Bela Balazs is considered a classic in film aesthetic theory, alongside Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Arnheim, and Kracauer. His earliest film book, "The Visible Man" from 1924, is the first truly consequential film theory that distills the essence of three decades of artistic development of the new medium: it aspires to be a philosophy of art aimed at legitimizing the art of the people, it presents a film dramaturgy that systematically addresses the aesthetic problems of film, it is methodologically an empirical work resulting from a year and a half of intensive film criticism in Vienna, and stylistically, it reflects the film theory of a poet who consistently finds striking imagery and whose enthusiasm for cinema still resonates with readers today. Bela Balazs, born in 1884 in Hungary, was a...