The Blue Light (1932) written, directed and featuring Leni Riefenstahl is an allegory about man's encroachment on natural beauty. It's a simple story and somewhat slow moving, but told in an artistic visual style with impressive cinematography and lighting. The final act picks up the pace and is very well done, and features climbing scenes presented in a very effective montage style. The freestyle rock climbing looks quite dangerous to me, and Leni Riefenstahl appears to do all her own climbing just as she apparantly did in Arnold Fanck's "mountain" pictures. This movie doesn't usually get good reviews because up until now it hasn't been generally available in a good quality print, but the recently released DVD has a good image quality German sound version with English subtitles. I was hoping that a blue tint would be used to show the blue light, but that wasn't done.
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