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Béla Balázs (1884-1949) |
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Hungarian poet, screenwriter, playwright, film critic, director, the author of the libretto for Béla Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle (1912) and the story for the The Wooden Prince (1917). Béla Balázs's Der sichtbare Mensch (1924) is considered the first major work in silent film aesthetics. Balázs also wrote the scripts for more than two dozen films, including Die Abenteuer eines Zehmarkscheines (1926), a pioneering work of the Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity), and Das blaue Licht (1932), directed by Leni Riefenstahl. "Every art alweays deals with human beings, it is a human manifestation and presents human beings. To paraphrase Marx: 'The root of all art is man'. When the film close-up strips the veil of our imperceptiveness and insensitivity from the hidden little things and shows us the face of objects, it still shows us man, for what makes objects expressive are the human expressions projected on to them." (from Theory of the Film (Character and Growth of a New Art) by Béla Balázs, translated from the Hungarian by Edith Bone, Dennis Dobson, MCMLII, p. 60) Béla Balázs was born Herbert Bauer in Szeged, the son of Simon Bauer, a teacher and translator, and Jenny (Levy) Bauer, also a teacher. Due to his liberal opinions, Simon Bauer was moved to Lőcse, a small town in the northern part of the country, where he died suddenly from stomach cancer in 1897. Balázs's mother returned with her three children to Szeged. While still at school, Balázs published his first writings in the local paper, using the pseudonym Béla Balázs, but he encouraged his closer acquaintances to call him by his original name. Because he was Jewish, he was not permitted to participate in religion class. After graduating from the gymnasium, he moved in 1902 to Budapest. Balázs studied at the famous Eötvös Collegium, where his roommate
was the future composer Zoltán Kodály. Among his friends was also Béla
Bartók, with whom he traveled in the countryside collecting folk music.
Though Balázs admired Bartók's musical gifts, they never became truly
close friends. "Apart from his music," Balázs once confessed in his
diary, "I am able to enjoy little about him." ('Bluebeard as Theater: The Influence of Maeterlinck and Hebbel on Balázs's Bluebeard Drama' by Carl Leafstedt, in Bartók and His World, edited by Peter Laki, Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 123) Bálazs continued his studies in Berlin and in Paris. He participated in Berlin in George Simmel's private seminar;
'Halálesztétika' (1907, The Aesthetics of Death), his most important
essay from this period, was dedicated to Simmel.
For Balázs, death gave meaning to life and art. "The awareness of death
makes us aware of life; art is born at the point when life becomes
aware of death; art stems from the transcendental instinct of man, from
a longing to overstep the limits of everyday reality." (Bartók and the Grotesque: Studies in Modernity, the Body and Contradiction in Music by Julie Brown, 2007, pp. 62-63) While a doctoral student, Balázs started to contribute essays to the magazine Nyugat (West), which soon developed into a leading forum of the cultural world in Hungary. Bálazs received his doctorate in German philologt from the University of Budapest for a dissertation entitled Hebbel Frigyes pántragizmusa, mint a romantikus világnézet eredménye (Friedrich Hebbel's Pan-Tragicness, as a Result of the Romantic Worldview). It was published under his real name Herbert Bauer. Doctor Szélpal Margit (1909), his first play, was performed at the National Theatre, without much success. In 1910 Balázs finished his third play, A kékszakŕllú herceg vára (Duke Bluebeard's Castle), which was influenced by symbolist technique and the dramas of Maurice Maeterlinck, such as Ariane and Barbe Bleue (1901). Balázs's libretto of Béla Bartók's famous opera was first performed in 1913. The composer himself had a high regard for his opera, but he never talked much of his cooperation with Balázs. Moreover, Balázs lost contact with him during the decades when he was a persona non grata in Hungary. Fairy tales inspired several of Balázs's works, but not because of
their depiction of the eternal battle between good and evil. Balázs's
interest was in the thin line between reality and fantasy, and the
search for meaning behind phenomena. In Duke Bluebeard's Castlethe
duke's new wife wants to open the dark doors of the castle, and
bring light into their life. She reveals the horrible secrets of her
husband, and eventually the Duke is left alone in the darkness.
"Bluebeard's castle is not a realistic stone castle," Bálazs
explained. "The castle is his soul. It is lonely, dark, and
secretive: the castle of locked doors. . . . Into this castle, into his
own soul, Bluebeard admits his beloved. And the castle (the stage)
shudders, sighs, and bleeds. When the woman walks into it, she walks
into a living being." (Bluebeard: A Reader's Guide to the English Tradition by Casie E. Hermansson, 2009, p. 141) Another
central theme in Balázs's works was the sense of loneliness, which he
dealt with, among others, in the short story 'Die Geschichte von der
Logodygasse von Frühling, vom Tod und der Ferne' (1912). Der Mantel der Träume (1922), "Chinese" styled fairy tales, was inspired by the illustrations of Mariette Lydis. . When World War I broke out, Balázs volunteered for the Hungarian
arm. For the surprise of his friends, he proclaimed on the pages of the
Nyugat, that this war was sacret. Before becoming seriously ill with endocarditis, he served at the
Serbian front. From his diaries Bálazs collected the anti-war
book Lélek a háborúban (1916, Soul in the War). In December 1915 Balázs joined The
Budapest Sunday Circle, led by the philosopher and literary
theoretician György Lukács (1885-1971). The Sunday Circle was a loose association of radical intellectuals, thinkers, and artists. Its members included Karl Mannheim, the art historian Arnold Hauser, the writer Anna Leznai, and the musicians Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. Also Balázs's first wife, Edith Hajós, and Anna Schlamadinger, his second wife, attended the meetings. Usually the group met at Balázs's elegant apartment or the Lukács's country estate and discussed about the end of the liberal society. In 1919 Hungary was for 133 days a communist republic under Béla
Kun, whose government was brought to end by the intervention from
Romania and Czechoslovakia. Balázs was forced into exile with his wife,
Anna Schlamadinger, as a fellow traveler of the Communists. He
settled in Vienna, like a number of other exiles, including
Sándor Korda (Sir Alexander Korda), Mihály Kertész (Michael Curtiz),
László Vajda, Paul Czinner, and Bela Lugosi. Balázs cooperated with the
director Hans Otto Löwenstein (1881-1931) in several film projects. From 1922 Bálazs contributed film reviews to the newspaper Der Tag, founded by Sigmund Bosel. In 1924 he published his first book of film theory, Der Sichtbare Mensch (The Visible Man). This collection of articles drew much attention and was translated into 11 languages. 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
argued. (Theory of the Film, p. 60) 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." (Ibid., pp. 65-66) 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. Balázs was regarded as one of the leading critics of his day, but
his sharp opinions clashed with the interest of the film producers and
directors, and he was forced to resign from Der Tag. The
mid-1920s also saw the decline of the Austrian film industry. In 1926
Balázs went to Berlin, where he was involved in a number of activities;
at times he was so overburdened that he cried for exhaustion. He
directed the Workers' Theatre Group, the Arbeitertheaterbund, wrote
plays and film scripts, lectured, and cooperated in left-wing film
projects with the director G.W. Pabst, the producer Erwin Piscator, and
the writer Bertolt Brecht. He declared that
the "crowd is the soul and the significance of stage plays," a
view that influenced Piscator's Total Theatre productions. (Erwin Piscator's Political Theatre: The Development of Modern German Drama by C. D. Innes, 1972, p. 141) Most of Balázs's essays were published during this period in Die Rote Fahne, Film und Volk, and Linkskurv, and Die Weltbühne. Die Abenteur Eines Zehnmarkscheines
(1928), Balázs's first screenplay in Germany focused on a ten-mark
note, which passes from hand to hand amidst diverse characters in
Berlin. The cool analysis of money was softened by the production
company with a love story between two young workers. Dreigroschenoper (1930), based on Brecht's famous play, caused Balázs troubles. The original screenplay for the film was written by Leo Lania and László Vajda. When Brecht did not like the adaptation, Balázs tried to improve the script. Eventually Brecht sued the production company, but he lost the case, and accepted a sizable settlement. The film was a popular success. Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light), co-written by Leni Riefenstahl,
Carl Mayer (not credited), and Hans Schneeberger, was set on the Alps.
According to Riefenstahl, Balázs was so excited about her
treatment that he was willing to co-author the script without a fee.
Mayer, F.W. Murnau's writer, finished the script. Balázs possibly
directed the scenes involving Riefenstahl. After the war, Riefenstahl
claimed responsibility for "script, direction, and art direction." The story was about the struggle between beauty and materialism, illusion and realism. Riefenstahl played a beautiful woman, Junta, who knows the secret of the mysterious light high on the mountains, which tempts young people into death. The film was admired by both Hitler and Chaplin, but criticized in the west-wing newspapers. Later Riefenstahl gained fame for her visually brilliant films, such as Triumph of the Will (1935), produced by order of the Führer, and Olympia (1938), about the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. When the Nazis came into power, Balázs left Vienna for the Soviet
Union, where he taught film aesthetics at Moscow's State Film Institute
from 1933 to 1945. In the late 1930s he wrote the screenplay for Die Löwin,
based on a novel by Ferdinand Ossendowski. Die Löwin was shot in
Algiers. When the director went to France with the film, its material
was confiscated and destroyed by the customs officials. The years in the Soviet Union were bitter for Balázs. He was attacked by orthodox, Stalinist ideologists, and also Lukács turned his back to him; Lukács did not believe in his friend's commitment to communism. In 1939 Balázs wrote a poem for Stalin, 'Auf ein Stalinbild' (Dem Genius der Freiheit: Dichtungen um Stalin, zusgest. u. red. von Erich Weinert, 1939), but even this flattering piece could not guarantee his personal safety. Like others working in the cultural field, during World War II Balázs was evacuated to Alma Ata in Kazakhstan, where he collected folk poetry, later published in Das Goldene Zelt (1956). After the war the communists gained control of government in Hungary, and Balázs returned to his native country, helping to rebuild its film industry. Balázs taught at the Academy of Theatre and Film Arts, and continued writing scripts, although his projects were turned down - by the communists he was considered a "bourgeois" theorist and author. He also lectured on films in Poland and at Prague University. Valahol Európában (1947, Somewhere in Europe), directed by Geza von Radvŕnyi, was Balázs's most succesful achievement. The story dealt with orphaned children in post-war Europe. Ének a búzamezőkről (1947, Song of the Corn Field), in which he worked with the director István Szőts and the screenwriter Lázsló Ranódy, was forbidden as "religious reaction propaganda". Balázs died in Budapest on May 17, 1949, in the same year when the opposition political parties were outlawed. After his death, the Béla Balázs studio for young experimental film-makers was opened in 1959 in Budapest. For further reading: Balŕzs és akinek nem kell by György Lukács (1918); 'Béla Balázs' by Guido Aristarco, in Bianco e Nero, June (1949); Balázs Béla világa by M.K. Nagy (1973); The Major Film Theories: An Introduction by Andrew Dudley (1976); A History of Hungarian Literature, by István Nemeskürty et al. (1983); The Oxford History of Hungarian Literature by Lóránt Czigány (1984); 'Béla Balázs in German Exile' by John Ralmon, in Film Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 3 (1987); 'Béla Balázs and the Cinematographer's Art' by Joseph Zsuffa, in American Cinematographer, vol. 68, no. 10 (1987); Béla Balŕzs, the Man and the Artist by Joseph Zsuffa (1987); Sininen valo: Belá Balázs ja hänen elokuvateoriansa by Matti Lukkarila (1991); International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers 4: Writers and Production Artists, edited by Samantha Cook (1993); World Cinema, 5: Hungary by Bryan Burns (1996); 'Balázs, Béla,' in The Film Encyclopedia by Ephraim Katz (1994); Film Theory and Film Criticism, ed. by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (1998); Zur Dialektik zwischen Zuschauer und Schauspieler in Béla Balázs' Filmphysiognomik (1924/1930) by Canan Turan (2009); Zu einer Theorie des Erlebens bei Béla Balázs by Matthias Hein (2011); 'Gestural (In)visibility in Béla Balázs and Helmuth Plessner,' in Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and Cultural Theory in the Early Twentieth Century by Lucia Ruprecht (2019) Selected works / fiction and non-fiction:
Screenplays:
Films as director:
Films based on Balázs's texts:
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