Miriam Hansen

Bela Balazs: The Physiognomy of Things

Born in 1884 in the Hungarian city of Szeged both parents were teachers, his real name was Herbert Bauer Baltzs was to surface in the most diverse contexts and occupations: as a prose writer; as the librettist for Bdla Bartoks opera, Duke Bluebeards Castle; as a friend of the young Lukatcs; as an activist in the Hungarian Council Republic; as a film critic for Viennese and Berlin newspapers; and finally even as a script writer whose products may not always have met the critical standards of the former. In short, Balatzs, like Kracauer, was a rather typical representative of the European intelligentsia of the first third of this century an allround educated personality without steady income.

Reinventing the Nickelodeon: Notes on Kluge and Early Cinema

Images from Griffiths Intolerance, the French story, the rape of Brown Eyes, tinted blue, projected in cinemascope onto the background of an opera stage, under a ceiling painted with purple sky and palm trees; on the soundtrack, Giacomo Meyerbeers Les Huguenots; all this on a television screen. Uptown music video, nostalgic modernism, or postmodern collage? Kluges recent work for television continues the eclectic juxtaposition of found materials familiar from his films montage clusters combining old footage, still photographs, magic lantern slides, popular illustrations, written titles, second-hand music, and occasional voice-over. While these nondiegetic clusters suspend the flow of the narrative (to which they usually relate in more or less oblique ways), they are often what persist in the viewers memory: the fire in the elephant house in Artists under the Big Top: Perplexed (1967); the suicide montage in Germany in Autumn (1978); images of Babylon, Paradise Lost, the London World Exposition of 1851, and the opera sequences in The Power of Emotion (1983). As in Kluges films, some of the found material assembled in the television miniatures has been manipulated in some way, even prior to its placement in the montage. What has changed, however, is both method and context. In the films, the materiality of old footage might have been emphasized by primitive devices like fast motion, rephotographing images off the editing table, angling the camera, tinting, masking, not to mention the deliberately dilettante trick photography of his science fiction films. Now similar effects are achieved through computer graphics, for instance, by matting (an anachronistic expression) one set of images onto a different and at times varying background, such as the screen of a 1920s picture palace or urban shop windows. Even more surprising than his sudden leap into the electronic age is the context of exhibition for which Kluge is producing this work -a culture show called Zehn vor elf (Ten to Eleven), which is alloted about thirty minutes of air time per week. The format of this show, so far largely under Kluges editorial control, seems to be guided by principles of brevity and variety. Thus, at the beginning of one program, a female announcer promises the viewer that no item will last more than five minutes; in the same spirit, composer Luigi Nono has supplied the series with forty two-minute operas