Das blaue Licht

They were a smash hit with German audiences: the ‘Bergfilme’ (‘mountain films’) of the 1920s and ’30s by director Arnold Fanck. With Teutonic intransigence, his protagonists conquered towering Alpine giants while braving snow, ice and storms. The films were shot on location, and made considerable demands on the athletic prowess of their casts.

Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003), then a young dancer, was one of the fans of the romantic genre, which appealed to the German penchant for nature mysticism. She would play the female lead in no fewer than five of Fanck's mountain films, with Die weisse Hölle vom Piz Palü, Stürme über dem Mont Blanc and Der weisse Rausch being the best-known titles.

In 1932, she directed and produced her own mountain film, her feature film debut Das blaue Licht - Eine Berglegende aus den Dolomiten, in which she also played the leading role. More than Arnold Fanck, Riefenstahl paid attention to the psychological undertones of the narrative, in this case about the fate of the beautiful young woman Junta, who is rejected as a witch by her fellow villagers and attracts young men high up in the mountains, in her cave with crystals.

Technological inventiveness

Riefenstahl experimented with infrared film material for the filming of the film shot in the Dolomites in order to achieve fairy-tale-like, unreal effects. Three years later, she caused a sensation with her propaganda film about the 1934 Nazi party rally in Nuremberg (Triumph des Willens, 1935) which was also praised for its technological inventiveness.

With subsequent films about the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin (Olympia 1. Teil - Fest der Völker and Olympia 2. Teil - Fest der Schönheit, 1938), Riefenstahl established her name as a brilliant filmmaker and opportunistic supporter of Nazi ideology, something she would deny until her death.

Hanna Kuijt erased from film history

It has long been known that the names of Jewish crew members were removed from the credits of Das blaue Licht, including co-director Béla Balazs and sound engineer Hans Bittmann. A lesser known name is Hanna Kuijt (1897-1943), who worked as an editor on Das blaue Licht. Although she initially earned praise for her work, she was later removed from the credits. Hanna Kuijt fled to the Netherlands around 1933. She was an experienced sound editor, a sought-after expertise in the Netherlands at the time. She worked on at least four Dutch feature films in quick succession (probably more) - but within a year, growing aversion to foreign workers in the Dutch film industry made her work dry up. She spent her last years in increasing fear and despair. She was murdered in a concentration camp in 1943. Read more