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Béla Balázs’ın Kavramlarıyla Sinemayı Anlamak: ‘Yakın Çekim’, ‘Yüz’, ‘Şeylerin Yüzü’ ve ‘Fizyonomi’

Year 2022, Volume: 7 Issue: 14, 255 - 278, 28.12.2022
https://doi.org/10.31122/sinefilozofi.1145259

Abstract

Durağan imgelerin mekanik bir aygıtın devinimiyle hareketli görsellere dönüştürülmesi neticesinde vücut bulan sinema, anlamın yaratımı ve iletimi bağlamında mümkün kıldığı yeni olanaklar sayesinde kendinden önceki tüm medyumların ötesine geçerek bireyin düşünce düzlemi ile imgeler arasında kurulan karmaşık ilişkiler ağının saklı yönlerinin keşfine kaynaklık etmiştir. Bu yeni aparatın muhtemel potansiyelinden etkilenen pek çok fikir insanı, aygıtın icadını takip eden birkaç yıl içinde sinematik düşünce yaratımı üzerine kendi kuramsal yaklaşımlarını geliştirmeye başlamıştır. Bu doğrultuda klasik dönem film teorisyenleri arasında sinemaya ilişkin yenilikçi söylemleriyle dikkati çeken Macar düşünür Béla Balázs’ın ayrıcalıklı bir konuma sahip olduğu görülür. Balázs’ın sinema sanatına ilişkin düşünsel literatürü, yalnızca yaşadığı dönemde ortaya konulan diğer kuramsal çalışmalardan ayrışmakla kalmamış, aynı zamanda kendisinden sonra filmin mekanik varlığı, fenomenolojisi ve felsefesi gibi farklı alanlarında kaleme alınan eserlere de kılavuzluk etmiştir. Béla Balázs’ın bugün film literatüründeki bilinirliği, sinemanın ve genel olarak bir kültürün mekânı olarak insan yüzüne ilişkin söylemlerine dayanır. Balázs, ileri sürdüğü ‘yakın çekim’, ‘yüz’, ‘şeylerin yüzü’ ve ‘fizyonomi’ kavramları aracılığıyla, sinemanın teknolojik imkânlarının görünenin ötesinde yer alan gizil duygu ve düşünceleri ortaya çıkarma potansiyeline atıfta bulunur. Balázs’ın yakın çekimde çerçevelenen imgeler ve bir bütün olarak kadrajda izleyiciye yansıtılan tüm unsurların fizyonomisi üzerinden gerçekleştirdiği bu vurgu, onu çağdaşı teorisyenlerden farklı bir konuma getirmiştir. Çalışmada Béla Balázs’ın teorik söylemlerini içeren kitap ve makale formatındaki eserleri ile Balázs’ın fikri mirasını bugünün perspektifi üzerinden değerlendiren düşün insanlarının akademik çalışmalarına odaklanılmaktadır. Bu amaçla, öncelikle Balázs’ın hayatı ve sinema sanatına yönelik genel bakış açısı ortaya konulmaktadır. Ardından söz konusu kavramlar incelenmekte ve Balázs’ın ifade ettiği şekliyle sinemanın biçim dilinin unsurları ile bu kavramlar arasındaki ilişki değerlendirilmektedir.

References

  • Aitken, I. (2001). European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
  • Andrew, J. D. (2010). Büyük Sinema Kuramları (Çev. Z. Atam). İstanbul: Doruk Yayıncılık.
  • Balázs, B. (1952). Theory of the Film, Character and Growth of an New Art. London: Dennis Dobson LTD.
  • Balázs, B. (2006a). Compulsive Cameramen, October, 115, 51–52.
  • Balázs, B. (2006b). Radio Drama. October 116, 47-48.
  • Balázs, B. (2010). Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory. Visible Man and The Spirit of Film (Trans. R. Livingstone) (Ed. E. Carter). New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
  • Balázs, B. (2013). Görünen İnsan Ya da Sinema Kültürü (Çev. O. Kasap). İstanbul: Say.
  • Bauer, M. (2016). Béla Balázs: A Gestalt Theory of Film. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 36/2, 133-155, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01439685.2016.1167462.
  • Benjamin, W. (2007). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. H.Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (pp. 217-253). Newyork: Schocken Books.
  • Bergson, H. (2001). Time and Free Will, An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Trans. F. L. Pogson). New York: Dover Publications, Inc.
  • Biro, Y. (2011). Sinemada Zaman / Ritmik Tasarım; Türbülans ve Akış (Çev. A. C. Altunkanat). İstanbul: Doruk.
  • Brannigan, E. (2011). Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image. New York: Oxford University.
  • Brighter, G. (2018). Warped Space Time: Exploiting Schematic Assumptions in Ritual in Transfigured Time. Film Matters, 9(1), 7-17.
  • Cameron, A. (2020). Face, Frame, Fragment: Refiguring Space in Found-Footage Cinema (Sæther, S. O and S. T. Bull Eds.). In Screen Space Reconfigured, (pp. 127-152) Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
  • Carroll, N. (2014). Béla Balázs: The Face of Cinema, October, 148, 53-62, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24586619
  • Carter, E. (2007). Béla Balázs, Visible Man, or the Culture of Film (1924), Introduction. Screen, 48(1), 91-108.
  • Coates, P (2012). Screening the Face. New York: Palgrave MacMillan
  • Congdon, L. (1973). The Making of a Hungarian Revolutionary: The Unpublished Diary of Béla Balázs. Journal of Contemporary History, 8/3, 57-74, https://www.jstor.org/stable/260280
  • Csicsery-Ronay, I. (2014). The Eye of Gort. Science Fiction Studies, 41(2), 301-313.
  • Dini, R. (2017). An Analysis of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Macat.
  • Doane, M. A. (2003). The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 14/5, 89-111.
  • Doane, M. A. (2014). Facing a Universal Language. New German Critique, 122, 111-124, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43909565
  • Fowler, C. (2013). The Clock: Gesture and Cinematic Replaying. Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Medi, 54/2, 226-242, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13110/framework.54.2.0226
  • Frey, M. (2010). Cultural Problems of Classical Film Theory: Béla Balázs, ‘Universal Language’ and The Birth of National Cinema. Screen, 51/4, 324-339, doi:10.1093/screen/hjq028.
  • Friedberg, A. (1998). Reading Close Up, 1927-1933. J. Donald, A. Friedberg, L. Marcus (Eds.), Close Up 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism, (p. 1-26). New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
  • Füzi, I. (2012). The Face of the Landscape in Bela Balazs’s Film Theory. Film and Media Studies, 5, 73-86.
  • Geil, A. (2018). Between Gesture and Physiognomy: ‘Universal Language’ and the Metaphysics of Film Form in Béla Balázs’s Visible Man. Screen, 59(4), 512-522.
  • Grønstad, A. (2012). Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin and the Aesthetics of Ethical Intimacy. Film Criticism 37(2), 22-37.
  • Hake, S. (2013). Weimar Film Theory. P. E. Gordon & J. P. McCormick (Eds.), Weimar Thought, A Contested Legacy (pp. 273-291). New Jersey: Princeton
  • Hansen, M. (1991). Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  • Kamenskaya, E. & Kukharev, G. (2008). Recognition of Psychological Characteristics from Face. Metody Iformatyki Stoowanej, 13, 59-73.
  • Koch, G. & Miriam, H. (1987). The Physiognomy of Things. New German Critique, 40, 167-177.
  • Loewy, H. (2006). Space, Time and “Rites de Passage”: Béla Balázs Paths to Film. October, 115, 61-76.
  • Marcus, L. (1998). Introduction: Cinema and Psychoanalysis. J. Donald, A. Friedberg, L. Marcus (Eds.), Close Up 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism, (pp. 240-246). New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
  • Martin, A. (2017). Different, Even Wholly Irrational Arguments: The Film Philosophy of Béla Balázs. B. Herzogenrath (Ed.), Film as Philosophy, (pp. 45-65). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Monaco, J. (2001). Bir Film Nasıl Okunur? (Çev. E. Yılmaz). İstanbul: Oğlak Yayıncılık.
  • Pezzella, M. (2006). Sinemada Estetik (Çev. F. Demir). Ankara: Dost.
  • Rochester, K. (2016). Close-Ups and Fast Cuts: Physiognomy, Choreography, and the Silhouette Films of Lotte Reiniger. H-G. von Arburg (Ed.), Physiognomisches Schreiben. Stilistik, Rhetorik und Poetik einer gestaltdeutenden Kulturtechnik (pp. 243-264). Freiburg: Rombach Verlag.
  • Rodowick, D. N. (2014). The Aesthetic Discourse in Classical Film Theory. Screen, 55(3), 413-420.
  • Rushton, R. (2002). What Can a Face Do?: Deleuze and Faces. Cultural Critique, 51, 19-237
  • Saxton, L. (2020). No Power Without an Image, Icons Between Photography and Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
  • Shortland, M. (1986). The Power of a Thousand Eyes: Johann Caspar Lavater’s Science of Physionomical Perception. Criticism, 28/4, 379-408.
  • Sobchack, V. (2009). Phenomenology. P. Livingston & C. Plantinga (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (pp. 435-445). New York, Routledge.
  • Sobchack, V. (2011). Fleshing Out the Image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy and Derek Jarman’s Blue. H. Carel & G. Tuck (Eds.), New Takes in Film-Philosophy (pp. 191-206). New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Stam, R. (2014). Sinema Teorisine Giriş (Çev. S. Selman & Ç. Asatekin). İstanbul, Ayrıntı Yayınları.
  • Stewart, S. (2007). On Longing, Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durhan: Duke University Press.
  • Szaloky, M. (2006). ‘As You Desire Me’: Reading ‘The Divine Garbo’ through Movement, Silence and the Sublime. Film History, 18/2, 196-208.
  • Tegel, S. (2004). Béla Balázs: Fairytales, Film, and The Blue Light. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 24/3, 497-502.
  • Turvey, M. (2006). Balázs: Realist or Modernist?. October Magazine, 115, 77–87.
  • Woodward, S. (2016). Béla Balázs, Film Aesthetics and the Rituals of Romance. M. Pomerance & R. B. Palmer (Eds), Thinking in the Dark, Cinema, Theory, Practice (pp. 31-41). London: Rutgers University Press.
  • Zsuffa, J. (1987). Béla Balázs, The Man and the Artist. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Understanding Cinema through Béla Balázs: ‘The Close-Up’, ‘Face’, ‘Face of Things’ and ‘Physiognomy’

Year 2022, Volume: 7 Issue: 14, 255 - 278, 28.12.2022
https://doi.org/10.31122/sinefilozofi.1145259

Abstract

Cinema, which came into being as a result of transforming static images into moving images with the movement of a mechanical device, went beyond all previous mediums thanks to the new possibilities it made possible in the context of the creation and transmission of meaning, and became a source for the discovery of the hidden aspects of the complex network of relations established between the individual's thought plane and images. Fascinated by the possible potential of this new apparatus, many intellectuals began to develop their own theoretical approaches to cinematic thought creation within a few years of its invention. In this respect, Hungarian thinker Béla Balázs, who draws attention with his innovative discourses on cinema among classical period film theorists, has a privileged position. Balázs's intellectual literature on the art of cinema has not only differentiated itself from other theoretical studies in his lifetime, but has also guided works written in different fields such as the mechanical existence, phenomenology and philosophy of film after him. The recognition of Béla Balázs in the film literature today is based on his discourses on the human face as a place of cinema and a culture in general. Through the concepts of 'close-up', 'face', 'face of things' and 'physiognomy', Balázs refers to the potential of cinema's technological possibilities to reveal hidden emotions and thoughts beyond the visible. Balázs's emphasis on the physiognomy of the images framed in close-ups and the physiognomy of all the elements reflected to the viewer in the frame as a whole has brought him to a different position from his contemporary theorists. The study focuses on the works of Béla Balázs in book and article format containing his theoretical discourses, and the academic studies of thinkers who evaluate Balázs' intellectual legacy from today's perspective. For this purpose, first of all, Balázs's life and general perspective on the art of cinema is presented. Then, the concepts in question are examined and the relationship between these concepts and the elements of the formal language of cinema as expressed by Balázs is evaluated.

References

  • Aitken, I. (2001). European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
  • Andrew, J. D. (2010). Büyük Sinema Kuramları (Çev. Z. Atam). İstanbul: Doruk Yayıncılık.
  • Balázs, B. (1952). Theory of the Film, Character and Growth of an New Art. London: Dennis Dobson LTD.
  • Balázs, B. (2006a). Compulsive Cameramen, October, 115, 51–52.
  • Balázs, B. (2006b). Radio Drama. October 116, 47-48.
  • Balázs, B. (2010). Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory. Visible Man and The Spirit of Film (Trans. R. Livingstone) (Ed. E. Carter). New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
  • Balázs, B. (2013). Görünen İnsan Ya da Sinema Kültürü (Çev. O. Kasap). İstanbul: Say.
  • Bauer, M. (2016). Béla Balázs: A Gestalt Theory of Film. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 36/2, 133-155, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01439685.2016.1167462.
  • Benjamin, W. (2007). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. H.Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (pp. 217-253). Newyork: Schocken Books.
  • Bergson, H. (2001). Time and Free Will, An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Trans. F. L. Pogson). New York: Dover Publications, Inc.
  • Biro, Y. (2011). Sinemada Zaman / Ritmik Tasarım; Türbülans ve Akış (Çev. A. C. Altunkanat). İstanbul: Doruk.
  • Brannigan, E. (2011). Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image. New York: Oxford University.
  • Brighter, G. (2018). Warped Space Time: Exploiting Schematic Assumptions in Ritual in Transfigured Time. Film Matters, 9(1), 7-17.
  • Cameron, A. (2020). Face, Frame, Fragment: Refiguring Space in Found-Footage Cinema (Sæther, S. O and S. T. Bull Eds.). In Screen Space Reconfigured, (pp. 127-152) Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
  • Carroll, N. (2014). Béla Balázs: The Face of Cinema, October, 148, 53-62, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24586619
  • Carter, E. (2007). Béla Balázs, Visible Man, or the Culture of Film (1924), Introduction. Screen, 48(1), 91-108.
  • Coates, P (2012). Screening the Face. New York: Palgrave MacMillan
  • Congdon, L. (1973). The Making of a Hungarian Revolutionary: The Unpublished Diary of Béla Balázs. Journal of Contemporary History, 8/3, 57-74, https://www.jstor.org/stable/260280
  • Csicsery-Ronay, I. (2014). The Eye of Gort. Science Fiction Studies, 41(2), 301-313.
  • Dini, R. (2017). An Analysis of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Macat.
  • Doane, M. A. (2003). The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 14/5, 89-111.
  • Doane, M. A. (2014). Facing a Universal Language. New German Critique, 122, 111-124, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43909565
  • Fowler, C. (2013). The Clock: Gesture and Cinematic Replaying. Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Medi, 54/2, 226-242, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13110/framework.54.2.0226
  • Frey, M. (2010). Cultural Problems of Classical Film Theory: Béla Balázs, ‘Universal Language’ and The Birth of National Cinema. Screen, 51/4, 324-339, doi:10.1093/screen/hjq028.
  • Friedberg, A. (1998). Reading Close Up, 1927-1933. J. Donald, A. Friedberg, L. Marcus (Eds.), Close Up 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism, (p. 1-26). New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
  • Füzi, I. (2012). The Face of the Landscape in Bela Balazs’s Film Theory. Film and Media Studies, 5, 73-86.
  • Geil, A. (2018). Between Gesture and Physiognomy: ‘Universal Language’ and the Metaphysics of Film Form in Béla Balázs’s Visible Man. Screen, 59(4), 512-522.
  • Grønstad, A. (2012). Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin and the Aesthetics of Ethical Intimacy. Film Criticism 37(2), 22-37.
  • Hake, S. (2013). Weimar Film Theory. P. E. Gordon & J. P. McCormick (Eds.), Weimar Thought, A Contested Legacy (pp. 273-291). New Jersey: Princeton
  • Hansen, M. (1991). Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  • Kamenskaya, E. & Kukharev, G. (2008). Recognition of Psychological Characteristics from Face. Metody Iformatyki Stoowanej, 13, 59-73.
  • Koch, G. & Miriam, H. (1987). The Physiognomy of Things. New German Critique, 40, 167-177.
  • Loewy, H. (2006). Space, Time and “Rites de Passage”: Béla Balázs Paths to Film. October, 115, 61-76.
  • Marcus, L. (1998). Introduction: Cinema and Psychoanalysis. J. Donald, A. Friedberg, L. Marcus (Eds.), Close Up 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism, (pp. 240-246). New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
  • Martin, A. (2017). Different, Even Wholly Irrational Arguments: The Film Philosophy of Béla Balázs. B. Herzogenrath (Ed.), Film as Philosophy, (pp. 45-65). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Monaco, J. (2001). Bir Film Nasıl Okunur? (Çev. E. Yılmaz). İstanbul: Oğlak Yayıncılık.
  • Pezzella, M. (2006). Sinemada Estetik (Çev. F. Demir). Ankara: Dost.
  • Rochester, K. (2016). Close-Ups and Fast Cuts: Physiognomy, Choreography, and the Silhouette Films of Lotte Reiniger. H-G. von Arburg (Ed.), Physiognomisches Schreiben. Stilistik, Rhetorik und Poetik einer gestaltdeutenden Kulturtechnik (pp. 243-264). Freiburg: Rombach Verlag.
  • Rodowick, D. N. (2014). The Aesthetic Discourse in Classical Film Theory. Screen, 55(3), 413-420.
  • Rushton, R. (2002). What Can a Face Do?: Deleuze and Faces. Cultural Critique, 51, 19-237
  • Saxton, L. (2020). No Power Without an Image, Icons Between Photography and Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
  • Shortland, M. (1986). The Power of a Thousand Eyes: Johann Caspar Lavater’s Science of Physionomical Perception. Criticism, 28/4, 379-408.
  • Sobchack, V. (2009). Phenomenology. P. Livingston & C. Plantinga (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (pp. 435-445). New York, Routledge.
  • Sobchack, V. (2011). Fleshing Out the Image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy and Derek Jarman’s Blue. H. Carel & G. Tuck (Eds.), New Takes in Film-Philosophy (pp. 191-206). New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Stam, R. (2014). Sinema Teorisine Giriş (Çev. S. Selman & Ç. Asatekin). İstanbul, Ayrıntı Yayınları.
  • Stewart, S. (2007). On Longing, Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durhan: Duke University Press.
  • Szaloky, M. (2006). ‘As You Desire Me’: Reading ‘The Divine Garbo’ through Movement, Silence and the Sublime. Film History, 18/2, 196-208.
  • Tegel, S. (2004). Béla Balázs: Fairytales, Film, and The Blue Light. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 24/3, 497-502.
  • Turvey, M. (2006). Balázs: Realist or Modernist?. October Magazine, 115, 77–87.
  • Woodward, S. (2016). Béla Balázs, Film Aesthetics and the Rituals of Romance. M. Pomerance & R. B. Palmer (Eds), Thinking in the Dark, Cinema, Theory, Practice (pp. 31-41). London: Rutgers University Press.
  • Zsuffa, J. (1987). Béla Balázs, The Man and the Artist. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
There are 51 citations in total.

Details

Primary Language Turkish
Subjects Philosophy
Journal Section Articles
Authors

Alper Erçetingöz 0000-0002-9168-5740

Hüseyin Gençalp 0000-0003-2797-0587

Publication Date December 28, 2022
Published in Issue Year 2022 Volume: 7 Issue: 14

Cite

APA Erçetingöz, A., & Gençalp, H. (2022). Béla Balázs’ın Kavramlarıyla Sinemayı Anlamak: ‘Yakın Çekim’, ‘Yüz’, ‘Şeylerin Yüzü’ ve ‘Fizyonomi’. SineFilozofi, 7(14), 255-278. https://doi.org/10.31122/sinefilozofi.1145259