The Visible Century: Béla Balázs’s VISIBLE MAN at 100

Cover of Der sichtbare Mensch by Béla Balázs on the left; portrait of young Balázs on the right.

The Visible Century: Béla Balázs’s VISIBLE MAN at 100

Visible Man, or The Culture of Film (1924), by the Hungarian writer and critic Béla Balázs (1884-1949), was published exactly a century ago in German. The book is a landmark text not just for early film theory, but for twentieth-century media theory and aesthetic thought, whose reflections on the body, gesture, close-ups, faces, spectatorship, and more influenced generations of subsequent writers working in Europe and beyond. This workshop convenes an international roster of scholars to assess the legacy and ongoing significance of this groundbreaking work.

Collectively, we will draw on contemporary critical approaches–including queer studies, disability studies, the study of race and ethnicity, media history, media anthropology, and the study of material culture–to examine both the limits and potentials of Balázs’s theory of film, with an eye toward reorienting and reanimating key concepts. Through such varied engagements, we aim to better understand his significance as a critic responding to huge technological and cultural upheavals, and leverage this understanding to think about our own situation in the present.

Each session will discuss pre-circulated work-in-progress authored by the panelists. If you would like to attend a session, please email Paul Dobryden (pad9q@virginia.edu) to receive the pre-circulated texts, along with some relevant excerpts of Visible Man.

All panel sessions will be held in New Cabell Hall 236.

Organized by Paul Dobryden (University of Virginia) & Ervin Malakaj (University of British Columbia)

Friday, September 6, 2024

9:30-11:30am: Theoretical Lineages

Moderated by Olivia Landry (Virginia Commonwealth University)
Ilinca Iurascu (University of British Columbia), “Béla Balázs’ Nineteenth-Century Passages”
Nicholas Baer (University of California, Berkeley), “In the Red: Balázs on Marriage, Family, and Capital”
Johannes von Moltke (University of Michigan), “Der Sichtbare Mensch in Theory of Film: Kracauer’s Debt to Balázs”

1-3pm: Critical Reappraisals

Moderated by Jülide Etem (University of Virginia)
Artun Ak (Rutgers University), “‘Wir bitten um Einlaß!’: Polyphonic Theorization in Béla Balázs’s Visible Man”
Paul Dobryden (University of Virginia), “Visible Man’s Eugenic Formalism”
Berna Gueneli (University of Georgia), “Reevaluating Béla Balázs’s Formulations on ‘Race,’ ‘Gesture,’ and the ‘Close-Up’ in regard to Orientalist Silent Filmmaking in Weimar Germany: The Cases of Pola Negri and Asta Nielsen”

Saturday, September 7, 2024

10-11:30am: Theory and Practice

Moderated by Samhita Sunya (University of Virginia)
Eszter Polonyi (University of Nova Gorica), “Theory Versus Practice: Béla Balázs on the Film Set”
Owen Lyons (Toronto Metropolitan University), “Der sichtbare Geldschein: Fragmented Images of the Economy in Béla Balázs and Bertold Viertel’s Die Abenteuer eines Zehnmarkscheines (1926)”

1-3pm: Textures and Affects

Moderated by Marcel Schmid (University of Virginia)
Steffen Hven (Filmuniversität Babelsberg), “The Nebulous Primal Matter: Notes on Balázs's Aesthetics of Atmosphere”
Kristina Köhler (University of Cologne), “‘Falten im Gesicht / Falten im Stoff’: Balázs’ Thoughts on Dress and Textiles in Film”
Ervin Malakaj (University of British Columbia), “Visible Man and Divinatory Intimacy”