Nielsen’s function is quite different. Richard Dyer long ago identified as a key feature of stardom its ambivalent fusion in a single personality of the ordinary and the extraordinary. Stars, according to Dyer, project an image that is both ‘special’ and ‘spectacular’, but are also known, through their screen roles as well as celebrity chatter, as emblems of the familiar everyday. Balázs’s Visible Man epilogue does not, however, reproduce the conjunction between the ordinary and the extraordinary that Dyer identifies within individual stars. Instead it divides those qualities along gender lines, operating with a distinction that places Chaplin on the side of ‘ordinary life … ordinary things’, and Nielsen in the elevated realm of what Dyer calls the extraordinary but which might also be termed the modern sublime. Balázs’s ecstatic prose certainly recalls Romantic adorations of the sublime when he declaims: Just as we are tempted to despair that film can ever be capable of becoming a genuine form of art on its own, an art worthy of being represented by a tenth Muse on Mount Olympus; just as we are on the verge of accepting that film can never be more than a lame version of theatre … Asta Nielsen … restor[es] our faith and our conviction. … lower the flags in her honour, she is incomparable and without peer. (pp. 87–88) The rhapsodic tone persists as Balázs on to specify three features of Nielsen that locate her as the embodiment of an Olympian tenth muse. Visible Man, as is well known, presents silent cinema as the site of articulation of a new language of the body. Silent film in general, Balázs asserts, has rescued popular representation from the rationalist abstraction of a modern ‘dematerialized, abstract and over-intellectualized’ print culture, while screen performance in particular creates a ‘language of gestures’ that effects a bodily recovery from the alienation of the printed word (p. 11).
(1921), and Ricciotto Canudo’s The Birth of the Sixth Art (1911) an experimental prose style that owes more to contemporary modernisms than to the realist epistemology of, say, linguistic or semiotic modes of film interpretation and critique. Though Balázs cites comparative linguistics as a possible model for a ‘gesturology’ of screen performance (p. 97), his own writing only begins to emulate that discipline’s realist idiom in the formal grammar that he attempts in his 1930 Spirit of Film. Visible Man, by contrast, is notable for, among other features, its stylistic borrowings from Expressionism, including second-person address (the ‘May we come in?’ of the prologue) and a mood or voice that is typically declarative, exclamatory, interrogative or even imperative, as in the ‘I have to tell you … you must’ of his opening demand to aestheticians that film be accorded ‘a chapter … in the great aesthetic systems’ (p. 3). In his influential theorization of the relation between film criticism or theory and the screen image, Christian Metz notes ‘the broadly projective character of the relation the cinema writer often maintains to his [sic] object’. Recognizing the generative function of film criticism – its productive capacity in relation to cinematic meaning and affect – Metz famously dubs film writing ‘the cinema’s third machine’: an engine of textual production, then, that is fuelled by the desire of the critic to maintain a ‘good object relation’ with the medium of film. In Metz’s Lacanian account, the cinema figures as a ‘technique of the imaginary … the definitive imprint of a stage before the Oedipus complex [and of] the exclusive relation to the mother’. What he calls cinematic writing is based in an initial move on ‘idealisation’: the critic falls in love with the film, and produces writing that, in its crudest form, subsists in discourse only as fantasy, ‘an uninterpreted dream’. The move into film theory proper, however, demands an Oedipal separation from this maternal imaginary; thus the film writer must follow the Law of the Father by ‘break[ing] the beneficial image’,