newnotes

Hampstead Authors' Society No. 79 Issue 12 May 2010

The Spirit of Film
The Road to Casablanca via Béla Balázs
Exhibition launch and Casablanca screening

Projecting flickering images onto a white screen…

On June 8 2010, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and the Everyman Cinema, Hampstead, open a dual-site exhibition with insights into the Central European origins of early twentieth-century film. The opening is accompanied by a BAFTA screening of Casablanca (1942). Michael Curtiz, the film’s director, is perhaps the best known among the host of legendary figures from screen history whose careers began not in Hollywood, but in World War I Hungary.

In a 1925 interview, Curtiz once recalled how the proprietor of Budapest’s Café Venice, a certain Herr Ungerleider, sought regularly to divert a war-weary clientele by drawing down the blinds and “projecting flickering images onto a white screen.” When Ungerleider later extended to Curtiz “a kind invitation to play a role in the first ever cinematic work on Hungarian soil,” he paved the way to a career that would yield some of the most celebrated titles of Hollywood’s classical era: Casablanca of course, but also Passage to Marseille (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), and the Cary Grant-Jane Wyman vehicle Night and Day (1946).
Less well known are the revolutionary origins of Curtiz’s oeuvre. In the heady days of the short-lived 1919 Budapest revolution, Curtiz (or Kertész, as he was then known) had worked alongside Alexander Korda and Ladislaus Vajda (screenwriter on Curtiz’s 1922 Sodom and Gomorrah) making films for the revolutionary People’s Commissariat for Education. All three in turn collaborated during the Budapest Commune with the figure to whom these two exhibitions are dedicated, the screenwriter, author, opera librettist, film maker and critic, journalist and theorist Béla Balázs.

Born Herbert Bauer to German-Jewish parents in Szeged, Hungary, in 1884, Balázs began his career as a poet in turn-of-the century Budapest. His close associates included the composers Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. He is known to music lovers as the author of the libretto for Bartók’s only opera, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. In literary history, Balázs features as a key figure in the early twentieth-century renaissance of a Hungarian folk vernacular, and as a prolific writer of modern fairy tales in the two languages in which he wrote interchangeably, Hungarian and German.

But the polymath Balázs also features prominently in histories of early twentieth-century film. After the failure of the 1919 Hungarian uprisings, Balázs fled with his wife Anna Hamvassy first to Vienna, later Berlin, and in 1932 to the Soviet Union. His friends and associates in Viennese exile included the Marxist philosopher György Lukács, as well as Korda, for whom he wrote two (never-to-be-filmed) screenplays.

In 1922, he began writing film reviews for the Vienna daily Der Tag; and after his later move to Berlin, the reviews became the raw material for two path-breaking works on the new art of film, Visible Man (1924) and The Spirit of Film (1930).
Timed to coincide with the launch of the first English-language translations of these two early works, the exhibitions at BAFTA and the Everyman explore Balázs’s perspectives on film art, including his insights into the close-up, montage, colour and early sound; his views on film as the modern equivalent of the folk and fairy tale; and his writing on the role of the moving image in transforming human perceptions of the world.
The shows are curated by Zsuzsanna Ardó, a writer and photographer with a long-standing interest in Balázs. In June 2010 her years of research on Balázs come to fruition when BAFTA opens its doors to invited guests for a private view of The Spirit of Film.
Simulating the crossover between celluloid and book that was also central to Balázs’s career – he worked simultaneously as screenwriter, film critic, theorist and cultural activist – the exhibition juxtaposes text excerpts from Balázs’s writings with stills from major film titles of the silent era and the early years of sound, including Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919), Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Joe May’s Asphalt (1929).
Funded by the University of Warwick, the film journal Screen, and Berghahn Books, the private view on June 8th will also mark the new translation by Rodney Livingstone of Balázs’s early works, and culminates in a screening of Casablanca, introduced by the Balázs editor and Warwick-based film historian Erica Carter.
The exhibition will be on view at BAFTA, and at the Everyman Cinemas in Hampstead, Belsize Park and Everyman Baker Street. Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory edited by Erica Carter, translated by Rodney Livingstone (Berghahn Books 2010).

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