“With time, the invention of printing has rendered the human face unreadable. […] By that, the visible being [Geist] has turned into a readable being, and the visualculture has turned into a conceptual one. […] Nowadays, another machine is at work, which is turning culture back to the visual and is giving humans a new face. It is called the cinematograph” (Balázs, p. 16)

With these optimistic words, the early film theorist Béla Balázs summarised the advent of (silent) film. The year was 1924, a tumultuous time between the two World Wars, one that witnessed a vast amount of changes — the rise of the modern metropolises with their busy streets and vitrines, a plethora of political movements giving a face to urban mass culture, the deaths and abdigations of the last European emperors, and a new popular medium — film. And Berlin, where Balázs was writing these lines, was in the midst of it all. The new experience of seeing moving faces and bodies on the big screen, so much more intense than the memories convened in the family photo album, promised a fundamental change in the cultural landscape — the birth of visual culture. [Read more…]