Glossary Editorial
Erica Carter
Visible Man or the Culture of Film Three Addresses by Way of a Preface
I. May We Come In?
II. To Directors and Other Fellow Practitioners
III. On Creative Enjoyment
The Spirit of Film
Appendix:
Reviews I: Siegfried Kracauer, 'A new film book' (1930)
Reviews II: Rudolf Arnheim, The Spirit of Film (1930)
Béla Balázs was a Hungarian Jewish film theorist, author, screenwriter and film director who was at the forefront of Hungarian literary life before being forced into exile for Communist activity after 1919. His German-language theoretical essays on film date from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s, the period of his early exile in Vienna and Berlin.
Béla Balázs's two works, Visible Man (1924) and The Spirit of Film (1930), are published here for the first time in full English translation. The essays offer the reader an insight into the work of a film theorist whose German-language publications have been hitherto unavailable to the film studies audience in the English-speaking world. Balázs's detailed analyses of the close-up, the shot and montage are illuminating both as applicable models for film analysis, and as historical documents of his key contribution - alongside such contemporaries as Arnheim, Kracauer and Benjamin - to critical debate on film in the 'golden age' of the Weimar silents.