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.