At first sight things look simple: at the beginning, cinema represented the world as we see it in ways until then unparalleled; it was not hindered by the language barriers of many other sign systems; everybody could access and above all enjoy and understand it; there were no obstacles to its worldwide spread and success; in short cinema was the perfect candidate to become the “Visual Esperanto” many were dreaming of, the ideal semiotic remediation of reality via a form of representation that Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in their influential 1999 Remediation. Understanding New Media would have called totally and immediately transparent. An Esperanto, but one that there was no need to learn beforehand and that could effortlessly be read and understood by any group or individual. We may be somewhat more skeptical about this dream today, but in the first decades of the twentieth century it undoubtedly shaped the way the new medium was defined as well as experienced.

Ori Levin’s well informed and inspiringly written study of film as Visual Esperanto unpacks the history of this myth (hence the Biblical reference to Babel), from its first and rapid mentions till it’s no less rapid dislocation during the 1930s (the book does not address the different reappearances of the myth in our age of “world cinema”). But it does so in a very nuanced manner, explaining how and why the dream of cinema as a universal language did not only rely on the fact that we all immediately understand what we see on screen, but also on a wide range of other aspects and dimensions whose importance has not always been fully acknowledged. The three central chapters of the book give an appealing overview of these elements, whose contribution to the birth as well as the success of the modern myth was at least as important as the fact that there was now a medium that seemed to show things as they are. For in practice, the myth itself was far from being innocent. How to explain, for instance, the use of a linguistic metaphor (why call cinema a “language”? And what does it mean to call it “universal” if it is less represented, if not totally absent, from non-Western cinemas (given also that non-Western cinema had hardly more than a small and purely local existence in these decades)? How to understand also the great enthusiasm raised by the idea of cinema as a global language: was it a marketing idea to sell worldwide, a tool of democratizing culture, or the first step toward a new, more equal society? And what to think of the fast collapse of the Visual Esperanto ideal after the end of the silent era, since most production companies had rapidly elaborated various strategies to tackle the language issue, a question already present in the pre-sound era, for instance via the use of expository and dialogue titles?

Celluloid Babel offers clear and convincing answers to these questions, not shying away from difficult topics, such as the ruthless commercial and sometimes imperialist motivations between the Esperanto ideal, but clearly emphasizing the utopian and democratizing drives behind the new myth. The most important contribution of the book consists of a careful historicization of the idea of cinema as universal language, on the one hand, and a close analysis of the various elements that maintained its triumph over more than two or three decades, on the other hand.

Historically speaking, the dream of a new universal language cannot be separated from an already existing and sometimes ruthless tendency towards globalization during the second half of the 19th Century, characterized by major changes in mobility and material and immaterial transportation (think of railroad and telephone) as well as the rise of a more general craving for standardization (from uniform time systems to universal language like Esperanto or unified banking structures and financial markets). Cinema, from that point of view, was one of the missing links towards a general evolution towards the “one world” idea. Yet it is important to highlight no less, as Levin rightly does, the growing distrust of (verbal) language before and after the first World War, with Dada for instance, and the suspicion that language is no longer capable of faithfully expressing feelings and thoughts. The direct result of this distrust was that more and more people got convinced one had to turn to other forms of communication, for instance sound or images, to achieve that goal. Cinema was then the right medium at the right place and the right time to solve a problem that verbal language was no longer qualified to address in an acceptable manner.

In addition, Levin’s book sheds new light on the fact that the Esperanto effect of cinema cannot be reduced to the narrow features of film as visual copy of the real. The author has extremely interesting analyses on some other elements that helped construct the belief in film as the new and above all really efficient new Esperanto. Celluloid Babel thus insists for instance on the role of gestures as a key dimension of universality: the performing attitudes and techniques of the actors on screen were seen as a visual language that played a crucial role in the universal and correct understanding of what the movie was “saying”, for gestures and body language, which often escaped rational control and had not to be trained or especially encoded, were seen as a truly authentic mirror of human feelings, regardless of ethnicity, education, sex, social position, or religion. The role of the body also comes to the fore when analyzing the use of rhythm and sound, for instance in the city symphonies genre, a typical 1920s movie genre that accompanies the ongoing production of clock time but also aims to provoke specific yet universally shared effects based on the relationships between film features and bodily rhythms and intensities. Equally important here and directly related to the negative perception of verbal language in these years, is the attempt to avoid titles and dialogue panels as well as to develop a new visual language blurring the boundaries between image and word in the written verbal interruptions of the visual flow. Another fascinating element convincingly analyzed by the author is the role of silence, a pivotal factor that increases the spectator’s capacity of identifying with the characters on screen. Silence is decisive in the effectivity of the new universal language which relies on the sameness of the viewers’ emotional involvement. Finally, there is also what Levin calls the movie’s tendency toward “abstraction”, as exemplarily demonstrated by the character of Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, a figure that in its purest forms has to ambition to put between brackets all individual or contextual and cultural-specific features in order to present an almost conceptual hero or antihero (the difference is irrelevant) with whom any spectator can both straightforwardly empathize and easily adapt to any local context whatsoever.

What happens after the generalization of sound cinema is well known: not only the shattered belief in cinema as a new and emancipatory medium (many critics fear the regression of cinema to a kind of filmed theater, painfully regretting the loss of the visual and narrative experiments of the previous decade), but also the rapidly vanishing hope of film as universal Esperanto –a distrustful shift that cannot be fully explained by the mere transitional form supposedly universally understood images to linguistically caged talkies. Granted, film continues to be a universal medium, even after the creation of powerful linguistic barriers (the market share of Hollywood only rises after the spread of sound cinema), but it can only do so, according to the skeptical voices than start to be heard very loudly, by choosing the lowest common denominator and thus abandoning the democratizing hopes of the new medium, as shown by the fact that the sound film rapidly sharpens and eventually institutionalizes the gap between commercial entertainment and art cinema. Finally, the nationalistic and populist ideologies of the 1930s in many Western countries rapidly end up despising as “elitist” the work of those who used to be seen as utterly “popular”, a sad ending of a dream that had been as important to the idea of cinema as the properly visual aspects of the new medium.