Bauer 2016 Béla Balázs. A Gestalt Theory of Film

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
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Béla Balázs: a Gestalt theory of film
Matthias Bauer
To cite this article: Matthias Bauer (2016): Béla Balázs: a Gestalt theory of film, Historical
Journal of Film, Radio and Television, DOI: 10.1080/01439685.2016.1167462
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Download by: [Monash University Library] Date: 15 April 2016, At: 13:10
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01439685.2016.1167462
BÉLA BALÁZS: A GESTALT THEORY OF FILM
Matthias Bauer
Downloaded by [Monash University Library] at 13:10 15 April 2016
Discussing the major concepts on which Balázs’s film theory is built, the article
explores the poetic Gestalt and symbolic meaning of film, the interplay of close-up,
montage and conjecture. Following the development of the theory from Visible Man
(1924) to The Spirit of Film (1930), the article argues for the possibility of a
semiotic understanding of Balázs’s phenomenological approach. In the beginning,
Balázs was attracted by the spiritual dimension of the new art. He expected a new
visual culture to emerge from the silent movie. Consequently, Balázs had to recon-
sider his theory when sound came in and enriched the medium’s capacity to convey
information. Another reason to alter his conception was Balázs’s struggle with
Eisenstein. A closer look at this struggle reveals that Balázs had his own theory of
linkage and was not willing to accept the Soviet idea of montage as a making up
of mind. In favour of associations provoked deliberately he thought the viewer
should bridge the gap between observation and imagination that is essential in cin-
ema. In the end, Balázs imlicitly derives at a diagrammatic understanding of the
moving image and its conjectural reception. This understanding – together with
Balázs’s concern for cinema’s affective potential – inspired film theory after his
death, especially in France.
According to Marshall McLuhan, a new medium has the power to restructure the
culture of any society – the interplay of senses and motions as well as the key con-
cepts of human understanding.1 Béla Balázs’s writings on film can be seen as a
reflection of this process, decades before McLuhan launched his retrospective view
of the Gutenberg Galaxy in the early 1960s. Already in 1924, in his seminal book
Visible Man, Balázs claimed that cinematography has the power to reshape the ‘face’
of the world.
Correspondence to: Prof. Dr Matthias Bauer, Department of Language, Literature and Media,
Europe University Flensburg, Auf dem Campus 1, D-24943 Flensburg, Germany. E-mail:
matthias.bauer@uni-flensburg.de
Ó 2016 IAMHIST & Taylor & Francis

2 Matthias Bauer
This article presents the major concepts on which Balázs’s film theory is built.
Discussing some problematic implications and correcting several misunderstandings,
the article also parallels Balázs’s approach with semiotics. This developed version
of Balazs’s theory, as outlined in The Spirit of Film (1930),2 implies that technology
enriches culture and overcomes the alienation of man from the modern world
shaped by industrial production and design. Though this sounds utopian in the
Marxist sense of the word and though Balázs’s thinking was undeniably strongly
influenced by the revolutionary left in the first half of the twentieth century, his
film theory is neither an orthodox expression of communism nor devoted to the
method of historic materialism. In contrast, Balázs borrowed and transformed dif-
ferent concepts provided by romantic and formalist aesthetics, phenomenology and
Gestalt psychology, ideas from Goethe, Simmel, Bergson and others, to set up a
framework in which one can detect many sources of inspiration for film theories
to come.
Towards a Gestalt theory of cinematography

To understand Balázs’s theory in its own right, one has to reconstruct the literary
milieu of his times and the social network of artists and intellectuals in Vienna
after the First World War. Because they had been engaged in the failed Hungarian
revolution of 1919, Balázs, his close friend George Lukács (1885–1971) and many
other members of the Socialist Party had to leave Budapest and to reassemble in
the capital of Austria. Balázs, who had been born in Szeged on 4 August 1884,
was raised by German-speaking parents. During his study years he, together with
Lukács, had founded the so-called ‘Sonntagskreis’ (Sunday Circle) and travelled to
Berlin and Paris, where he met Georg Simmel (1858–1918) and Henri Bergson
(1859–1941). Both exerted a major influence on him. Now, in Vienna, Balázs, a
passionate writer of poems and fables, fairy tales and libretti, frequently showed
up at the Café Filmhof, where he met people like Alexander Korda (1893–1956),
Michael Kertész (=Curtiz) (1886–1962), Ladislaus Vajda (1877–1933) and Béla
Blaskó (=Lugosi) (1886–1956).3
In 1921, Balázs was invited to deliver film reviews to a local newspaper and
produced a considerable number of them in the following years. He started with a
programmatic justification of film review that anticipates some arguments in favour
of a new visual culture in his first book on the topic. Consequently, some chapters
in Visible Man were composed of parts of the reviews Balázs had already published
in Der Tag, Wiener Tagblatt, Basler National-Zeitung and Pester Lloyd between 1922
and 1924. When Visible Man was translated into Russian in 1925 and attracted
many readers, among them the Bolshevik film-makers, Lukács poignantly claimed
‘that his comrade from the 1919 Hungarian Soviet was only called a Marxist film
critic because Marxist film theory did not yet exist’.4 This statement reflects the
estrangement of the former friends. While Lukács retracted from the romanticism
inherent in his early Theory of the Novel (1914/15) and became a radical protagonist
of the Soviet regime, Balázs, at least in Vienna, stood apart from politics and
remained a romantic. In his diary of 1921, he even wrote: ‘Everything depends on
the spiritual transformation of communism into religion’.5
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 3
Accordingly, the development of his film theory, especially the shift from
Visible Man to The Spirit of Film, can be seen as the outcome of a constant struggle
between the tendency to explore the spiritual dimension of the new art and to
explain its core feature from a technical point of view. In 1923, Balázs published
two articles that precede this struggle. In his essay ‘On Lyrical Sensibility’ he pre-
sumed: ‘The soul is not opposed to nature since all things are only colours of the
same soul’.6 This monistic conception is present in Visible Man, too. But in another
article, Balázs was concerned with the specific quality of expressionism and portrait
painting. There he argued that such a portrait, instead of showing the outward
look of the person depicted, exhibits the ‘diagram’ of the person’s soul. (Wir
sehen das Diagramm einer herausgeschälten Seele, aber nicht mehr die Person, der
sie angehört.)7 In this respect, the picture displays a relation which, if analysed
correctly, is a triangular one, since it is the viewer who apprehends how the artist
has conceived of the personality he had been portraying. The picture, then, stimu-
lates a complex interplay of perception and imagination, affection and cognition
that should not be reduced to what is visible at first sight. The portrait is a painted
image and, by the same token, it displays more or less abstract relations. As will
be shown below, this coincidence of concrete appearance and diagrammatic display
is a core feature of the moving image, too. Therefore, though never made explicit
in Balázs’s books, a semiotic understanding of his film theory is presumably much
more compelling than the relics of spiritualism they also include.
One reason why Balázs never arrived at an explicit semiotic understanding of
film was his obligation to Bergson phenomenology and Gestalt psychology. In fact,
these approaches are not incompatible with semiotics from the outset, but they
both stress different specific terms and attitudes. The key term, of course, is
‘Gestalt’. Balázs was among the first who grasped the importance of this term.
Bergson, the Austrians Ernst Mach (1838–1916) and Christian von Ehrenfels
(1859–1932), and the research group around Carl Stumpf (1858–1936) in Berlin,
contributed to the new discipline of psychology. They were able to demonstrate
that the continuous apperception of impressions results in a holistic understanding:
the whole is more than the sum of its parts. What a painting displays cannot be
reduced to the single forms and colours it is composed of. Similarly, a melody is a
Gestalt transcending the succession of notes. What is more, it can be recognised if
transposed. This is significant for every Gestalt. No wonder, then, that the inter-
art discourse was triggered by Gestalt psychology. It also demanded a reconsidera-
tion of the transcendental forms of perceiving distinguished by Immanuel Kant
(1724–1804) in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), namely space and time. To
hear a melody involves retaining in the mind the impression of the first note until
the last one has been apprehended. This extension of impressions, Bergson
claimed, is not an extension in time that could be measured by the clock – it is
more a kind of ‘durée’ (duration) which the hearer becomes aware of while listen-
ing to the melody. It is plain to see that every act of apperception and conjecture
results in a kind of Gestalt. Therefore, the moving image, due to montage, can be
compared to the intonation of a melody. It would be senseless to look at each sin-
gle frame to gather the meaning suggested by the Gestalt that is produced by edit-
ing the takes in a specific way. It follows that the entire meaning transcends the
visible because it is the product of observation and imagination, remembrance and
4 Matthias Bauer
ratiocination. It can neither be identified with the surface appearance of the

photographed world nor with the content of the narration alone. Instead, it is a
kind of Gestalt developed in the viewer’s mind, where it is present according to
the law of duration.
Besides Gestalt psychology, Balázs was inspired by Simmel. Significant for Sim-
mel’s scientific method was his use of the essay as a means of exploration. Lukács,
therefore, considered him to be the real philosopher of impressionism.8 It is
important to realise that Balázs adopted Simmel’s heuristic use of the essay and his
sociological approach to the phenomenological world. Simmel tried to identify the
so-called ‘Zeitgeist’ by scrutinising concrete things like the handle or the cash flow.
He wrote an often quoted Philosophy of Money (1900) and discussed Kant, Goethe
and Nietzsche in a series of acclaimed articles. He also exchanged ideas with Berg-
son and hinted at a link between modernity and physiognomy that Balázs took up
enthusiastically: Simmel supposed that modern man is more attracted by the human
face, whereas ancient man had been attracted much more by the entire human
body. This notion, in Simmel, is closely related to the observation that the realism
of contemporary art is bound to motion.9 Film, Balázs could infer, was the most
advanced achievement of modern art: the viewer is confronted with inward move-
ments expressed in facial expressions that change before his very eyes.
Today, one could explain the immediate impact of these expressions by the
theory of the mirror neurons. This neurons, located in the sensomotoric cortex,
correspond to perception and prepare imitative movement.10 The theory holds that
this immediate reaction stimulates empathetic understanding. In 1924, however,
Balázs had to rely on Gestalt psychology, phenomenology and Goethe’s concept of
physiognomy to understand this impact and to grasp the specific feature of film,
which is twofold: to confront the viewer with a countenance bigger than life and
to proceed by the constant Gestaltwechsel (change of shape). The moving image
displays the ongoing metamorphosis of human faces and of the diegetic world that
in its dynamism reflects the permanent change of the entire universe. In this
respect, Balázs’s theory comes close to the notion that the world itself is a kind of
‘meta-film’ and that each take is a fragment of the overall movement that encom-
passes everything. It is the same idea that Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) extracted
from Bergson’s writing many years later, especially from his book L’Évolution
créatrice, published as early as 1907.
As speculative as such a meta-kinetics may be, there can be no doubt that cin-
ematography was connected to another dynamic, the dynamic of the masses.
Whereas, modern art and avant-garde poetry had deprived themselves of any mass
appeal, the movie theatres attracted millions of people from different classes every
night. This observation, which clearly is a sociological one, marks the point of
attack in Visible Man. To justify his interest in the moving image, Balázs wrote:
‘Film has now become a fact, a fact that is producing such profound universal,
social and psychic effects that we must engage with it, whether we will or no. For
film is the popular art of our century. Not, unfortunately, in the sense that it arises
from the spirit of the people, but in the sense that it is out of film that the spirit
of the people arises’. (VM 4) It is clear from the outset, then, that Balázs, taking
up Simmel’s approach to the ‘Zeitgeist’, recognised both a new art and an under-
estimated political power in film. ‘In Vienna alone, for example, films are shown
every evening in almost 200, and I mean two hundred cinemas, each with an aver-
age of 450 seats. They provide three or four showings a day. So, if we assume that
the cinemas are three quarters full, that comes to around 300,000 (three hundred
thousand!) people in a not very large city’. (VM 4) Consequently, the impact of a
movie screened worldwide must be immense. Not to mention the impact of the
globally operating film industry that emerged in the ‘roaring twenties’. (VM 4)
The physiognomical approach to cinema: sources and problems

With these empirical indications of the new medium’s potential in mind, it is quite
comprehensible that Balázs expected an overwhelming cultural shift to result from
cinema. He thought it would be able to change the ‘face’ of nearly everything in a
profound manner. This becomes evident if one compares the main feature of the
new medium with the culture that had been shaped by books and rational dis-
course: ‘The discovery of printing has gradually rendered the human face illegible.
People have been able to glean so much from reading that they could afford to
neglect other forms of communication’. (VM 9)
To his own disadvantage, Balázs, in Visible Man, did not answer clearly enough
the question whether the specific Gestalt he later, in The Spirit of Film, called
‘countenance’ (SF 103–104) is the ‘natural’ face overlooked in the printing age or
the product of the new art, confined to the screen. Though the latter interpreta-
tion is much more likely, another key term used by Balázs confuses the picture.
This term is ‘body language’. On the one hand, Balázs argued that any body lan-
guage is a product of culture; on the other hand, some of his remarks tend to ‘nat-
uralise’ this language. ‘The body’s expressiveness is always the latest product of
cultural process. This means that however primitive and barbarous a film may be
in comparison to literature as it is today, it nevertheless represents the future
development of culture because it involves the direct transformation of spirit into
body’. (VM 13) While any constructivist could agree with the first part of this
statement, the notion of a ‘direct transformation of spirit into body’ must raise
strong reservations. A similar ambivalence occurs when Balázs comes to discuss the
internationalism of the body language. ‘The screens of the entire world are now
starting to project the first international language, the language of gestures and
facial expressions. This internationalism has its root in economics, which always
provides the firmest foundation’. (VM 14) Accordingly, it is the shaping force of
the market that leads to standardised gestures and expressions understandable all
over the world. However, other utterances contradict this reading and seem to
involve highly problematic notions of race and even ‘selective breeding’: ‘The cine-
matograph is a machine that in its own way will create a living, concrete interna-
tionalism: the unique, shared psyche of the white man. We can go further. By
suggesting a uniform ideal of beauty as the universal goal of selective breeding, the
film helps to produce a uniform type of the white race’. (VM 14)
Of course, Erica Carter was right to say that this shocking passage in Visible
Man ‘reminds the modern reader of the perils of a film theory that celebrates the
culture of the physical body’.11 However, coming back to the topic some pages
later, Balázs wonders about man’s ability to understand a facial expression never
6 Matthias Bauer
seen before. In this context, he writes: ‘Like the other mysteries of physiognomy,
this is one that we shall never be able to fathom as long as we remain within the
bounds of a single system of physiognomy and performance. Just as philology can
discover the laws of language only by recourse to comparative linguistics, so too
we shall have to make use of the film as the material sources for a new field of
comparative physiognomy’. (VM 31) Since comparative linguistics is not compati-
ble with the idea of a Master Language superior to all others, it is likely that com-
parative physiognomy would do away with racist ideology. In any case, Balázs’s
interest in physiognomy is a psychological and dramaturgical one. This becomes
evident in the following paragraph: ‘Both soul and destiny can be seen in the
human face. In this visible relationship, in this interplay of facial expressions, we
witness a struggle between the type and the personality, between inherited and
acquired characteristics, between fate and the individual will, the “id” and the
“ego”’. (VM 31) The inward struggle which is ‘readable’ in the dramatic change of
facial expressions lends cinema the power to convey psychological insights beyond
those that are available in the theatre, where the audience looks at the actors from
a great distance and a fixed position. Therefore, the crucial innovation that sets
cinema apart from stage drama is the variance of viewpoints, and especially the
close-up that is inserted to intensify the viewer’s empathetic understanding.
In this respect, the apparatus resembles a microscope. It enlarges the scope of
the expressiveness of acting and displays aspects of the Visible Man in such a man-
ner no other art can compete with. Paintings and photographs lack the dynamic
change of facial expression, although some of them can be described as close-ups.
But the moving image shows how expressions develop over time. Of course, one
could describe such a development with words, too. But words – despite all rheto-
ric and poetic devices – remain abstract from sensual impression, whereas the
moving image can convey complex emotions or ‘chords of feeling’ as Balázs say in
Visible Man. (VM 34). His example is telling:
In Way Down East [1922], Lilian Gish [1893–1993] plays a trusting girl who has
been seduced. When the man tells her that he has deceived her and made a
fool of her, she cannot believe her ears. She knows what he says is true, but
wants to believe that he is just joking. And for five whole minutes she laughs
and cries by turns, at least a dozen times. / We would need many printed
pages to describe the storms that pass over this tiny, pale face. Reading them
would also take up much time. But the nature of these feelings lies precisely
in the crazy rapidity with which they succeed one another. The effect of this
play of facial expressions lies in its ability to replicate the original tempo of her
feelings. (VM 35)
Consequently, in his first book about the moving image, Balázs considered the
close-up to be the cornerstone of any genuine film dramaturgy, the core feature of
the new art and the major means to establish a visual culture which transcends the
boundaries of traditional aesthetics: ‘The close-up is the technical precondition of
the art of facial expressions and hence of the highest art of film in general. A face
has to be brought really close to us and it must be isolated from any context that
might distract our attention (likewise something is not possible on the stage); we
must be able to dwell on the sight so as to be able to read it properly’. (VM 37)
Nonetheless, Balázs was aware that the specific function of the close-up is
relative to the editing which determines its place and function in a series of shots.
So he tells the reader: ‘The close-up of a face is frequently used as the climax of
an important scene; it must be the lyrical essence of the entire drama. If the sud-
den appearance of such an image is not to appear meaningless we have to be able
to recognize its links with the drama as a whole’. (VM 37) Even more explicit is
the following paragraph about the interplay of light and sight, distance and angle
variance: ‘Over and above the close-up, the tools with which to achieve emphasis
include the concentration of lighting, “effects lighting,” and middle-ground shots.
All of these present the director with the problem of visual linkage. It is the art of
directing to know where to insert an extreme close-up, at what point a long shot
should be interrupted for a foreground shot. For the risk of disrupting the continu-
ity of a film by inserting individual shots is never far away’. (VM 39)
There can be no doubt that Balázs, already in Visible Man, paid much attention
to montage, although he preferred to speak of ‘editing’ or ‘linkage’. He posed the
problem of ‘linkage’, namely as an operation of balancing visual continuity and
affection, dramatic narration and lyrical meaning. The proof of this interpretation
can be seen in the next quotation: ‘The twin necessities of interpolated scenes on
the one hand and visual continuity on the other often appear to present an almost
insoluble contradiction and turn visual linkage into the director’s most delicate
part’. (VM 68) It must be said, that the twin necessities arise from an assumption
that limits Balázs’s understanding of cinematography: ‘For it is illusion alone that
counts in a picture’. (VM 42) Although, of course, illusion is an apt mode of
reception for many films, it is neither a precondition of everyone nor a mode con-
stantly at work even if the story told is fictitious. Only after he had acknowledged
the intellectual capacity of montage, was Balázs, in The Spirit of Film, able to free
his theory from this limitation.
Fortunately, he had conceived theory to be a developing system of assumptions
easy to correct, since its subject, the new art of film, was also a developing sys-
tem. Balázs expresses his heuristic understanding of theory on the first page of Visi-
ble Man: ‘It is theory that gives us the courage to undertake Columbus-like voyages
of exploration and turns every step into a freely chosen act’. (VM 3) It is obvious,
then, from the start that the reader should not expect a set of axioms or premises
from which one can deduce systematically every part of a hypothetical totality.
Such a deduction is only possible after the exploration has been undertaken suc-
cessfully. Yet, in 1924, Columbus is on its way and only able to lay out a kind of
map for further discoveries. Consequently, it would be a failure to judge an essay
like Visible Man on the knowledge available today. What Balázs offered were
‘Sketches for a dramaturgy of film’ (and not, as the English translation suggests,
‘Sketches for a theory of film’, VM 17). Taking into account this modest aim and
the state of art in 1924, Visible Man is an astonishing achievement – despite the fact
that Balázs’s ‘India’ – the new visual Culture he had been expecting – turned out
to be something else when colour and sound came on the scene.
If regarded from a genealogical point of view, the discovery of the pathetic
close-up helped Balázs to describe film as a specific art and to set the screened
drama apart from the staged drama. But Balázs also pointed out the common fea-
ture of every art: ‘Atmosphere is to be sure the soul of every art. It is the air and
8 Matthias Bauer
aroma that pervade every work of art, and that lend distinctiveness to a medium
and a world. This atmosphere is like the nebulous primal matter that condenses
into individual shapes. It is the substance common to the most disparate works,
the ultimate reality of every art’. (VM 22) Put in this frame of reference, many
arguments – especially those that are concerned with physiognomy – become much
more transparent than they might appear without. Since, for Balázs, it is neither
character nor action which make up the quality of a work of art, but the Gestalt
that relates form and feeling, his phenomenological approach focuses on the inter-
play of cognitive and affective stimuli. This is also the reason why Balázs could
argue that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) had written something about
film, even though he died almost 70 years before cinematography had been
invented. Indeed, Goethe wrote: ‘The things surrounding a person do not simply
impinge on him; he also reacts to them, and while letting himself be modified, he
modifies his surroundings’ (VM 29). This is true of every confrontation between
the human soul and a landscape or another surrounding apprehended with lyrical
sensibility. It follows that film has the capacity not only to display atmosphere by
giving the world a specific physiognomic ‘look’. What is more, the picture might
also lay out relationships inherent in any shot, scene or sequence. There are at
least two of them: the one Goethe was talking about and the one that comes into
play because the shot, scene or sequence is observed. Erica Carter’s comment
illuminates the basis of this concept:
It is significant that Balázs quotes Goethe here, rather than the acknowledged
‘father’ of modern physiognomy, the Swiss writer and Protestant pastor Johann
Caspar Lavater [1741–1801]. Goethe had collaborated with Lavater on the first
volume of his monumental Physiognomische Fragmente (Physiognomical Fragments,
1775–78), a four-volume exploration of that Romantic utopia of a ‘penetrating
inner vision’ to which Balázs also would later aspire. Initially enthusiastic about
Lavater’s ‘conception of the human being as an entity in which body and soul,
external and internal being, form an inherent unity’, Goethe contributed arti-
cles to Lavater’s first volume and allowed his portrait in profile to be used in
a section of Volume III on poets of genius. But Goethe distanced himself from
Lavater as distinctions began to emerge concerning their conception of the
relationship between body and character, personality or soul. […] while Lava-
ter understands the relation between inner and outer substance ‘semioti-
cally’,12 so that bodily phenomena become the sign of a transcendental
content, Goethe developed physiognomy as ‘syntactics’ in which every bodily
element ‘stands in a dialectical and mutually determining relationship with a
hypothetical conception of the whole’.13
Most important is the mutual interaction between subject and object: ‘For Goethe,
the unity between body and mind, physical form and spiritual essence remained,
then, in a permanent state of becoming; as Goethe himself wrote, “Nature forms
human beings, but they in turn transform themselves”’.14
Because Balázs took over Goethe’s conception completely, two implications
should be underlined: first, the mutual modification of surrounding and onlooker
does not involve bodily action. Second, as it holds true for the character in the
diegetic world, it also holds true for the viewer who is immersed in this world
and its specific atmosphere. The viewer is impressed by the things surrounding
him, too, and modifies every impression he receives by reacting to it with feelings
and thoughts, associations and inferences. It would be not sufficient, then, to
acknowledge the fact that ‘on stage’ and ‘on screen’ are fairly different displays.
One has also to reflect the difference in disposition: observing a drama that is per-
formed on stage is an operation according to the transcendental forms of perceiv-
ing, only. Watching a movie makes it possible to step over into ‘the space of
different specifically filmic time’15 and to sense the atmosphere established by facial
expressions and other physiognomic characteristics. Immersed in the dream-like
black-and-white world of the silent movie where virtually everything is transposed
to an encounter, the experience takes on the form of an interaction between the
viewer’s lyrical sensibility and the film’s symbolic meaning.
Interestingly, Kant, contradicting Lavater, did not believe that physiognomy
could become a science since all its possible inferences depended on drawings
instead of concepts.16 An artificial display is always necessary to mediate between
concrete phenomena and their physiognomic apperception (whereas, concepts can
be applied to phenomena according to the transcendental forms of perceiving with-
out the mediation of any further display). In this sense drawings or paintings, pho-
tographs and films are necessary preconditions to provide the world with a ‘face’.
That means: without the mediation of art, there is no physiognomy at all. Conse-
quently, in The Spirit of Film, Balázs admits:
So everything depends on physiognomy. But there is no such thing as physiog-
nomy ‘in itself’. There are only the physiognomies that we see. And these
change according to the angle from which we view them. Physiognomy depends
on point of view, in other words, on the camera set-up. Physiognomy is not
only an objective given, it is also our relation to it. A synthesis. (SF 112)
With this clarification in mind, it is easy to detect the common misunderstanding
of Balázs’s physiognomical approach to cinema. Many readers ignore the simple
fact that film art makes a secondary symbolic use of man’s primary capacity to see
‘faces’ in the world. Therefore Balázs reminds the reader in Visible Man:
The decisive fact as far as film is concerned is that all objects, without excep-
tion, are necessarily symbolic. For whether we are aware of it or not, all
objects make a physiognomical impression upon us. All and always. Just as
time and space are categories of understanding, and thus can never be elimi-
nated from the world of experience, so too the physiognomical attaches to
every phenomenon. It is a necessary category of perception. / The director
cannot chose, therefore, between an objective representation of objects and a
physiognomical, significant representation, but only between a physiognomical
representation that he has mastered and that he consciously deploys in accor-
dance with specific intentions, and one that is left entirely to chance and hence
resists him at every turn. (VM 56)
To call physiognomy a ‘necessary category of perception’ is not particularly accu-
rate. In his Critiquw of Pure Reason, Kant had separated the categories that the mind
applies to every object of perception, for example causality, from the transcenden-
tal forms of perceiving. The product of perceiving and categorising an object is a
10 Matthias Bauer
notion that may not be identified with the ‘thing itself’. Instead, it is a ‘picture in
the head’ showing how an object is apprehended by the subject according to the
forms of perceiving, the categories and – as Kant added – the schemata that the
imagination produces to mediate form and category. Accordingly, it would be
more accurate to call physiognomy a mode of apperception which involves the
schema of the human face. Balázs was convinced that this schema enters every act
of apperception in the cinema. Consequently, a film-maker has only the choice to
sharpen or to obscure the schema of the face entering the act of apperception
involuntarily. It follows that Balázs was in accordance with Kant when he stated
‘that film – like every art – is concerned not with objective “nature in itself” but
with man’s personal relation to it’. (VM 60) To read ‘Every view of the world
contains a world view’ (VM 81), therefore, is no obligation to accept an ideologi-
cal world view. It only reminds the reader of the impossibility of any objective
view, or, to use Kant’s famous phrase, the activity of the ‘transcendental ego’, i.e.
subjectivity.
The conclusion, however, does not have to remain a negative one. Instead of
turning down any positive knowledge, Kant’s transcendental aesthetics enables art
to modify the subject’s relation to the world – not by altering the forms of per-
ceiving or the categories, but by modifying the schemata of imagination. Following
this idea, Balázs assures the reader in The Spirit of Film: ‘The specific, unique form
that we apprehend in every object is a construction of the mind or an experience
of our sense of touch’. (SF 112) Since the sense of touch in film can be excited by
intermodal impressions only – for example, the close-up of a surface triggers an
apprehension of tactile features as texture and temperature – the ultimate trick is
to reconstruct or to deconstruct the mode of apperception by suggesting this or
that specific schema. Symbolism and impressionism, expressionism and abstraction,
estrangement and exaggeration, physiognomy and atmosphere, framing and light-
ing, editing and the related techniques of the dissolve, the pan or the fade-in and
fade-out are means that serve this purpose. The constant collaboration of percep-
tion, imagination and memory corresponds to these means of re and deconstruc-
tion. But the interplay of montage and conjecture, of film-maker and moviegoer is
flawed when everything is shown and spelled out. Instead of frustrating the viewer
the moving image shall stimulate the imagination that, according to Kant, splits
into a productive and a reproductive faculty. Balázs, one might assume, left the
reproductive faculty to the viewer and reserved the productive for the artist. In
any case, he looked at cinema from a constructive point of view, although this is
less transparent in Visible Man than it is in The Spirit of Film. The second book
focuses much more on the active part of the viewer and his growing capacity to
draw conclusions from the visible. In this respect, it anticipates recent theory of
media reception.
Apperception, montage and association: from Visible Man to The Spirit

of Film
How did Balázs come to clear up the matter? It is very likely that it was under the
influence of Robert Musil (1880–1942) that he reconsidered the epistemological
status of physiognomy. Musil and Balázs had become friends in Vienna and
remained in contact during their stays at Berlin in the second half of the 1920s. In
1925, Musil wrote an essay – in fact an extended review of Visible Man – using
Balázs’s book as a pretext for a new aesthetics: ‘Ansätze zu neuer Ästhetik.
Bemerkungen über eine Dramaturgie des Films’. In this essay, Musil distinguished
two levels of conscience: one in which the world is seen in a stable condition due
to a rational manner of observation that is in accordance with the rules of logic
and the laws of nature – and another, different one which is only transitional and
imaginary, transforming the world into a flux or a dream-like stream of moments
that bridge the gap between subjectivity and objectivity and resulting in a specific
Gestalt.17 To identify this second, ‘different’ state of mind with the old idea of
mystical unification is tempting but misleading, since it is not produced by spiritual
contemplation. In the movie theatre, it emerges out of the interplay between the
apparatus and the tendency of man to ‘see’ faces all over in the world. While
these ‘faces’ are identified as false impressions, wrong perceptions and illusions as
long as man sticks to the normal, rational level of conscience, he immerses himself
into the second state of mind as soon as he adopts the pan-poetic gaze established
by camera angle, abstraction from sound and colour and other devices.
In the light of Musil’s distinction, two ‘readings’ of Balázs’s early film theory
emerge: the first focuses on its esoteric features and regressive impulses: the
viewer tends to become a child, animating things and looking at the world accord-
ing to its unrealistic representation in fairy tales. This reading is linked with a
somewhat mystical attitude and indicated by Balázs’s interest in anthropological
research. Hanno Loewy, following these traces, tried to identify a hidden plot in
Balázs’s film theory: the kernel narrative, he presumed, is the little death and sym-
bolic rebirth the viewer lives through in the movie theatre.18 Of course, this read-
ing can rely on the spiritual yearning Balázs had expressed in some of his writings.
However, in the mid 1920s he had probably changed his mind due to his own
observations as a film critic and due to the insights of Musil, who had studied phi-
losophy and psychology in Berlin and had written a thesis about Ernst Mach that
was examined by Carl Stumpf. The second reading, then, mediates between the
two states of mind the Austrian novelist had juxtaposed. To get things straight:
neither Musil nor Balázs suggested that man should get rid of the rational manner,
of logic and positive science. But they both were convinced that the normal ‘gaze’
was a reduction of the universe and that man was in need for a second layer of
experience to become (or remain) creative. The imaginary journey, undertaken
with the difference of fact and fiction, reality and art in mind, enriches the ‘nor-
mal’ world view and empowers adult man with the lyrical sensibility that normally
is marginalised in the process of education. Even if Balázs and Musil had never met
and exchanged their ideas, this non-esoteric understanding of the transfiguration
the viewer is experiencing in the movie theatre would be more convincing and
productive than the other. It goes along with technology and modernity, establishes
a heuristics with operational features and allows for reliability. The overt implica-
tion is that all speaking of dream-like experience etcetera is only metaphoric speak-
ing for lack of scientific terminology. It goes also along with Kant: since the
‘normal’ world view is the result of a specific but contingent mode of appercep-
tion, art – as propagated by formalist aesthetics – is able to suggest alternative
12 Matthias Bauer
modes of apperception. The work of art, then, is a kind of thought experiment,

asking the audience to adopt a different view that, although only transitory, may
possibly provoke a sustainable reconfiguration of the ‘normal’ world view.
So far, the key term ‘apperception’ had been used without further explanation.
This term was promoted by Kant to distinguish the basic act of perception from
the process of categorising and interpreting sensual impressions. ‘As William James
[1842–1910] put it, apperception describes “the fate of every impression … to fall
into a mind preoccupied with memories, ideas, and interests; thus sense impres-
sions acquire a mental escort … drawn … from the mind’s ready-made stock”’.19
James explanation is probably too metaphoric. His friend Charles S. Peirce (1839–
1914), the founder of modern semiotics, took the notion of apperception much
further with his concept of the so-called ‘interpretant’: the mind develops the
immediate impression, linking it in the associative imagination with feelings,
thoughts, memories, etc. and arrives at conclusions about its meaning in a given
situation. Apperception, then, takes on the form of a three-step development from
‘immediate emotional interpretants’ to ‘dynamic and energetic interpretants’ up to
‘logical interpretants’ that satisfy the actual need of the interpreter but can be
altered if new impressions attract the mind and change the situation.20 Apparently,
the concept of the interpretant can be applied to the conjectural mode of film
reception. Because the moving image is a dynamic object in permanent flux, either
any logical interpretant is surpassed immediately or never acquired as long as the
movement takes on and triggers dynamic and energetic interpretants. There can be
no doubt, then, that the physiognomic impression already is an interpretant, i.e. a
product of apperception and not an objective quality of the picture in itself.
To be accurate, this Peircean understanding of Balázs’s film theory is a semi-
otic reconstruction of its phenomenological approach to cinema. Balázs himself, of
course, was not familiar with the concept of the ‘interpretant’. He was inspired by
recent Gestalt psychology, its revision of Kant and by some ideas discussed in for-
malist aesthetics and poetry. In this context, the German author Carl Hauptmann
(1858–1921) deserves notice. Hauptmann was fascinated by gestures. The realm of
gestures, he wrote in 1919, is a ‘cosmic realm’ set apart from the realm of linguis-
tic speech, where man could communicate even with animals and plants, rocks and
stars, houses and other things. This realm, Hauptmann suggested, should be
explored and deployed by art.21 If Musil’s review made Balázs think over the
essentialist implication in Visible Man, Hauptmann was one of those who inspired
the exaggerations that can be found in this book.
Despite this critique, one feature of the physiognomical apperception should
be marked and remembered as clearly as possible: it establishes an emotional rela-
tionship between the moving image and the viewer that is not based on action or
causality. One might hesitate to adopt the term of the ‘affect image’ that Deleuze
has coined since his hermetic merging of Bergsonian metaphysics and Peircean
semiotics is highly problematic. Nevertheless, part of Balázs’s discovery of the
close-up as a core feature of film is his insight that movement and action, story
and plot are not everything and that cinema’s impact on the audience has a lot to
do with empathy that contributes to the intellectual understanding of the ongoing
course of events. The camera, Balázs writes, has ‘to paint images of mood’. (VM
52)
Balázs, too, was familiar with the making of movies to ignore how much work
was invested in style and décor, look and atmosphere. ‘From 1926 until 1931,
Balázs lived and worked in Berlin, where he pursued his career as a film scenarist
and actively involved himself in leftist media initiatives, including the People’s
Association for Film Art’.22 On 9 June 1926, he gave a talk to the Club of Cam-
eraman, declaring: ‘Film could only become a work of art in that highest sense if
it were photographed in a productive and not a reproductive way, if the ultimate
and determining creative expression of spirit, soul, and emotion would develop
not through performance and mise-en-scène but only through the shooting of the
filmic images themselves, if the cameraman, who in the final analysis creates the
film, would be the spiritual creator, the writer of the work, the actual film-
maker’.23
It was none other than Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) who opposed this talk
vehemently. In an article entitled ‘Béla forgets the scissors’, the Russian director
attacked Balázs because he had ignored the collectivism inherent in film-making
and, by doing so, overestimated the work of the cameraman.24 The necessary cor-
rection, Eisenstein was demanding, reflects his own focus of interest. Instead of
the (isolated) shot the sequence of shots makes up the expressiveness of a movie,
he argued in favour of montage.25 Not surprisingly, the director turned out to be
the actual film-maker. One could discuss if Eisenstein’s notion of ‘collectivism’ is
only rhetoric. In any case, montage, for Eisenstein, does not serve narration or
dramatic suspense as it does in America (i.e. Hollywood).26 The so-called ‘mon-
tage of attraction’ is directed towards conjectures which, instead of mediating a
melodramatic story, lead to political considerations and moral judgments. As
shown above, Balázs had acknowledged the relevance of montage already in Visible
Man and was far from reducing collaborative work to the cameraman’s contribu-
tion. However, Eisenstein’s attack exerted some influence on him. Learning that
he probably had focused too much on the close-up, Balázs, in The Spirit of Film,
was quick to give a triple answer to the apparently simple question: ‘What makes
film a specific language of its own? The close-up. The set-up. The montage’.
(SF 98)
Of course, this is not the only improvement. There are others indicated by
the achievements of technology and the poetic development of film: the expres-
sionist mode of gestures and mimics so characteristic of German film production
after the First World War looked dated in 1930 when not only Soviet directors
had made great efforts to go beyond dramatic cross-cutting. In the seven years that
had gone by since Visible Man appeared, sound and colour had broken down the
black-and-white world of the silent movie. On the one hand, Balázs sensed the
danger that the new medium might lose its specific quality. ‘Fearing a degeneration
of visual expressiveness, he cautioned against the film’s tendency to become
unfilm-like, merely photographed naturalism’.27 Films could become ‘talkies’ bereft
of the dream-like atmosphere that had been condensed in the silent shadow play.
On the other hand, Balázs, in The Spirit of Film, clearly states that technological
achievements are never regrettable. ‘There is after all a new beginning, even if it
is one that has also produced an ending. One road has been blocked, but another
is opening up’. (SF 94) If theory was a road map, as he had argued in Visible Man,
this map had to be redesigned to accommodate recent developments.
14 Matthias Bauer
With much more accuracy than in Visible Man, Balázs, in The Spirit of Film,
describes the phenomenon of immersion: ‘The camera takes my eye along with it.
Into the very heart of the image. I see the world from within the filmic space. I
am surrounded by the figures within the film and involved in action which I see
from all sides’. (SF 99) The variance of angles and distance allows a multi-perspec-
tive approach to the screened drama. Although Balázs himself never used the speci-
fic term ‘immersion’, he realised that film involves a specific interplay of space and
time, scenography and atmosphere. ‘Length of time is a mood, not an objective
fact to be measured by the clock. Whether we feel that one minute has passed or
many hours depends on the rhythm of a scene, the space in which it is set and
even the way it is lit’. (VM 68) The effect is evident in the films of D.W. Griffith
(1875–1945), where ‘we can see an especially clever technique of visual linkage at
work when the plot approaches its climax. There is a divergence between the
tempo of the action and the tempo of the images. The former seems to come to
stop; the tempo of the images, in contrast, becomes increasingly excited and hur-
ried. The images pass before our eyes more and more rapidly and briefly, and their
rhythm intensifies the mood to the point of extreme excitement. But the action
does not advance and this breathless wait for the final moment is often stretched
out over an entire act’. (VM 72)
Practice, politics and polemics: Balázs, the soviet film and the critics
Reflecting the developments in dramatic narration, montage and style, Balázs, in
The Spirit of Film, discusses widely the ‘escape from anecdote’ which had been a
recent trend in the late 1920s. A film does not need a dramatic hero in the tradi-
tional sense of the word, he argues. In Secrets of the Soul (1926), a film directed by
Georg Wilhelm Papst (1885–1967), for example, only a dream agent is required
to illustrate the image production of the unconscious. Another example is the
cross-section movie that Balázs illuminates with his own Adventures of a Ten-Mark
Note (1926). ‘The screenplay contained no central characters; instead, a ten-mark
banknote passes from hand to hand, spreading fate like a plague as it goes on its
way’. (SF 147) Balázs had written the screenplay. The film, which is lost, was
directed by Berthold Viertel (1885–1953) and photographed by the legendary Karl
Freund (1890–1969). Besides the cross-section movie, ‘the mass-action film has
coherent action with structure and dramatic development, and yet is has no her-
oes. The clearest example is Eisenstein’s October’. (1927) (SF 148) For Balázs, the
cross-section film and the mass action film ‘represent stages in a transition to
reportage, even though in the former case every single step is invented’. (SF 148)
Similarly, Secrets of a Soul could be understood as the reportage of a state of mind,
though this film also tells the story how this mind was traumatised and how the
trauma is resolved. Since a strict juxtaposition between the display of a certain situ-
ation and a narration that recalls its genesis seems useless, the concept of reportage
can be considered as a kind of ‘emplotment’ which transcends the boundaries of
the melodrama. This kind of ‘emplotment’ is also present in the works of Russian
film-maker Dziga Vertov. ‘His idea was to make travelogues which lead the specta-
tor not into remote, unknown parts, but to unknown places close by. The use of
the camera, the cine-eye, to eavesdrop on scenes from everyday lives. The most
insignificant scenes become meaningful here because, when removed and isolated
from their context, they attract our full attention. They become exemplary’ (SF
150–151) as every reportage. Nevertheless, Vertov is no story teller. ‘The poet
guiding us with his camera is no narrative poet. More like a lyrical poet who
makes optical notes and sketches’. (SF 151) Drawing further conclusions from his
observation, Balázs tried to persuade the reader ‘that all films of documentary have
an element of subjectivity’. (SF 159) If the new art was to surpass the melodrama
it had taken over from the stage, reportage would probably be an appropriate
genre.
After The Adventures of a Ten-Mark Note had been released, Balázs worked with
Paul Czinner (1890–1972) on two projects, Dona Juana and an adaption of Arthur
Schnitzler’s (1862–1931) Fräulein Else (Miss Else). In the end, he was in total dis-
agreement about the outcomes. When he took the matter to court, he became a
persona non grata in the industry.28 Still working as a film critic and author – his
novel Unmögliche Menschen (Impossible People) was edited in 1929 – he adopted the
position of a director of art at the German Workers Theatre Association (Arbeiter-
Theater-Bund Deutschland). After a severe heart attack in 1930, he was invited to
collaborate with Georg Wilhelm Pabst on the cinema version of Bert Brecht’s Drei-
groschenoper (Three Penny Opera).29 The project, again, went to the court, since
Brecht (1898–1956) and his composer Kurt Weill (1900–1950) were upset by the
interpretation Pabst and Balázs had developed together.30
The last attempt was probably the worst experience: in 1931, Balázs helped
Leni Riefenstahl (1903–2003) out of the problems she had got into during the
preparation and production of Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light). At its premiere (24
March 1932), the film was presented as common work of Riefenstahl, Balázs and
cameraman Hans Schneeberger (1895–1971). Carl Mayer (1894–1944) and Arnold
Fanck (1889–1974) got no credits for their collaboration.31 ‘Apart from writing
and directing, Balázs also contributed to the strange fable-like mood of the night
scenes (shot “day-for-night”) by suggesting the use of a new infrared high-speed
negative, available from Agfa as a special order in limited quantity. Balázs had tried
out this material in 1930, in a documentary-style anticolonial film, whose scenarist
and co-director he was’.32 The whole project revealed that Balázs still was ‘a
romantic idealist, a mystic, a lover of folklore and legends, and a reverer of moun-
tains. […]’.33 He had written favourably about Fanck’s Storm over Mont Blanc
(1930), a forerunner of The Blue Light and demonstrated interest in the mountain
film – a genre of which every orthodox Marxist thinker could only be suspicious.
Then, two things happened. Despite his romanticism, Balázs was invited to the
Soviet Union to make a film about the Hungarian Revolution. During his stay
there, the Nazi Party became a major political force in Germany and took over
power in 1933. Since he left Berlin for Moscow and presumably because Riefen-
stahl wanted to get rid of the Jewish author and suspected communist, Balázs’s
name was expunged from the copies of The Blue Light the same year. The debate
as to whether this film is already a fascist movie or not, as Siegfried Kracauer
(1889–1966) claimed, still continues. Indeed, ‘Balázs was later celebrated by Third
Reich theorists for his insights on film rhythm’,34 a fact from which Erica Carter,
alluding to the passage in Visible Man where Balázs expected the film to unite the
16 Matthias Bauer
psyche of the white man (VM 14) deduces: ‘There is no doubt that it was Balázs’s
early allegiance to race theory that made his work available for appropriation by
Nazi film ideologues’.35 While Wolfgang Liebeneiner (1905–1987) and other pro-
tagonists of the fascist film industry made selective use of Balázs’s writings, the
author himself struggled desperately for acceptance in the Soviet Union, failed and
returned to Budapest where he died on 17 May 1949. His last success was an invi-
tation to lecture at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, founded
by Benito Mussolini (1883–1945), but now in the hands of the anti-fascist left.
There, Balázs exchanged ideas with neorealist critics and theoreticians like
Umberto Barbaro (1902–1959), Luigi Chiarini (1900–1975) and Guido Aristarco
(1918–1996).36
It is very likely, that Balázs’s criss-cross journey through the mine field of ide-
ology deprived him of support and acceptance in Germany, Russia and among the
European intellectuals who emigrated to America. Would it have been better for
him to follow them? The lack of translation from which his reception suffers in the
English-speaking world could at least probably have been prevented. Anyway, the
ambiguity inherent in his work is hard to overlook. Though he always praised
D.W. Griffith as founder of the sixth art and appreciated the Gish close-up as the
core feature of cinematography, Balázs turned his attention to Soviet film and, by
doing so, provoked harsh reactions, often simplistic or even slanderous. In his
review of The Spirit of Film, Kracauer wrote in 1930: ‘Balázs behaves like a con-
vert. […] He takes over the entire complex of Russian ideology without reserva-
tions’.37 A close reading of the book reveals that this statement is absolutely
wrong. Nevertheless, many critics have followed Kracauer in accusing Balázs of
having mixed aesthetics and propaganda, art and politics. Interesting is the case of
Rudolf Arnheim (1904–2007). While in 1930 Arnheim acknowledged Balázs’s per-
formance and wrote that his two books on film were clear, vivid and displaying
the entire material for a theory hard to surpass,38 in 1977, long after his immigra-
tion to the USA, Arnheim reproached his former colleague ‘for confusing the qual-
ity of a film with its content and for presenting mere speculation as systematic
thought’.39 Some scholars, ignoring Balázs’s heuristics, have recently reproduced
this argument. Sabine Hake, for example, quoting only Arnheim’s verdict, arrives
at an apparently biased comparison of Balázs, Kracauer and Arnheim: ‘Sharing a
Jewish middle-class background, all three exhibited a strong belief in the power of
intellectual discourse and, in their student years, received strong impulses from the
philosophical movements of their time’.40 – ‘But where Kracauer proposes a
dialectical relationship between aesthetics and politics, Balázs collapsed both terms
and reduced the power of film to a question of correct positions, both in the lit-
eral and figurative sense. The mechanistic approach is based on the assumption that
all meaning originates in the single shot and its poetic qualities are always in agree-
ment with its political implications’.41
Hake bases her judgement on two terms Balázs had promoted: ‘Einstellung’
und ‘Aufnahme’. She explains them as follows: ‘Einstellung – in German, the word
denotes both a camera position and a critical position […]’.42 ‘Aufnahme […], like
Einstellung, means two things, shooting and reception. Balázs uses these homonyms
to draw attention to the identity of art and ideology and to stress the relationship
between film and masses’.43 Though it cannot be denied that both terms can attain
a double meaning, Balázs has restricted his argument in Visible Man as well as in
The Spirit of Film to the technical aspect exclusively. Of course, every shot conveys
meaning. Nevertheless, this does not always have to be a political message. When
Hake recapitulates the talk of Balázs that Eisenstein reacted against in 1926, she
tells the reader: ‘Balázs’s sharp distinction between profilmic event and camera-
work marked a radical departure from the scenarios of unmediated presence he
described in Der sichtbare Mensch’.44 In fact, there is no scenario of unmediated
presence, and, consequently, no radical departure. Therefore, Balázs was right to
claim in The Spirit of Film: ‘Already in Visible Man, I discussed that simple form of
editing which aspires only to make the development of events comprehensible’.
(SF 124) Taking into consideration now, in The Spirit of Film, the contribution of
Soviet film-makers he remained sceptical due to aesthetic reasons. Even Hake has
to admit: ‘Balázs’s general resistance to what he dismissively calls “ideograms and
treatises in hieroglyphics,” however, supports the impression that his conception of

montage stands closer to music than film, and that is has little in common with
the theories of Eisenstein’.45 To mark his position, Balázs, in The Spirit of Film,
explains:
Ideas have to be clear, or else they are nothing. Admittedly, not every idea
can be conveyed purely by association. Yet association is precisely what is nec-
essary if the film wishes to remain ‘art’, not just a dynamic representation of
statistical tables and ideograms. It is the Russians who succumb most fre-
quently to the all too obvious danger here, which is that of the hieroglyphic
film. When a statue falls from its pedestal in Eisenstein’s October, this is
intended to signify the fall of Czarism. When the broken fragments are
reasembled, this is supposed to signify the restoration of bourgeois power.
These are signs that have a meaning, just as the cross, the section sign, or Chi-
nese ideograms have a meaning. But images should not signify ideas; they
should give shape to and provoke thoughts that then arise in us as inferences,
rather than being already formulated in the image as symbols or ideograms.
For in the latter case the montage ceases to be productive. It degenerates into
the reproduction of puzzle pictures. (SF 128)
This position is not compatible with any ideological notion of ‘Einstellung’ or ‘Auf-
nahme’. Instead of confusing aesthetics with politics, Balázs drew a sharp distinc-
tion between the artfully arranged image that should provoke associations
deliberately and the misuse of montage as a making up of mind. Far from behaving
like a convert that took over the rhetoric of Soviet film, Balázs was opposed to the
ideogram inherent in Eisenstein’s ‘montage of attraction’. Unfortunately, his alter-
native was obscured by the fact that he did not name the diagram explicitly. Nev-
ertheless, the implicit semiotics of the diagram and the interpretant can be found
in many statements concerned with the intellectual reception of film.
Looking at the recent development of the new art, Balázs, in The Spirit of Film,
notes: ‘We no longer know how we have managed in these few years to learn how
to see: how we have learned to make optical associations, draw optical inferences,
to think optically, or to become so utterly familiar with optical abbreviations, opti-
cal metaphors, optical symbols and optical concepts’. (SF 95) Balázs also stresses
the reflexivity of the diagram inherent in the moving picture: ‘In the image we see
18 Matthias Bauer
both the object and our own position, that is to say, our relation to the object’.
(SF 112) Both remarks arrive at a pragmatic understanding of the new technology
and its impact on culture. Moviegoers have improved their intellectual capacities.
They have learned to think with film and to reflect the relationship that makes the
world comprehendible. Though this relationship has been the precondition of every
apperception film has widened the scope. ‘A new human organ has developed. This
is more important than the aesthetic value of the individual works made possible by
that organ’. (SF 94) Especially noteworthy is the dynamic aspect of the diagram
inherent in the moving image: ‘It is through the shot that we share the spatial experi-
ence and the trajectories of others in a way that no other art can match’. (SF 113) Film-
makers and moviegoers must be aware that ‘[…] every image implies a camera
point of view, every point of view implies a relation. And that relation is more than
merely spatial’. (SF 112) Here, again, the notion of Gestalt mediates between the
image directly perceived and the diagram apprehended.

The same notion is at work when Balázs states: ‘Montage becomes creative
when we learn something that the images in isolation do not show’. (SF 124) To
learn something is a cognitive achievement of the viewer – according to an obser-
vation. Indeed, every kind of diagrammatoidal reasoning is based on observation.
To infer something one has to observe relations. By observing how relations
change further insights occur. The improvement of technical devices and the
improvement of mental operations are linked with each other in a productive way:
‘Both this montage technique of implying hidden connections and the audience’s
skill in drawing the right inferences have made great strides’. (SF 124) The
montage, Balázs continues,
prompts us not only to guess at events, or at lacunae in the narrative, that is
to say, concrete acts that we have not seen but might have done. Montage can
also lead us to associate emotions, meanings and ideas whose interconnections
become evident to us, even if they are not visible. (SF 125)
This distinction between the evident and the visible is telling: Balázs conceives of
the film experience as a constant interaction between external and internal mon-
tage, between the moving image on the screen and the stream of associations that
pay attention to the relations laid out in the course of events or by a frame that
refers to another. The film is a dynamic object of observation; the viewer’s task is
to look out for meanings laid out on the screen or present in the actual memory
of what had been visible just before. Expectations add the ‘picture’ that is made
up in the viewer’s mind, apparently an accumulated picture that is composed of
‘interpretants’ (and not of sensual data).
Besides the montage that affords the use of scissors, Balázs comments on ‘mon-
tage without cutting’, namely the fade, the fade-out and the pan: ‘The point of the
fade-out is that we should think about what we are seeing. “Think”, in other
words, about what isn’t in the picture’. (SF 132) Fading, then, ‘is a purely subjec-
tive, that is, a purely mental expression of the camera. This is why the fade ele-
vates the image, as it were, out of natural space and the lateral lapse of time,
creating as it does the effect of something thought rather than something seen’. (SF
132) Here, Balázs anticipates the notion of camera as ‘the transcendental subject’
of cinematography in Christian Metz (1931–1993).46 If something perceived is
apprehended as thought, film has the potential not only to reveal how a character
might feel, dream, ratiocinate, etc. Such a demonstration is a demonstration of
content. But the fade-out is not an element of content. It is a form the narration
takes on in film. What can be said about the fade and the fade-out holds true for
the pan: ‘This too is montage without cutting. The camera turns or roams and has
images of the objects it fleetingly catches pass muster before us’. (SF 136) Obvi-
ously, to catch pass muster before us is what a mind often does recollecting some-
thing or looking out for a specific item in a broader area of thought.
Turning his attention from sight to sound, Balázs, in The Spirit of Film, sticks
to the concept he had developed in Visible Man to explain the function of the
close-up: ‘The task of the sound close-up will be to raise for the first time to the
level of consciousness this large and important sphere of auditory experience’. (SF
194) He regards the sound close-up to be a supplement: ‘The point is that we
should not hear, or only hear, what we can already see’. (SF 198) – ‘It should
awaken ideas and associations in our minds that the silent image on its own might
have failed to arouse’. (SF 198) Also, the logic of the diagram is applied: ‘Sound
montage, then, can generate relations between sound and image and between
sound and sound which represent not outward perceptions but internal mental
associations’. (SF 199) Again, the crucial point is the relationship that is exposed
by the sound montage. But Balázs also hints at the difference between visual and
acoustic information: ‘The particular characteristic of the sound close-up is that,
despite its being just a detail, it is never so completely separated from the acoustic
environment as is a visual close-up from its background’. (SF 195) – ‘The same
sound from a single source cannot be recorded in three different ways by three
different sound-camera operators, it cannot be “interpreted”, as is possible in any
optical image of the same object’. (SF 192) What is more: ‘The fact is that sounds
cast no shadows. Hence they do not create figures in space. The things I see in
space are either contiguous or overlapping. Optical impressions do not merge into
one. If, however, several sounds are heard simultaneously, they blend into one
total, composite sound’. (SF 187) The eye, so to say, operates by analysing the
surrounding – the ear, in contrast, by synthesising impressions to a soundscape. It
follows that ‘sound does not establish space’. (SF 187) Whereas, an image cannot
avoid a spatial layout, so that it is easy to diagrammatise the picture, a soundscape
thwarts such an operation. The explanation seems to be that a picture is concrete
and able to display abstract relations at once. Sound in contrast, though often
apprehended as integral Gestalt, remains concrete. Since orientation needs abstrac-
tion it is much harder, if not impossible, to structure a melody without transposing
it into a visual display like the score. In this respect, Balázs probably was too opti-
mistic when he expected the sound film would ‘teach us to read the score of the
many-voiced orchestra of life’ (SF 185). Though, of course, sound film is poly-
phonic, soundscapes – composed of many voices and noises – are not ‘readable’ in
the same way as a spatial layout is ‘readable’.
The dual ‘nature’ of the moving image explains why Balázs did not appreciate
abstract film. In accordance with Kant he presumes: ‘There can be abstraction only
where there is also concrete substance. Thus it is the fact that a concrete object
can be triangular that makes it possible also to abstract the form of triangle’. (SF
175) Consequently: ‘Abstract film is the offspring of a theory, born through an act
20 Matthias Bauer
of parthenogenesis. Such a birth is never healthy’. (SF 177) Hake has scandalised
this remark by insinuating that Balázs were proposing highly problematic notions of
‘sanity’.47 This critique misses the point. Balázs did not deny that there are
moments of abstraction in cinema, sometimes. But a film completely bereft of con-
crete phenomena could neither claim to be a work of art nor attract the audience.
Film-makers want to show something and moviegoers want to see something. If
the moving image is a sensual experience that, similar to the concrete triangular
object, can display abstract relations, it has to been seen. Otherwise no observing
would be possible at all. If there is more to the picture than meets the eye, there
must be something. Balázs’s credo says it nearly all: ‘Film is the art of seeing. Its
innermost tendency is to lay bare and unmask. It may be the most powerful cre-
ator of illusion, but it is also quintessentially the art of open eyes’. (SF 229)
The seemingly incompatible potential to immerse the viewer in a fictitious world
and to convey insights on reality has puzzled many theoreticians of cinema. But the
riddle can be solved in the same way as the riddle of the moving image that is con-
crete and, by the same token, able to display relations that are not abstracted from
the picture but laid out on its surface. The making up of the diegetic world is the pre-
condition to understand it as a model of the existing universe (or the ways of world-
making man is capable of). If the reader has become aware that the ‘grammar’ (SF
97) of film, Balázs had promised to outline in The Spirit of Film, in fact is a ‘diagram-
matic’ it is easy to accept that the iconic presentation of a world of imagination has
the potential to trigger inferences about the structure of reality (or the social con-
struction of reality). As Bálazs puts it in his third book about film theory: ‘What is
photographed is reality and reality alone. But by editing the shots a meaning is added
to the film not inherent in the shots. The main task of the montage, to lend meaning
to the world visible is an ambivalent feature of film. On the one hand, it enables the
technique of cinematography to become an art; on the other hand it involves the pos-
sibility of lying. Rendering meaning to the photographed reality by montage might
deprive the images of their truth’.48 (WW 185). One may doubt if Soviet film-mak-
ers and communist thinkers like Lukács, at least during their Stalinist period, were
keen on reading such comments.
Balázs’s heritage: affection, cognition and immersion

During his stay at Moscow, Balázs wrote a third book on the art of cinematogra-
phy. A German translation appeared in 1949: Der Film. Werden und Wesen einer neuen
Kunst (The Film. The Becoming and Essence of a New Art). Indeed, this last version of
his theory is a synthesis of its two precursors, with a few supplements that do not
alter the picture already established in The Spirit of Film. No wonder, then, that
Balázs’s second book has remained the referential text. Two examples may illus-
trate how this text became productive in the theoretical analysis of film after the
Second World War:
In Le cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire (1956) Edgar Morin (*1921) conceives of
film as a medium oscillating between science and dream, technology and magic,
industry and art. Since it has a deep impact on the human mind and soul, film
poses metaphysical questions and arouses emotional responses one cannot explain
with the content of this or that movie alone. Films immerse the viewer, Morin
states, in a fluid universe where things alter their appearances frequently. One of
the major changes (Gestaltwechsel) is that of lending a face to landscapes and other
objects normally gazed at as pure matter. The spiritus rector of this vision, no
doubt, is Balázs, whom Morin quotes only once: ‘The film reveals the anthropo-
morphic face of everything’.49 Though there is no further explicit reference in
Morin’s book, his approach to cinema, in concept and style, is telling. He speaks
of ‘The Soul of Film’,50 gives an extended paraphrase of Balázs when describing
cinema’s immersive force51 and uses the core term ‘Gestalt’ in German.52 In many
respects, Morin’s film theory seems to be a palimpsest of The Spirit of Film. Balázs’s
vision of cinematography lurks on nearly every page Morin has devoted to the dif-
ferent kinds of magic participation offered by image projection.
Another philosopher of cinema who followed some traces laid out by Balázs is,
of course, Deleuze. As Massimo Locatelli has shown, Deleuze adopted Balázs’s

physiognomic interpretation of the close-up as an entity of its own, set apart from
narration.53 In Deleuze, this entity becomes the so-called ‘affect-image’ whose
importance derives from the crisis of the ‘motion-’ or ‘action-picture’. Conveying
emotion apart from the cause–effect relationship of drama is the major shift mod-
ern cinema has undertaken, according to Deleuze. It enables the art of film to
become a medium of time reflection and philosophical thinking. Since the concept
of the ‘affect-image’ can be traced back to Balázs’s ‘chords of feeling’ (VM 34),
Deleuze is deeply indebted to the Hungarian Poet. One could even argue that the
pitfalls of his own theory of cinema arise exactly from what Balázs always tried to
avoid: abstraction from the visible. When Deleuze introduces the ‘crystal-image’
he declares: this image is no matter of perception, it is a ‘virtual picture’.54 Only
a ‘seer’ could grasp how Kronos and Chronos divide.55 The ordinary viewer is
restricted to actual motions and emotions.
Since this ordinary viewer is the addressee of Balázs’s writing his phenomeno-
logical approach still is inviting to everybody who is interested in the poetic
Gestalt and symbolic meaning of film. With the physiognomic understanding of the
close-up that conveys chords of feeling Balázs, in Visible Man, has primarily
explored the affective dimension of the moving image. By describing the functions
of montage and diagrammatic display in The Spirit of Film, he complementarily paid
attention to its cognitive dimension. Both dimensions merge in the vivid
experience when the viewer is immersed in the diegetic world and its specific
atmosphere. There, the viewer realises what cinema is all about.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. See the first chapter ‘The Medium is the Message’, in Understanding Media. The
Extensions of Man, ed. Marshall McLuhan (Abington: Taylor & Francis, 2001).
22 Matthias Bauer
2. Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory. Visible Man (1924) and The Spirit of Film
(1930). Edited by Erica Carter. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. New York/
Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010. I refer to this edition by indicating either Visible
Man (=VM) or The Spirit of Film (=SF).
3. Compare John Ralmon, ‘Béla Balázs in German Exile’, in Film Quarterly 30,3
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 13.
4. Quoted according to Sabine Hake, The Cinema’s Third Machine. Writing on Film in
Germany 1907–1933 (Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 223.
5. Béla Balázs, ‘Tagebuch (1915–1922)’, in Georg Lukács, Karl Mannheim und der Son-
ntagskreis, ed. Éva Karádi und Ersébet Vezér (Frankurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1985), 124.
6. Béla Balázs, ‘Über lyrische Sensibilität’, in Georg Lukács, Karl Mannheimer und der
Sonntagskreis, ed. Èva Karádi and Ersébet Vezér (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1985), 232.
7. Béla Balázs, ‘Nicht der Maler, der Gemalte ist schuldig!’, in Ungarische Avantgarde in
der Weimarer Republik, ed. Wechsel-Wirkungen (Marburg: Jonas-Verlag, 1986), 535f.
8. Compare Anna Wessely, ‘Der Diskurs über die Kunst im Sonntagskreis’, in
Ungarische Avantgarde in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Wechsel-Wirkungen (Marburg:
Jonas-Verlag, 1986), 541.
9. Compare Gertrud Koch, ‘Die Physiognomie der Dinge. Zur frühen Filmtheorie
von Béla Balázs’, in Frauen und Film 40 (Basel: Stroemfeld, 1986), 76.
10. Compare Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People. The New Science of How we Connect with
Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). See also: Ciacomo Rizzo-
latti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Empathie und Spiegelneurone. Die biologische Basis des
Mitgefühls (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008).
11. Erica Carter, ‘Introduction’, in Early Film Theory, ed. Béla Balázs, xxxvii.
12. Of course, Carter uses the term in a very restricted sense that covers only the
ancient idea of sign as index or symptom.
13. Ibid., xxvii.
14. Ibid., xxvii.
15. Ibid., xxx.
16. Compare Michail Jampolski, ‘Die Geburt der Filmtheorie aus dem Geiste der
Physiognomik’, in Beiträge zur Film- und Fernsehwissenschaft 2,2 (Berlin: Vistas-
Verlag), 81.
17. Compare Robert Musil, ‘Ansätze zu neuer Ästhetik. Bemerkungen zu einer Dra-
maturgie des Films’, in Prosa und Stücke – Kleine Prosa – Aphorismen – Autobi-
ographisches – Essays und Reden – Kritik, ed. Robert Musil (Reinbek bei Hamburg:
Rowohlt, 2000), 1137–54.
18. Compare Loewy, 287.
19. Carter, xxiv–xxv.
20. Compare Philosophical Writings of Peirce. Selected and Edited with an Intro-
duction by Justus Buchler (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), 274–86.
21. Compare Jampolski, 88f.
22. Hake, 222.
23. Translation of Béla Balázs, ‘Produktive und reproduktive Filmkunst’, in
Geschichte der Filmtheorie. Kunsttheoretische Texte von Meliès bis Arnheim, ed. Helmut
H. Diederichs (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 210.
24. Compare Sergej Eisenstein, ‘Béla vergißt die Schere’, in Diederichs, 52f.
25. Compare Eisenstein, 54.

26. Compare Eisenstein, 56.
27. Ralmon, 15f.
29. Compare ibid., 344ff.
30. Compare ibid., 347.
32. Ralmon, 18.
33. Ibid., 16.
34. Carter, xxxviii.
35. Ibid.
36. Compare Ralmon, 12.
37. Siegfried Kracauer: ‘Ein neues Filmbuch’, in Der Geist des Films. Mit einem Nach-
wort von Hanno Loewy und zeitgenössischen Rezensionen von Siegfried Kracauer und Arn-
heim, ed. Béla Balázs (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 232.
38. Rudolf Arnheim, ‘Der Geist des Films’, ibid., 234f.
39. Quoted according to Hake, 216.
40. Hake, 214.
41. Ibid., 219.
42. Ibid., 218.
43. Ibid., 240.
44. Ibid., 239.
45. Ibid., 243.
47. Compare Hake, 244.
48. Béla Balázs, Der Film. Werden und Wesen einer neuen Kunst. Aus dem Ungarischen
übertragen von Dr. Alexander Sacher-Masoch (Wien: Globus Verlag, 1949), 185.
49. Compare Edgar Morin, Der Mensch und das Kino. Eine anthropologische Unter-
suchung. Aus dem Französischen übersetzt von Kurt Leonhard (Stuttgart: Klett-Verlag,
1958), 81.
53. Compare Massimo Locatelli, Béla Balázs. Die Physiognomie des Films (Berlin: Vistas
Verlag, 1999), 160.
54. Compare Gilles Deleuze, Das Zeit-Bild. Kino 2. Übersetzt von Klaus Englert (Frank-
furt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 108.
Notes on contributor
Matthias Bauer, a professor of German at Europe University Flensburg, Germany (since
2008), studied German, History and Media Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz
and was a visiting professor at the University of Basel, Switzerland (2006/07). He is co-editor
of the Yearbook of Immersive Media (since 2010) and has recently published a book about
Michelangelo Antonioni (2015). His research focuses on the history and theory of the novel,
the history and theory of diagrammatoidal reasoning and the history and theory of ﬁlm.

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Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

ISSN: 0143-9685 (Print) 1465-3451 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/chjf20

Béla Balázs: a Gestalt theory of film

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BÉLA BALÁZS: A GESTALT THEORY OF FILM

Ó 2016 IAMHIST & Taylor & Francis

Towards a Gestalt theory of cinematography

ratiocination. It can neither be identified with the surface appearance of the

The physiognomical approach to cinema: sources and problems

Apperception, montage and association: from Visible Man to The Spirit

modes of apperception. The work of art, then, is a kind of thought experiment,

treatises in hieroglyphics,” however, supports the impression that his conception of

image directly perceived and the diagram apprehended.

Balázs’s heritage: affection, cognition and immersion

of course, Deleuze. As Massimo Locatelli has shown, Deleuze adopted Balázs’s

25. Compare Eisenstein, 54.

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