Balázs: Realist Or Modernist?

Balázs: Realist or Modernist? MALCOLM TURVEY I In The World Viewed, Stanley Cavell argues that “film is a moving image of skepticism.”1 Due to what he calls its “automatism,” its removal of “the human agent from the task of reproduction,”2 film, he claims, satisfies the wish, borne of skepticism and “intensifying in the West since the Reformation, to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation—a wish for the power to reach this world, having for so long tried, at last hopelessly, to manifest fidelity to another.”3 By skepticism, it should be noted, Cavell does not mean a rigorously theorized philosophical doctrine, but rather the some- what vaguer idea, hugely influential in modernity and still very much with us, that the ability of us human beings to know the world around us is limited, that we are unable, or fail, to know reality as it really is. The deep hold of this skeptical idea over film theorists and filmmakers has not, I think, been given its due. The same is true of that which skepticism gives rise to: the wish to escape the limits of human knowledge and access reality as it really is. Much film theory and filmmaking informed by film theory, especially prior to the 1960s, is a euphoric expression of the belief that in the cinema we finally have at our disposal an artistic medium that satisfies the skeptical wish identified by Cavell, that overcomes the gulf created by skepticism between subject and object, self and other, conscious- ness and nature—our “metaphysical isolation,” to use Cavell’s felicitous phrase. For most, however, it is not only what Cavell calls film’s automatism that enables it to “escape subjectivity” and “reach this world.” In the context of film, skepticism has typically taken the form of claims about the limits of human vision, about our inability to see reality as it really is, which is unsurprising given that the cinema is widely consid- ered to be a visual art. And it is the cinema’s capacity to reveal truths about reality invisible to human sight that is viewed by many as the source of its power to escape the 1. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged Edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 188. Cavell actually only uses this particular phrase in the essay added to the enlarged edition of The World Viewed, titled “More of The World Viewed.” 2. Ibid., pp. 20, 23. 3. Ibid., p. 21. OCTOBER 115, Winter 2006, pp. 77–87. © 2006 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.115.1.77 by guest on 02 October 2021 78 OCTOBER limits of human knowledge and access reality. The major film theorists who conceive of the cinema in this way are Jean Epstein (1897–1953), Dziga Vertov (1896–1954), Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966), and Béla Balázs (1884–1949) in the material from Der sichtbare Mensch (The Visible Man, 1924), his first book of film theory, which he includes in Theory of the Film (1948), his third, and which he elaborates on in other chapters of Theory of the Film, such as chapter eight, titled “The Face of Man.” Like Epstein, Vertov, and Kracauer (in Theory of Film, 1960), Balázs answers the question What is Cinema? in this material by arguing that one of the cinema’s most significant properties is its capacity to reveal features of reality invisible to the naked human eye: “In the silent film facial expression, isolated from its surroundings [by the close-up], seemed to penetrate to a strange new dimension of the soul. It revealed to us a new world—a world of micro-physiognomy which could not otherwise be seen with the naked eye or in everyday life.”4 And again like these theorists, Balázs often compares the cinema to other visual technologies, in particular the microscope: The technique of the close-up . was able to make us feel nerve-rackingly the sultry tension underneath the superficial calm; the fierce storms raging under the surface were made tangible by mere microscopic movements, by the displacement of a hair. Such films were unsurpassed in showing the Strindbergian moods in the savagely antagonistic silences of human beings confined together in narrow spaces. The micro-tragedies in the peace and quiet of ordinary families were shown as deadly battles, just as the microscope shows the fierce struggles of micro-organisms in a drop of water. (TTF, pp. 84–85) Like these theorists, Balázs also attaches considerable significance and value to the cinema’s revelatory capacity. Indeed, he claims that this capacity has brought about the evolution of new perceptual and cognitive abilities in human beings: “The birth of film art led not only to the creation of new works of art but to the emer- gence of new human faculties with which to perceive and understand this new art” (TTF, p. 33). And he declares that it is the task of his film theory to “investigate and outline that sphere of the development of human sensibility which developed in mutual interaction with the evolution of the art of the film” (TTF, p. 33). Because it has lead to the evolution of new perceptual and cognitive abilities, Balázs pro- nounces the invention of the cinema to be an epochal transformation for the better in human existence: The evolution of the human capacity for understanding, which was brought about by the art of the film, opened a new chapter in the history of human culture. We were witnesses not only to the development of a new art but to the development of a new sensibility, a new understanding, a new culture in its public. We have learned to see. (TTF, pp. 34–35) 4. Béla Balázs, Theory of Film (Character and Growth of a New Art), trans. Edith Bone (New York: Arno Press, 1972), p. 65. Hereafter cited in the text as TTF. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.115.1.77 by guest on 02 October 2021 Balázs: Realist or Modernist? 79 But unlike Epstein and Vertov, Balázs argues (as does Kracauer in Theory of Film) that it is, in part, a historical limitation that normal human vision suffers from, a limitation from which it can potentially recover. For Epstein and Vertov, the eye is flawed and unreliable because of innate, physiological handicaps, which cannot be overcome (except perhaps by evolution). For Epstein, the eye shrouds reality in deceptive, anthropomorphic appearances: These [cinematic] experiments contradict and throw into confusion the sense of order which we have established at great cost in our conception of the universe. Yet it is hardly news that any classification has something of the arbitrary about it and that we abandon frameworks that seem overly artificial. The generalized sense of our own psychological time, which still varies very little, turns out to be an illusion that we have created in order to think more easily. The gaze which cinematography lets us cast over nature, where such time is neither unique nor constant, is perhaps more fecund than the one we cast out of egocentric habit. Not without some anxiety, man finds himself before that chaos which he has covered up, denied, for- gotten, or thought was tamed. Cinema apprises him of a monster.5 In 1921, for example, Epstein evokes the scientific doctrine of “secondary qualities” to make this point: The senses, of course, present us only with symbols of reality: uniform, proportionate, elective metaphors. And symbols not of matter, which therefore does not exist, but of energy; that is, of something which in itself seems not to be, except in its effects as they affect us. We say “red,” “soprano,” “sweet,” “cypress,” when there are only velocities, movements, vibrations.6 By contrast, the cinema is able to reveal what is hidden by such secondary qualities, namely, reality as it really is: the “waves invisible to us, and the screen’s creative pas- sion [which] contains what no other has ever had before; its proper share of ultraviolet.”7 For Vertov, meanwhile, the eye is very bad at processing visual data into organized, intelligible patterns. Hence, human beings are normally confused by what they see. Vertov gives as an example stage performances. “The viewer at a ballet fol- lows, in confusion, now the combined legs of dancers, now random individual figures, now someone’s legs—a series of scattered perceptions, different for each viewer.”8 The cinema, according to Vertov, is able to overcome this limitation, 5. Jean Epstein, “Photogénie and the Imponderable” (1935), in French Film Theory and Criticism, A History/Anthology, Volume II, 1929–1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 190. 6. Jean Epstein, “The Senses I (b)” (1921), in French Film Theory and Criticism, A History/Anthology, Volume I, 1907–1929, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 244. 7. Ibid. 8. Dziga Vertov, “Kinoks: A Revolution” (1923), in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 16. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.115.1.77 by guest on 02 October 2021 80 OCTOBER “bring[ing] clarity into the worker’s awareness of the phenomena concerning him and surrounding him,”9 because of the precision with which editing can be used to organize visual phenomena recorded on film into harmonious patterns—based upon geometrical principles—that can be understood by the viewer: Within the chaos of movements, running past, away, running into and colliding—the eye, all by itself, enters life.

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