Time for some more highly influential film theory material. Here is another in-depth, free of jargon book on film theory that’s easily accessible for everyone. It’s a book I have already begun reading and taking notes on which will be posted once I’m done, but for now you guys can check it out for yourself.
Bela actually influenced other early filmmakers and theorists in the 20′s and 30′s – such as Eisenstein and Pudovkin.
“Balázs emphasized that the moving pictures brought back the language the body and the expressions of the human face, which had been buried by the culture of books and words. “Facial expression is the most subjective manifestation of man, more subjective than speech,” Balázs wrote in Theory of the Film. “The language of the face cannot be suppressed or controlled.” The close-up was for Balázs the most essential feature of the film art, which separated it from all other arts, especially from the theatre. “Not even the greatest writer, the most consummate artist of the pen, could tell in words what Asta Nielsen tells with her face in close-up as she sits down to her mirror and tries to make up for the last time her aged, wrinkled face, riddled with poverty, misery, disease and prostitution, when she is expecting her lover, released after ten years in jail; a lover who has retained his youth in captivity because life could not touch him there.” Much later, in 1939 Balázs wrote in the essay ‘Das Filmszenarium, eine neue literarische Gattung’ that the screenplay is an independent and a new form of literature, and emphasized the role of the writer as the auteur of the film. In Theory of the Film (1952), which was first published in Moscow in 1945 as The Art of Cinema, Balázs developed his earlier ideas and used writings produced at the State Film Institute.” [source]
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I’ll be posting some more material from the BBC4 series in a bit. Luis Bunuel and Wim Wenders stories. If you missed the Truffaut reading check it out here. Also, the stuff I’ll be posting that isn’t particularly commentary related – I update through Twitter as well as add it to the Commentaries section. So if you don’t see a post on the main page, just check the commentaries section.
