Iván Hevesy and the Revolution of the Second Plan

The Inconnu and the Well-Known

When teaching my course The History of Film Theories, I used to say that we Hungarians have two outstanding early film theoreticians. One whom everybody knows all over the world—Béla Balázs (1884–1949)—and the other whom nobody knows except us Hungarians: Iván Hevesy (1893–1966). Hevesy’s chef-d’œuvre, Aesthetics and Dramaturgy of the Film Play (of which we here present the second part), first appeared in Hungarian in early 1925 in Budapest.¹ To our knowledge no translation of the book has been published until today, and so it can be considered Hungarians’ secret treasure.² Balázs’s main work was, in contrast, written during his years of Austrian exile and in German. Visible Man was published in 1924 in Vienna and Leipzig, and enjoyed international recognition.³ Balázs’s book had appeared a year before Hevesy’s, but the two were written independently of each other.

Whereas Hevesy lived practically all his life in Budapest, Balázs emigrated in December 1919 and returned only in 1945. But did they ever meet, or did they communicate, either through live discussions or an exchange of letters? For four months in 1917 and 1918 Hevesy was the editor of the short-lived literary journal Jelenkor (Present Age). There he published a feuilleton by Balázs, as well as a study about Balázs by the philosopher György (Georg) Lukács. And according to a contemporary witness, Hevesy, László Moholy-Nagy, and Balázs spent a full day together at the socialist May Day parade in 1919.

In 1926 Hevesy wrote a critique of The Adventures of a Ten-Mark Note (Berthold Viertel), a German film written by Balázs. “Those who are familiar with Béla Balázs’s film-theoretical articles and fine book about film, Der sichtbare Mensch [Visible Man] can see this film with double interest,ˮ began Hevesy.⁴ Balázs, already living in Berlin, still had a vivid interest in Hungarian cultural life. It is very likely that he read the article. However, we have no indication that Balázs had ever read Hevesy’s book. Ervin Gyertyán, an acquaintance of Hevesy in his final years, remembers that “the two pioneers did not know anything about each other’s work. (This is not a mere hypothesis, Hevesy himself told me so.)”⁵

An essential comparison of the theories of Hevesy and Balázs is yet to be written. What we can offer here are some remarks and some quotes. The two books that can be compared are Hevesy’s Aesthetics and Dramaturgy of the Film Play (abbreviated as Film Play) and Visible Man by Balázs: both deal with silent cinema in its prime. Balázs’s later works (The Spirit of Film and others) all address sound film.

A recurring point of departure in writing about Balázs and in (Hungarian) writing about Hevesy is that their interest in film theory is the result of their activity as film critics, Balázs at Der Tag, in Vienna, and Hevesy at Nyugat (West), in Budapest. In both cases, this assumption needs a correction. Hevesy, as a twenty-year-old student, had already written a seminar paper, “The Cinema Drama,” which survived as a manuscript and was published only posthumously.⁶ Some of the basic ideas of Film Play are already outlined there, eleven years before his book. As Júlia Lenkei recently discovered, Balázs had published a two-part article in Hungarian titled “A látható ember” (“Visible Man,” using the same title as his book two years later!) in May 1922.⁷ This article already contains the main philosophical framework of his book.⁸ He began writing film criticism for Der Tag months later, in December 1922.

The styles of the two authors could not be more different. Balázs’s text is animated, spirited, often subjective, poetic, a firework of observations and ideas grouped loosely in chapters. There are several references to films (being then screened in Vienna), and the texts...