Béla Balázs

<p> Béla Balázs's two works <i>Visible Man</i> (1924) and <i>The Spirit of Film</i> (1930) are published here for the first time in full English translation. The essays offer the reader an insight into the work of a film theorist whose German-language publications have been hitherto unavailable to the film studies audience in the English-speaking world. Balázs's detailed analyses of the close-up the shot and montage are illuminating both as applicable models for film analysis and as historical documents of his key contribution - alongside such contemporaries as Arnheim Kracauer and Benjamin - to critical debate on film in the 'golden age' of the Weimar silents.</p>