The Blue Light (German: Das blaue Licht) is a black-and-white 1932 film directed by Leni Riefenstahl and written by Béla Balázs with uncredited scripting by Carl Mayer.
Junta lives largely in solitude (except for the company of Guzzi, a young shepherd boy) in the tranquility of the mountains surrounding the village.
This place of indescribable beauty, radiating the film's titular "blaue Licht" (blue light), is a sacred space for Junta.
The crystals' luminous glow casts a spell on the village's young men, who, one by one, in a state of hypnotic attraction, attempt and fail to reach its source, falling to their deaths.
Later, after saving her from the villagers after another young man's death, Vigo follows Junta to the cabin she shares with Guzzi, and decides to stay.
The film then closes, returning to the opening, modern-day scene, with a shot of what is presumably the last page of the book, in which Junta is exonerated and her memory celebrated.
According to Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema, 1896 to the Present [2] Riefenstahl was questioned on her techniques such as combining different filters to create the famous blue light within the film.
Riefenstahl edited the film from 86 to 73 minutes, removing the arrival scene of modern urbanites in Santa Maria.
[7] 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.
Apart from the strange lamp he comes upon, 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.
Gustav Renker's novel Bergkristall (1930) has many similarities to the plot of Das blaue Licht and may have been used by Balázs and Riefenstahl without attribution.