Béla Balázs
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Béla Balázs (4 August 1884, Szeged – 17 May 1949, Budapest), born Herbert Bauer, was a Hungarian-Jewish film critic, aesthete, writer and poet.
He studied Hungarian and German at the university. His first book on film, Der Sichtbare Mensch (The Visible Man) (1924), helped found German "film as a language" theory, which also exerted an influence on Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin.
Later, he wrote and helped Leni Riefenstahl direct her first film, Das Blaue Licht (1932). One of his best known films is Somewhere in Europe (1947; It happened in Europe, 1949 USA version). Two of his fairy plays, The Wooden Prince and Bluebeard's Castle were put to music by his friend, composer Béla Bartók. György Lukács also was among his friends.
In 1949 he received the most distinguished prize in Hungary, the Kossuth Prize. Also in 1949, he finished Theory of the Film published posthumously in English (London: Denis Dobson, 1952). In 1958, the Béla Balázs Prize was founded and named for him as an award to recognize achievements in cinematography.
