Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory: <i>Visible Man</i> and <i>The Spirit of Film</i> (Film Europa)

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analyses of the close-up, the shot and montage are illuminating both as applicable models for film analysis, and as historical documents of his key contribution - alongside such contemporaries as Arnheim, Kracauer and Benjamin - to critical debate on film in the 'golden age' of the Weimar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