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Writ large across the textual surface of Western film theory is a hitherto unacknowledged conceptual history that is as rich as it is chequered. Walter S. Bloem's Seele des Lichtspiels (The Soul of the Moving Picture) of 1922 and Henri Agel's Le Cinéma a-t-il une âme? (Does Cinema Have a Soul?) of 1952 constitute the two most extended and explicit theorizations of the soul within film scholarship.¹ Each book offers a response to the intriguing question of what it might mean for cinema to have a soul, and each is inflected by its particular author's political and religious convictions in the differing contexts of the Weimar Republic and France respectively. Bloem's conservative and nationalist vision and Agel's Catholicism give rise to divergent connotations of the soul of cinema, which would seemingly render the term either politically untouchable or too spiritually imbued to conceptualize film hereafter, within a field that has come to define itself since the late 1960s as principally left-wing and secular, with materialism overriding idealism in large measure. Bloem and Agel do not have the last or the only word here, though, and it is the complexity of Western film theory's recourse to 'soul", beyond such specific political and religious alignments, that forms the subject of this book.²

DOI: 10.1057/9781137328588_1

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