Béla Balàzs: early film theory in transnational context

这个项目以贝拉·巴拉兹为中心，他是一位匈牙利裔犹太作家，曾在布达佩斯、维也纳和柏林担任记者、歌剧编剧、象征主义诗人、电影评论家、编剧和理论家，被同时代的人誉为电影艺术的早期倡导者。他的声誉建立在他的《看得见的人》(1924年)和《电影的精神》(1930年)上，这两本书在他作为政治流亡者在柏林的时期以德文出版。虽然《看得见的人》庆祝了这种媒介对人体和面部的实时亲密呈现，但电影精神杂志分析了巴拉兹是最早认识到电影的语法的人之一。今天，巴拉兹主要是以他1952年的电影理论英译本中的特写镜头而闻名。然而，尽管这本书融合了巴拉兹在两次世界大战之间的几卷书中的段落，但它失去了原著的历史细节和争辩的神韵。巴拉兹的作品在很大程度上脱离了历史背景，因此经常被认为过时了，或者只是因为他对特写镜头的分析的重要性而被认可。在这种片面的观点中，许多有价值的东西都丢失了。我与罗德尼·利文斯通(南安普顿)合作，对巴拉兹的两部早期德语作品进行了第一次英译本和评论版的创作，部分原因是为了提高人们对巴拉兹在电影艺术各个层面上的写作的认识。重返巴拉兹岛还有第二个原因。近年来，人们对1933年后逃离德国和法西斯占领的欧洲的电影从业者产生了新的兴趣。故事讲述的是从一种文化中逃离的故事，这种文化让人们对已故政权反对者或“种族敌人”的记忆被遗忘。巴拉兹斯是一个有趣的例外。在纳粹关于电影的著作中，他的开创性工作被誉为第一次认真阐述电影语法。这样的赞誉令人费解；因为这是一位匈牙利裔犹太血统的马克思主义知识分子，他参加了1919年的社会主义公社，在柏林与欧文·皮斯卡托和海因里希·曼等左翼自由派名人一起工作，并于1931年离开德国前往苏联。仔细一看，就会发现这个谜题的线索。1931年，Balazs与Leni Riefenstahl合作；他为她的故事片Das Blaue Licht写剧本，并在片场与该片导演兼明星Riefenstahl合作。他们的亲和力与其说是意识形态，不如说是艺术上的。巴拉兹信奉浪漫主义现代主义，这也注入了里芬斯塔尔的作品，据说其流动性与自然界的生活节奏相呼应。巴拉兹特别关注的是电影恢复自然身体作为人类交流的组织枢纽的潜力；他写道，电影是“唯一的普遍语言”，并主张通过电影中的身体实现启蒙运动的普遍性。然而，当巴拉兹将电影主体命名为白人、欧洲人和男性时，他也反驳了启蒙平等主义，并赞扬了电影创造……白人种族的共同心理的能力。这句话揭示了一个多重矛盾的巴拉兹：一位犹太马克思主义革命者，他的作品受到右翼的赞誉，他的早期作品拥护白人种族美学。这些矛盾使巴拉兹相对默默无闻，将人们的注意力转移到同时代的人身上，他们的作品更符合他们的左翼观点。在这个项目中，我将相反地使用这些矛盾作为生产紧张的来源，它的探索允许对德国流亡电影的新见解。我的研究将探索巴拉兹复杂的传记对他的理论工作的矛盾的启示。我要问的是，他的生活和工作如何与本世纪中叶更广泛的欧洲历史相交？他受到文化右翼和左翼的拥护，如何有效地使我们对流亡的文化政治的理解复杂化？在巴拉兹的一生中，电影媒介正在迅速变化，巴拉兹为当代人们理解正在迅速变化的运动图像文化提供了什么见解？

This project centres on Béla Balázs, a Hungarian-Jewish writer who worked as a journalist, opera librettist, symbolist poet, film critic, screenwriter and theorist in Budapest, Vienna and Berlin, and was fêted by contemporaries as an early champion of film art. His reputation rested on his Visible Man (1924) and The Spirit of Film (1930), published in German during his period as a political exile in Berlin. While Visible Man celebrated the medium's intimate representation in real time of the human body and face, The Spirit of Film analysed what Balázs was among the first to recognise as the 'grammar' of film. Balázs is known today primarily for work on the close-up deriving from a 1952 English translation of his Theory of the Film. Yet while that volume integrates passages from Balázs's interwar volumes, it loses the originals' historical detail and polemical verve. Read largely outside historical context, Balázs's work is thus often dismissed as outdated, or recognised only for the significance of his analyses of the close-up. Much that is of value is lost in this partial view. It is in part to raise awareness of Balázs's writings on all dimensions of film art that I have embarked with Rodney Livingstone (Southampton) on a first English translation and critical edition of Balázs's two early German works. And there is a second reason for a return to Balázs. Recent years have seen a new interest in film practitioners who fled Germany and fascist-occupied Europe after 1933. The story told is one of flight from a culture that consigned to oblivion the memory of departed regime opponents or 'racial enemies'. Balázs is an interesting exception. In Nazi writings on film, his pioneering work was fêted, and cited as the first serious elaboration of a grammar of film. Such accolades are perplexing; for this was a marxist intellectual of Hungarian-Jewish descent who participated in the 1919 socialist Commune, worked in Berlin with such left-liberal luminaries as Erwin Piscator and Heinrich Mann, and left Germany for the Soviet Union in 1931. A closer inspection points up clues to this puzzle. In 1931, Balazs had worked with Leni Riefenstahl; he wrote the screenplay for her feature Das blaue Licht, and collaborated on set with Riefenstahl, the film's director and star. Their affinity was more artistic than ideological. Balázs espoused a Romantic modernism that also infused Riefenstahl's work, the fluidity of which was said to echo the living rhythms of the natural world. Balazs's special concern was with film's potential to reinstate the natural body as the organising pivot of human communication; he writes of film as the 'only universal language', and argues for an Enlightenment universalism achieved through the body in film. Yet Balázs also counters Enlightenment egalitarianism when he names the film body as white, European, and male, and celebrates film's capacity to create the 'shared psyche of the ...white race'. The phrase reveals a Balázs of multiple contradictions: a Jewish, marxist revolutionary whose work was celebrated by the Right, and whose early work espoused a white racial aesthetics. These contradictions have consigned Balázs to relative obscurity, deflecting attention to contemporaries whose writings sat better with their leftist views. In this project, I shall by contrast use those contradictions as a source of productive tension whose exploration allows new insights into German exile film. My research will explore the light shed by Balazs's complex biography on the contradictions of his theoretical work. How, I shall ask, do his life and work intersect with the larger history of mid-century Europe? How does his embrace by both the cultural Right and Left usefully complicate our understanding of the cultural politics of exile? And what insights does Balázs offer for contemporary understandings of a moving image culturethat is changing rapidly as was the film medium during Balazs's life?