Intimacy: on divination in Béla Balázs’s Visible Man

Béla Balázs’s Der sichtbare Mensch (Visible Man, 1924) secured its status in the canon of film theory through a focus on the language of gestures and expressions cinema deploys to engage with audiences. For Balázs, cinema mediates an embodied vitality its performers bring to their roles. In this context, film stars are particularly skilled in channeling this vitality, which speaks to the individual audience members and facilitates among them an attachment to the star and the cinematic medium. This article draws on the work of Lauren Berlant to describe how the apprehension of embodied vitality for Balázs maintains divinatory characteristics that produce an intimate relation between the performer and audience. The article’s aim will be to show how the theory of cinematic intimacy emanating from Balázs’s writing is grounded in a deeply personal and always unique audience engagement practice. Cinema culture might like to cultivate such intimacy for its operations, but despite the attempts to commodify intimacy or even deploy it for the purpose of disciplinary ends, the personal quality of intimacy depends on the lived experience of audience members, which means that intimate relations with works of art can never be fully institutionalised.