Béla Balázss two works,Visible Man (1924) andThe 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. Balázss 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analyses of the close-up, the shot and montage are illuminating both as applicable models for film analysis, and as historical documents of his key contribution alongside such contemporaries as Arnheim, Kracauer and Benjamin to critical debate on film in the golden age of the Weimar silents.

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.

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

Visible Man Sketches For a Theory of Film The Substance of Film Type and Physiognomy The Play of Facial Expressions The Close-Up The Face of Things Nature and Naturalness Visual Linkage Supplementary Fragments World View Two Portraits Chaplin, the Ordinary American Asta Nielsen: How She Loves and How She Grows Old

The Spirit of Film

Seven Years The Productive Camera The Close-Up Set-Up Montage Montage Without Cutting Flight From the Story The Absolute Film Colour Film and Other Possibilities Sound Film Ideological Remarks

Appendix:

Reviews I: Siegfried Kracauer, A new film book (1930)
Reviews II: Rudolf Arnheim,The Spirit of Film (1930)