1The New Woman and the ekphrastic poetics of Béla Balázs

ERICA CARTER

Film studies has long acknowledged the centrality to the discipline of the female

subject as historical protagonist, symbolic representation and theoretical construct. My

contribution to this dossier suggests, however, that there remains work to be done on

the relation between early film theory and early twentieth-century femininity.

Femininity, more pointedly, can be considered from both a historical and a symbolic

standpoint as a structuring element within early film theory. I elaborate this argument

here in a discussion of the early writings of Béla Balázs: specifically of the two

interwar treatises, Visible Man (1924) and The Spirit of Film (1930), in which Balázs

explored the part played by film and cinematic perception in the formation of new

social subjects.

As Balázs wrote in The Spirit of Film, ‘the substrate of [the film medium’s]

development is the subject, the human subject, man in his social being’.2 After his turn

to Marxism towards the end of World War I, Balázs’s primary commitment was to the

working class as that ‘subject … in his social being’ who was destined to become the

collective agent of historical change. Yet his own life trajectory suggests the

significance for Balázs of a second emergent historical protagonist: the ‘New

Woman’, whom we know from feminist history to have become by the turn of the

century a second global agent of social, economic and cultural change.3 Political

feminism was formative for Balázs: he wrote an early essay on feminism, and worked 1

2Béla Balázs, Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory. Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Oxford: Berghahn, 2010), p. 96. Page numbers from this volume are given hereafter in brackets.3 Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco (eds), The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011); Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (eds), The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).

1

alongside feminist activists in the short-lived Budapest Commune of 1919. He

nurtured lifelong and intellectually formative relationships with women artists and

intellectuals, among them Anna Lesznai, the writer and illustrator who, as I discuss

below, helped to shape Balázs’s thinking on cinema as a ‘fairytale’ mass popular art.4

Similarly ubiquitous in Balázs’s early writings are references to the popular female

stars who embodied the New Woman’s emancipatory ideals as well as her frustrated

desires – Lilian Gish, Pola Negri, Suzanne Desprès and, most famously, Asta Nielsen.

But the New Woman’s pervasive presence in Balázs’s writing is not yet matched by a

full understanding of her heuristic significance as image and female muse. In what

follows, I therefore take Balázs’s writings on female star performance as a point of

entry for a discussion of the generative – because, I suggest, ekphrastic – relation in

which his film theory stands to the New Woman as image, cinema icon and myth.

Balázs concludes Visible Man with an encomium to Asta Nielsen, the star long

recognized by cinema historians as a key figure in early twentieth-century cinema’s

articulation of the New Woman myth. But Balázs’s debt to her goes further. At the

close of Visible Man he situates Nielsen and Charlie Chaplin as early silent cinema’s

emblematic stars, presenting them as exemplifying in their performance and star

persona what he considers to be the specific aesthetic properties of the film medium.

Their juxtaposition reveals the gendered vision on which Balázs’s film theory rests.

Reiterating his plea from the book’s introduction that film be recognized as the

quintessential modern art form, Balázs writes of Chaplin that his is a ‘popular art in

the best sense’: a form of ‘modern American folk poetry’ whose stories redeem a

‘reified, mechanized society’ by recasting it within a ‘poetry of ordinary life, the

inarticulate life of ordinary things’. Chaplin’s silent performances of the ‘little guy’ in 4 Hanno Loewy, Béla Balázs. Märchen, Ritual und Film (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2003).

2

the American city thus embody for Balázs a collective poetics: the mute visual poetry

of everyday life in the modern urban mass (pp. 85–86).

Nielsen’s function is quite different. Richard Dyer long ago identified as a key

feature of stardom its ambivalent fusion in a single personality of the ordinary and the

extraordinary. Stars, according to Dyer, project an image that is both ‘special’ and

‘spectacular’, but are also known, through their screen roles as well as celebrity

chatter, as emblems of the familiar everyday.5 Balázs’s Visible Man epilogue does not,

however, reproduce the conjunction between the ordinary and the extraordinary that

Dyer identifies within individual stars. Instead it divides those qualities along gender

lines, operating with a distinction that places Chaplin on the side of ‘ordinary life …

ordinary things’, and Nielsen in the elevated realm of what Dyer calls the

extraordinary but which might also be termed the modern sublime. Balázs’s ecstatic

prose certainly recalls Romantic adorations of the sublime when he declaims:

Just as we are tempted to despair that film can ever be capable of becoming a

genuine form of art on its own, an art worthy of being represented by a tenth

Muse on Mount Olympus; just as we are on the verge of accepting that film

can never be more than a lame version of theatre … Asta Nielsen … restor[es]

our faith and our conviction. … lower the flags in her honour, she is

incomparable and without peer. (pp. 87–88)

The rhapsodic tone persists as Balázs moves on to specify three features of Nielsen

that locate her as the embodiment of an Olympian tenth muse. Visible Man, as is well

known, presents silent cinema as the site of articulation of a new language of the body.

Silent film in general, Balázs asserts, has rescued popular representation from the

rationalist abstraction of a modern ‘dematerialized, abstract and over-intellectualized’

5 Richard Dyer, Stars, 2nd edn (London: BFI Publishing, 1998), p. 35.

3

print culture, while screen performance in particular creates a ‘language of gestures’

that effects a bodily recovery from the alienation of the printed word (p. 11).

Nielsen’s first claim to Olympian status derives from her command of this new

‘gesturology’. Her performances are, for Balázs, ‘stupefying’ in their ‘diversity’, their

‘wealth of mimed expressions’ and their rootedness in the vast ‘thesaurus of gestures’

on which she alone can draw (p. 87). Her second triumph resides in an ‘erotic

charisma’ that makes manifest the film medium’s status as the early twentieth

century’s emblematic secular art. As Dyer further reminds us, the prestige of the

cinema star derives from historical processes of cultural modernization that have

unseated ancient gods, replacing them with secular deities including the idols of the

silver screen.6 The idea of film spectatorship as a secular version of a sacred quest is

confirmed when Balázs notes that Nielsen’s performances establish the erotic as

‘film’s very own theme, its essence’ (p. 87). Here, then, the search for a blissful union

with the godhead is replaced by erotic desires for the body of a desired other on

screen.

But the ‘mute understanding’ that arises from this erotic union derives for

Balázs, thirdly, from a play of performed expressions exemplified not only in

Nielsen’s expressive body but in her face. Studies of Balázs regularly identify the face

both as a key figure in his analyses of screen performance and as a founding metaphor

in a Balázsian phenomenology attentive to the ‘physiognomy of things’.7 Equally

familiar is Balázs’s celebration of the facial closeup as the ‘poetry of the cinema’: a

‘mute pointing’ that expresses within the duration of a single shot an ‘entire view of

life’ (pp. 39–41). That Nielsen’s performance represents once again for Balázs the

6 Ibid.

7 See Gertrud Koch, ‘Béla Balázs: the physiognomy of things’, New German Critique, no. 40 (1987), special issue on Weimar film theory, pp. 167–77.

4

quintessence of this cinematic poetry is confirmed when he celebrates her ability to do

‘what children do’, which is to wear ‘not only her own expression but, barely

noticeably (although we always sense it), the expression of her interlocutor, which is

reflected as in a mirror. … She carries the entire dialogue in her features and fuses it

into a synthesis of understanding and experiencing’ (p. 88).

Nielsen’s screen image functions in Visible Man, then, as both visual foil and affective

trigger for a gendered film-critical account that locates the female body on screen as

the source of a quintessentially cinematic erotic power. Balázs’s reflections, moreover,

are couched not in the rationalist abstraction of, say, a new film grammar but in an

ekphrastic poetics that both acknowledges and disavows the feminine autonomy for

which Nielsen’s image stands.

Ekphrasis – a term deriving from classical rhetoric, and defined in that context

as an ‘elaborate digressive disruption [in] rhetorical discourse’ – has recently attracted

the attention of literary scholars seeking critical concepts adequate to the literary arts

on an image-saturated age. Stephen Cheeke, for instance, observes that the

contemporary ‘immersion of poets in the “image world”’ has produced a

‘corresponding struggle to render or control the image verbally’, a struggle he

explores in an illuminating study of ekphrastic poetry from the Renaissance to the

present day.8 But Cheeke’s final chapter, an essay on ‘prose ekphrasis’, suggests that

the term – which for him has purchase on art history and criticism from Goethe,

Johann Winckelmann and Gotthold Lessing to Walter Benjamin – may also help

illuminate the relation between the moving image and its rerendering in the effusive

critical prose of Balázs.

8 Stephen Cheeke, Writing for Art:. the Aesthetics of Ekphrasis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), pp.19, 2.

5

Visible Man was written well in advance of any properly institutionalized film

theory or criticism. Drawing substantially on reviews for the Vienna daily Der Tag –

the first Austrian newspaper to employ, in the person of Balázs, a fully fledged film

critic – the text shares with cognate works including Jean Epstein’s Bonjour, Cinema

(1921), and Ricciotto Canudo’s The Birth of the Sixth Art (1911) an experimental

prose style that owes more to contemporary modernisms than to the realist

epistemology of, say, linguistic or semiotic modes of film interpretation and critique.

Though Balázs cites comparative linguistics as a possible model for a ‘gesturology’ of

screen performance (p. 97), his own writing only begins to emulate that discipline’s

realist idiom in the formal grammar that he attempts in his 1930 Spirit of Film. Visible

Man, by contrast, is notable for, among other features, its stylistic borrowings from

Expressionism, including second-person address (the ‘May we come in?’ of the

prologue) and a mood or voice that is typically declarative, exclamatory, interrogative

or even imperative, as in the ‘I have to tell you … you must’ of his opening demand to

aestheticians that film be accorded ‘a chapter … in the great aesthetic systems’ (p. 3).

In his influential theorization of the relation between film criticism or theory

and the screen image, Christian Metz notes ‘the broadly projective character of the

relation the cinema writer often maintains to his [sic] object’. Recognizing the

generative function of film criticism – its productive capacity in relation to cinematic

meaning and affect – Metz famously dubs film writing ‘the cinema’s third machine’:

an engine of textual production, then, that is fuelled by the desire of the critic to

maintain a ‘good object relation’ with the medium of film. In Metz’s Lacanian

account, the cinema figures as a ‘technique of the imaginary … the definitive imprint

of a stage before the Oedipus complex [and of] the exclusive relation to the mother’.

What he calls cinematic writing is based in an initial move on ‘idealisation’: the critic

6

falls in love with the film, and produces writing that, in its crudest form, subsists in

discourse only as fantasy, ‘an uninterpreted dream’. 9 The move into film theory

proper, however, demands an Oedipal separation from this maternal imaginary; thus

the film writer must follow the Law of the Father by ‘break[ing] the beneficial image’,

and striving after that ‘necessarily sadistic’ distance from its object which is the

prerequisite for a fully elaborated theory of the film.10

Although Metz never advocates a cinema writing that abjures the critic’s early love of

cinema and film – we must, he writes, not lose sight of the cinephile, even while we

strive ‘no longer [to] be invaded by him’ – he certainly repudiates those forms of early

cinema theory that maintain film ‘in the imaginary enclosure of a pure love’.11 His

rebuke surely extends to Balázs, whose stylistic excess in his early writings is

evocative as much of their author’s cinematic passions as of any objectified reality of

the moving image in film. But work by Cheeke and others on ekphrasis suggests a

possible recasting of Metz. Ekphrastic writing certainly recognizes the same otherness

of the pictorial object that, for Metz, fuels film-critical desire. But it strives to

overcome this through a poetic emulation that is in psychic terms more akin to

mimesis – a mode of embodied identification that blurs self–other distinctions – than

to the objectifying symbolizations of Metz’s account. Ekphrasis, in other words,

borrows from its visual object those aesthetic features that are also the signal

characteristics of poetry, adopting a tone, rhythm, imagery and lyrical voice that

perform an imaginary mirroring of the moving image on film.

9 Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. trans. Celia Britton and Annwyl Williams (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 4–14.10 Ibid., pp. 3, 80.11 Ibid., pp.13–15.

7

One instance from Balázs is his account of associational montage, whose

rhythmic qualities he mimics when he describes it as flowing ‘smoothly and in a broad

stream, like the hexameter in a classical epic, or else like a ballad, flaring up

breathlessly and then … rising inexorably towards a climax, or tingling capriciously’

(pp. 3,and 80). This is just one of numerous ekphrases in Balázs that reproduce the

poetic textures of their critical object: here, associational montage; elsewhere, camera

and the closeup, screen performance, colour or sound. This film-critical mimesis

differs in important ways from the ‘third machine’ of Metz’s account. Mimesis is

distinguished in psychic terms from object relations in the Lacanian symbolic by the

reciprocity of the relationship it establishes between self and other – or, in the present

context, between critic and image on screen. Ekphrasis as a rhetorical practice is

mimetic, therefore, not just by virtue of its stylistic impersonation of the image. As W.

J. T. Mitchell observes, the sensuous dance that ekphrasis performs with its object also

suggests an understanding of the image as ‘a thing that is always already addressing us

… a subject with a life that has to be seen as “its own” in order for our descriptions to

engage the picture’s life as well as our own lives as beholders’.12

Mitchell’s account is persuasive in the case of Balázs, whose

phenomenological understanding of film as a material embodiment of modern

experience indeed leads him to recognize the medium as ‘a subject with a life’ (pp. 67

and 46). Hence his exaltation of fluid montage as film’s ‘living breath’, or of the

moving image as a vital expression of the ‘physiognomy of things’. Balázs’s

condemnation of those forms of Soviet montage that, he argues, reduce film art to

‘ideograms’ is further evidence of a film aesthetic that privileges embodiment over

intellect, thereby favouring films that, by their own agency, ‘give shape to and

12 W. J. T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 49.

8

provoke thoughts’ (p. 128). That the ‘thoughts’ arising in film theory should be

similarly generated by an intersubjective sensual relation between screen image,

audience and critic is made plain when Balázs insists to his readers that the ‘greater

enjoyment’ his writing will bring derives not from its pedagogical function (‘the

cinema, thank God, is no educational establishment!’) but from its capacity to

‘stimulate your senses and nerves’ (p. 7).

Balázs here gives expression to the Marxist utopia of a film medium whose

embodied qualities – not just its images of the human body but the aesthetic intensities

of filmic rhythm, movement, tempo, spatial transformation and temporal flow – might

contribute to an overcoming of an alienated capitalist culture of the printed word.

Reading Balázs through his commentary on Nielsen allows us to see how that utopia

rests on his embrace of precisely that feminized imaginary whose repudiation, for

Metz, is the prerequisite for a theory of film. Metz does allow for a film aesthetics that

involves a writing in and of the imaginary, but he draws a strict distinction between

aesthetics and film theory as a scientific discursive mode . Balázs’s Visible Man, by

contrast, embraces poetic writing – or more specifically, the ekphrastic mimesis of

feminine performance – as the generative vehicle for an aesthetic theory of film.

Yet a film-critical practice deriving from sensuous engagement with a

feminized imaginary produces, ultimately, its own ambivalence. If one feature of

ekphrasis is its reproduction in poetry of the sensual qualities of the image, then a

second is its function in defending the writer against the image’s overwhelming

power. We might cite here Cheeke’s final contention that, since word and image are

ultimately incommensurable, writing for art both ‘exists under the knowledge of

failure’, and involves therefore ‘a struggle to … control the image verbally’.13 As is

13 Cheeke, Writing for Art, p. 2.

9

apparent in the very first pages of Visible Man, this same struggle drives Balázs’s

conceptualization of film theory:

Creating meaning is our way of defending ourselves against chaos. If an

elemental force becomes so powerful that we can neither withstand it nor

change it, then we make haste to discover a meaning in it lest we be engulfed

by it. Theoretical knowledge is the cork that keeps us afloat. (p. 4)

His plea for theory as a defence against ‘engulfing’ returns us one last time to his

panegyric to Nielsen. Read in the light of Balázs’s own call for ‘defence’, that tribute

invites a rereading as an instance of fetishistic disavowal, a hypostasis that confines

Nielsen to the realm of erotic myth, obscuring her (powerful) agency in the production

and dissemination of her star image.

For the assessment of classical film theory attempted in this dossier, the

implications of this historical occlusion are significant. If we content ourselves with

Balázs’s reading of Nielsen as a ‘spiritual’ figure who ‘restor[es] our faith and our

conviction’ in the power of film art (p. 87), then we risk perpetuating a gender

division that places masculinity on the side of film-historical agency – including in the

early production of film theory - and femininity on the ahistorical side of erotic myth.

An understanding of the workings of ekphrasis can once again help us. If

ekphrasis mimics the aesthetic qualities of its object, then it does so in part through its

rerendering of that object’s organization of space and time. We see this process at

work in the brief examples above of Balázs’s rhythmic prose. Rhythm is deployed in

Visible Man as a mode of film-theoretical poiesis: a poetic bringing forth or

(re)making of the film image that eschews linear argument, emphasizing instead its

own sensuous presence in fractured space and non-linear time. This accounts for the

aphoristic and spatially disjunctive structuring of Visible Man, a text whose meaning

10

often accrues through metaphor and associative montage, and knowledge is produced

not in the linear time of reason, but in the simultaneous temporality of poetic

illumination and affect.

Conceiving Balázs’s writing as a poetic mimesis of a specifically cinematic

orchestration of space and time may help us, finally, to rescue Nielsen, and other

female stars, from the frozen temporality of a male fantasy of eroticism on screen.

Indeed Balázs himself begins that recuperation when he takes up, first in Visible Man

and later in The Spirit of Film, the issue of female performance and film time. Writing

on the closeup, he observes the capacity of virtuoso performers including Nielsen and

Lilian Gish to break the teleology of narrative progression and instead to evoke,

through the myriad shifts in facial expression that pass across their face in closeup, a

multiplicitous time in which ‘past and future expressions merge into one another and

display not just the individual states of the soul but also the mysterious process of

development itself’ (p.34). The point is driven home when Balázs goes on to liken to a

musical arrangement a performance by Pola Negri in Carmen (Ernst Lubitsch, 1918).

While flirting with her lover José, Balázs suggests, Negri’s face, displays at one and

the same time ‘joy and submissiveness’, ‘superiority’ and melancholy, the pleasure of

an erotic encounter, and the sadistic enjoyment of her dominant role. Those complex

emotions, he continues, become visible all at once through Negri’s ‘polyphonic’

organization of multiple facial expressions; thus her face displays ‘the most varied

emotions simultaneously, like a chord, and the relationships between these different

emotions is what creates the rich amalgam of harmonies and modulations’ (p. 34).

Although Balázs’s tendency elsewhere in his early film theory is to locate in

aspects of the cinematic apparatus – most notably in the closeup and montage – the

source of a specifically cinematic temporality, he recognizes in this and other passages

11

that the female body too, in its interaction with the camera, can become the site of

production of a uniquely cinematic, simultaneous and multiplicitous time. Here again,

his film theory can be read as condensing metaphorically the larger history of the early

twentieth-century New Woman. Rita Felski has suggested that the New Woman as

cultural icon functioned symbolically as a point of intersection between the conflicting

temporalities of a contested modernity. While located within teleological narratives of

social emancipation as a ‘symbol of modernity at the forefront of social change’, the

New Woman in her manifestation as iconic image also occupied the more ambiguous

time of social fantasy.14 Fatefully, she might embody the archaic temporality of the

female archetype, the New Woman as sexual threat, as seen in Pandora’s Box (G. W.

Pabst, 1929) or in the robot Maria from Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927). But as Balázs

also reminds us, she might equally occupy a poetic and heterotopic time that escapes

teleology and inhabits instead a perpetual present of multiplicitous visual rhythms and

‘polyphonic’ emotional states. Certainly, this is a temporal experience evoked by

Nielsen, who characteristically used the long takes of early cinema to evoke a poetic

time in performances that exploit to the full the expressive possibilities of visual

rhythm and pace, gestural repetition and counterpoint, or stylistic shifts from fluidity,

through stasis, to resurgent flow.

We may seek in vain in Balázs’s film theory an explicit connection between

his account of film time and the modernist temporality that is inhabited, for Rita

Felski, by the New Woman. But there was one contemporary of Balázs who

recognized that gendered connection, the poet, fabulist and illustrator Anna Lesznai,

who was Balázs’s close companion and confidante during his Budapest years. She was

one of a handful of founder members of the influential Balázs-Lukács Sunday Circle,

she influenced his literary career by prompting his lifelong interest in the fairy tale, 14 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 158.

12

and served under him as Minister for Fairy Tales in the Budapest Commune. Along

with Balázs. she too fled to Vienna after the Commune’s collapse in late July 1919.

Most significantly for Balázs’s film theory, Lesznai wrote a psychology of the

fairy tale that Hanno Loewy has identified as shaping Balázs’s later account of the

cinematic organization of film time.15 Lesznai’s autobiography references Balázs’s

many visits to her garden, and the conversations had there and elsewhere on

temporality in his modernist fairy tales.16 But it is Lesznai’s own tales, not Balázs’s,

that both reveal her understanding of the gender trouble fomented by the fairy tale and

locate her fairy-tale aesthetics as a precursor to the film theory of Balázs. Her stories

depict female protagonists who are removed from narrative teleology, for instance by

thwarted happy endings, and made instead to occupy the suspended time of enchanted

spaces, mythical forests or exotic lands. In her 1918 article on fairy-tale psychology,

moreover, Lesznai prefigures Balázs’s observations on simultaneous time in film with

similar comments on the ‘contiguous’ nature of events in the fairy tale. Basing her

remarks on the fairy tale’s disruption of linear time schemes through events that erupt

into a continuous present – the vision of past times in enchanted mirrors, the

resurgence of past voices in present time – Lesznai notes that ‘[the fairy tale’s]

‘transcendence of the boundaries of the ego’ [is linked to the fact that] things exist in

the fairy tale contiguously, on a single level’.17

There is a clear similarity between this passage and Balázs’s parallel

comments on the simultaneous time of the closeup. But also notable is Lesznai’s

insistence on the subjective transformation – a ‘transcendence of the boundaries of the

ego’ – that is made possible by an imaginative move into fairy-tale time. As for

15 Loewy, Béla Balázs. 16 Anna Lesznai, Spätherbst in Eden (Karlsruhe: Stahlberg, 1965), pp. 401–4. 17 Anna Lesznai, ‘Babonásészrevételek a meseés a tragédialélektanához’ (‘Superstitious remarks on the psychology of the fairy tale and of tragedy’), Nyugat, no. 13 (1918), <http://epa.oszk.hu/00000/00022/nyugat.htm>, accessed 9 June 2014.

13

Balázs, it seems, Lesznai’s ultimate interest in popular cultural form – for her the fairy

tale, for Balázs the film – is its transformation of (to return to an earlier quote from

Balázs) ‘the subject, the human subject in his social being’.

That this transformation was to be effected not least through a reimagining of

the New Woman is evident in Lesznai’s writings on the utopian possibilities of fairy-

tale time. It can be found in the wicked lampooning of gender conventions that

characterizes her fairy tales; and in the life she lived as an engaged intellectual who

moved within and helped shape the intellectual and artistic movements first of the pre-

World War I Budapest avant garde, later of the Hungarian Commune, later still of the

exile communities of Vienna and of her ultimate exile destination, New York.

Repositioning Balázs’s writings on cinematic time, the body and the closeup in direct

relation to Lesznai allows us to understand not only the significance of gender for his

conception of the modernist temporalities of the moving image, but also to consider

the conditions of emergence of his early film writing. His was, I have argued, a body

of work in which the New Woman played a part as both mythic figure or muse, and

also, crucially, as historical agent in intellectual and artistic productions such as

Nielsen’s screen performances, Lesznai’s theoretical writing, and her fairy tales that

magically enact a gendered transformation of time.

A longer version of this article appears as ‘The Visible Woman in and against Béla

Balázs’, in Malte Hagener (ed.), Studying the Cinema: Knowledge Production, Institution

Building and the Emergence of Film Culture in Europe, 1919–1939 (London: Berghahn,

2014).

14