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The nineteenth-century writers who discovered behind stories the power of swirling dust, oppressive mugginess, streams of commodities, or forms of intensity in madness also invented montage as a measure of that which is measureless or as the disciplining of chaos.
The last decade has seen something of a rediscovery of “classical film theory” in the realistic vein, a rediscovery that at its best simultaneously “historicizes such work and its reception” and through that approach insists upon its “contemporaneity” (Gemünden & Von Moltke, 2012, p. 5). The renewed interest in figures such as Siegfried Kracauer, André Bazin, and Béla Balázs has been one powerful response to the limited nature of cognitive models as an answer to the declared death of theory.1 The sentiment behind this engagement might be encapsulated this way: “Across the board there are recursions into [classical] theories being staged; such remembering can be a very productive fashion … [because] there are things that must be said again … that must be repeated, in order to discover problems again: not the past ones, but the new ones.” It was Balázs who occasioned this remark; however, it comes not from a current piece, but from Hartmut Bitomsky's introduction to the re-issuing of Balázs' 1930 Der Geist des Films—the spirit of