This article is devoted to the work of a Hungarian film theorist Béla Balázs, who in his books of the first third of the 20th century entitled “Visible Man” and “The Spirit of Film” created an innovative concept of “physiognomy” of the cinema as a universal language of bodily expressiveness. As a theorist of left-wing views, he, likewise Lukács and Benjamin, criticized capitalist alienation, which man from reality. Cinematography as a new medium of communication and experience has, according to Balázs, an opportunity to restore the incarnation of man, the unity of his spirit and body, through “physiognomy” - a kind of romantic phenomenology based on the experience of aesthetic expressiveness achieved by the cinema. The cinema is able not only to retrieve the “visible” man after centuries of the “readable” man of culture, but also to revitalize the corporeality of all things on the screen, to turn the filmic experience into an ontological experience. Balázs was one of the pioneers of studying cinematography as a means of transforming collective perception and thinking.