Between gesture and physiognomy: ‘universal language’ and the metaphysics of film form in Béla Balázs’s Visible Man

This article takes up the question of cinematic multilingualism by tracing a fantasy of its negation in early film theory. The widespread trope of film as a ‘universal language’ in the 1920s can be understood as a reaction to the threat of linguistic difference (‘the curse of Babel’), and perhaps no film theorist took this trope further than Béla Balázs. In Visible Man (1924), Balázs pushes the idea to its paradoxical limit with a theory of film as not just the antidote to linguistic divisions but the antinomy of verbal language qua language. This theory depends upon an underlying metaphysics of the filmic image in which, Balázs writes, ‘the body becomes unmediated spirit, spirit rendered visible, wordless’. ‘Physiognomy’ is the name Balázs gives to this metaphysics. It is conceptualized in Visible Man through an ontology of film as the immediate expression of essence in sensible form, one which depends in turn upon a never fully successful attempt to severe cinematic gesture from verbal language and subsume it within Balázs’s transcendental notion of ‘physiognomy’. Giorgio Agamben’s writings on gesture in film suggest a path to ‘overcoming’ Balázs’s metaphysical picture. Because gesture bears the irreducible traces of historicity and difference its presence at the heart of Balázs’s theory ultimately undoes the fantasy of a universal (mono)language along with the metaphysics of ‘physiognomy’ that would sustain it.