy of Things’ New German Critique, trans. Miriam Hansen, Issue 40, Winter 1987, pp. 167-177.
10. Balázs, pg. 267.
11. For an overview of the reasons Balázs believed cinema has utopian potential see Eric Carter 'Introduction' Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory, New York: Berghahn Books, 2010.
12. Balázs, pg. 160.
13. Balázs, pg. 161.
14. Balázs, pg. 267.
15. Balázs concept of physiognomy also has a number of other dimensions to it; for example, it also involves Balázs' particular phenomenological and psychological understanding of how audiences experience space and time in film. For more information see Eric Carter 'Introduction' Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory, New York: Berghahn Books, 2010.
16. By ‘microphysiognomics’ Balázs means the subtle features, expressions and different dimensions of being (including unconscious reflex-like reactions) that a face or body can reveal when shot in particular ways i.e. framed through close-ups. Essentially, such devices reveal a hyper-reality, a reality that is not normally apprehended in everyday life.
17. Balázs, pg. 83.
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