The Face of the Landscape in Béla Balázs’s Film Theory
The Face of the Landscape in Béla Balázs’s Film Theory

Summary/Abstract: In establishing the concept of cinematic image Béla Balázs’s film theory relies on terms and concepts drawn from classical aesthetics. The everyday (and aesthetic) situation of viewing nature implies totalisation and anthropomorphism of nature, distanciation. Balázs, in contrast, opts for the merging of distant contemplation and absorbed participation, which makes his aesthetic position slightly different from that of his early mentor, Georg Simmel. This is part of his conceptualisation of cinema as a new site of articulation, a negotiation between subject and object, body and spirit, flesh and soul, surface and depth, inside and outside. Accounting for the structure of looking as both the subject and the object becoming images, Balázs adopts a surprisingly modernist position which anticipates the function of the landscape in Antonioni, Pasolini, and Godard.

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