The Blue Light (film)
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The Blue Light (German: Das Blaue Licht) is a black and white 1932 film written and directed by Leni Riefenstahl and Béla Balázs.
Plot summary
A young woman (played by Leni Riefenstahl) grows up apart from her village, and for her solitude is feared to be a witch; young children call her a witch, and tell her to be gone.
Rather than associate herself with those who would call her a witch, she prefers to retreat from society and stay by herself in the tranquility afforded her by the mountains surrounding her village. She plays in the hills and woodlands, more or less as a free spirit than as a rustic trying to build a home. Personal achievement being more important than social acceptance, she sees how high she can scale the rock faces of the mountains, and so becomes an accomplished rock climber.
On one particular night of the year, as the full moon happened to shine blue light, a crack in a distant mountain admitted the beam and illuminated a magic crystal that glowed sympathetically. The woman sees the mysterious blue glow of the chamber in the mountain, and is attracted to it. After making her way to the cavern, she sees that deep within is a place of indescribable beauty, but nothing is more beautiful than the magic crystal bathed in the light of the moon. She picks it up and removes it as her own, a special treasure unique in the world.
When the townspeople see her with the crystal, they want it for themselves but she won't give it to them, as she believes it was meant for her.
Pretending to be her friend, a man insinuates his way into her confidence, and - ultimately - violates her trust and betrays her, so stealing the crystal.
Borrowed from an Earlier Forerunner
A similarly named legend in Germany (Das Blaue Licht) may have lent some inspiration to Riefenstahl's screenplay. In a period of time when a pan-germanic ethos was sweeping the country, audiences were highly likely to have been familiar with the old legend, and accordingly expected the film to follow it closely. However, the film shares very little with the legend, and even departs from it in an unexpected way, casting Leni Riefenstahl as the beautiful loner, not at all a witch, but wrongly accused of being one.
The original legend, compiled by the Brothers Grimm in 1810, and later popularized by the pre-Hitler nationalists of the 1920s, tells the story of a crippled soldier who is terminated from the service of his king, and when he travels into the woods to seek a cure, he comes upon a witch's house. It is there that he asks her if she is willing to help him. She agrees to cure him if he first does three things for her. (The third task being nothing less than to descend into a very deep and dry well, and bring back a magic lamp from its depths.) In that legend, however, the soldier finds a dwarflike creature at the bottom of the well. Apart from the strange lamp he comes upon, and which glows in a mysteriously blue light (and which ultimately leads to the witch's ruin), there is very little else to connect Riefenstahl's concept to the German myth that came before her.
External links
| Films by Leni Riefenstahl |
| Das Blaue Licht (1932) | Der Sieg des Glaubens (1933) | Triumph of the Will (1934) | Tag der Freiheit (1935) | Olympia (1938) | Tiefland (1954) | Underwater Impressions (2002) |
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