A prolific Hungarian poet, writer, film reviewer and theoretician, Bálázs’ books on film include, Der Sichtbare Mensch (The Visible Man) (1924), and The Spirit of Film (1930). Bálázs helped found the German "film as a language" theory, which exerted an influence on Eisenstein and Pudovkin. Bálázs' 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analyses of the close-up, the shot and montage are illuminating both as applicable models for film analysis, and as historical documents of his key contributions..
Béla Balázs
1884 - 1949
Bálázs viewed cinema as a mode of producing, not reproducing reality, because the projection of film creates a new psychological effect called identification. As a function of identification, the identifiable distance between individuals and art is blurred and almost entirely faded through film; thereby closing the gap between the Self and the Other.
He attributed the ways in which cinema differed from the other arts to the unique, even spiritual, expressiveness of the close-up. Bálázs held that the spirit of film allows audience access to expressions that are lyrical, allowing for access to multiple emotions because the face can show many things at once, in ways that other artforms, like. literature, cannot. Beyond the mobility of the camera, Bálázs held that film has the ability to access an additional emotional human dimension.
MOTIVATIONS / IDEAS
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Tried to offer possibilities of overcoming a particular state of estrangement by designing a utopian visual culture where film plays an essential role.
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Ambitious description of film as a language brought him close to the Russian Formalists
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Value of close-up is to vanquish our ignorance, show us the very instant in which the general is transformed into the particular as a way of widening our vision of life and also deepening it.
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Views on montage would be too mechanistic even for Eisenstein’s standards. Saw montage as a mobile architecture of a film’s picture (photograph).
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Philosophical component enters his work through complex reflections on cinematic “reality.”
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It is the business of the sound film to reveal for us our acoustic environment.
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Saw film as a mode of producing, not reproducing reality.
RELATED STUDY TERMS
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Montage – the process or technique of selecting, editing, and piecing together separate sections of film to form a continuous whole; a sequence of film resulting from this.
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Dialectic – art of investigating or discussing the truth of opinions; inquiry into metaphysical contradictions and their solutions.
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Formalisim -- film study that is focused on the formal, or technical, elements of a film, like lighting, scoring, sound and set design, use of color, shot composition, and editing.
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Series v. Collision – a clash; conflict: a collision of purposes. The meeting of ideas or technologies through which each exerts a force upon the other, causing the exchange of ideas, forms, or use.
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Silent soliloquy -- This mimics (on film, through the use of the close-up) what theater had with the soliloquy but is far more convenient and believable. The most deep-felt human soliloquies could not find expression on the stage.
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Suggested Screening: “Orphan Black”