The Visible Century: Belá Balázs’s Visible Man at 100

Published a century ago, Belá Balázs’s Visible Man, or The Culture of Film (Der sichtbare Mensch, oder die Kultur des Films, 1924) is a landmark text not just for early film theory, but for twentieth-century media theory and aesthetic thought, whose reflections on the body, gesture, close-ups, faces, spectatorship, and more influenced generations of subsequent writers working in Europe and beyond. Our workshop “The Visible Century” will convene an international roster of scholars to assess the legacy and ongoing significance of this groundbreaking work.