Professor Erica Carter (University of Warwick) will be giving a Taylor
Special Lecture on Monday 15 February at 5.00pm in the Main
Hall in the Taylor Institution, University of Oxford. The lecture will
be followed by a drinks reception.
Her subject is: 'Béla Balázs and the Fairy-Tale Close Up'.
(Abstract below.)
Erica Carter, author of Dietrich's Ghosts. The Sublime and the Beautiful
in Third Reich Film (BFI 2004), and co-editor with Tim Bergfelder and
Deniz Göktürk of The German Cinema Book (BFI 2002), is an
internationally pre-eminent scholar of German cinema and, coming from a
Birmingham Contemporary Cultural Studies background, among the most
interesting and provocative thinkers about German 20th-century culture
working today (see also How German is She? Post-war West German
Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman' (University of Michigan Press,
1997)). Her most recent work has focused on the early film theory of
Béla Balázs (1884-1949), and a collection of his writings on film is to
be published later this year in the Berghahn Film Europe series: Béla
Balázs: Early Film Theory (ed. Erica Carter, transl. Rodney Livingstone).
All are welcome.
ABSTRACT
Béla Balázs and the Fairy-Tale Close Up
Erica Carter
This paper emerges out of my collaboration with Rodney Livingstone
(Southampton) on a translation of two works of early film theory by Béla
Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch (Visible Man, 1924) and Der Geist des Films
(The Spirit of Film, 1930). I begin by situating Balázs as an early
twentieth-century cosmopolitan intellectual whose vision of film as a
universal language drew inspiration from the multilingual,
European-Jewish and leftist intellectual circles in which he moved.
During his pre-World Way II years in Budapest, Vienna, Paris, Florence
and Berlin, Balázs embraced in both in his theoretical writings and his
fiction (fairy stories, screenplays, plays, ballets, opera libretti) a
mode of utopian modernism that he developed in dialogues across a
network of collaborators, mentors and friends, including Béla Bartók,
Zoltán Kodály, György Lukács, and Georg Simmel. Balázs’s vision of a
revolutionary transformation of perception and subjectivity through the
medium of film centred in part on an account of the close up, an
aesthetic element that he saw as emblematic of film’s potential to
transform the space-time relations of human vision. In the paper, I will
explore the connections between Balázs’s comments on the close-up, and
his lifetime commitment to the fairy story as a genre with similar
potential to shift readerly experience into the utopian temporality of
poetry and the dream.
--
Dr Georgina Paul,
Fellow and Tutor in German & Tutor for Graduates,
St Hilda's College,
Oxford OX4 1DY
Tel: +44 (0)1865 610311
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