Bela Balazs''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. Balazs''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analyses of the close-up, the shot and montage are illuminating both as applicable models for film analysis, and as historical documents of his key contribution – alongside such contemporaries as Arnheim, Kracauer and Benjamin – to critical debate on film in the ''golden age'' of the Weimar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.

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analyses of the close-up, the shot and montage are illuminating both as applicable models for film analysis, and as historical documents of his key contribution – alongside such contemporaries as Arnheim, Kracauer and Benjamin – to critical debate on film in the ‘golden age’ of the Weimar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.

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)