THE BLUE LIGHT Movie Review

Das Blaue Licht

Mount Cristallo emanates a mysterious light that mesmerizes climbers from the nearby village, who ultimately fall to their deaths trying to reach it. But Junta, a beautiful girl who is pure at heart, innocent, and virtuous (Leni Riefenstahl), conquers the precipice—only to be persecuted by other villagers who assume that her survival must mean that she's a witch. Her ultimate destruction comes as a result of the greed of her would-be lover (an artist), who, when he discovers that the mysterious blue light is emanating from precious crystals, has them removed, causing Junta to lose her footing in the darkness when she climbs Cristallo again. Leni Riefenstahl's first directorial effort is a cannily designed, thoroughly demented extension of the peculiar German genre of “mountain films” that had been popularized by directors Arnold Fanck and Luis Trenker, but which in Riefenstahl's hands takes on unmistakably ominous overtones of a struggle between “natural German purity” and “cosmopolitan” moneygrubbing. With her enormous talent as a director already evident, and her themes of imperiled purity firmly in place, Riefenstahl was soon enthusiastically working directly for Hitler (a fan of The Blue Light and of Riefenstahl herself), filming the meticulously choreographed 1934 Nazi Party Rally with an army of photographers at her command, later editing the miles of footage into her numbing, supremely insidious Nazi recruiting poster Triumph of the Will.

NEXT STOP … Triumph of the Will, Olympia, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl

1932 77m/B GE Leni Riefenstahl, Matthias Wieman, Max Holsboer; D: Leni Riefenstahl; W: Bela Belazs, Leni Riefenstahl; C: Hans Schneeberger; M: Giuseppe Becce. VHS VYY, MRV, FCT