While on a walking tour in the Italian Dolomites, Leni Riefenstahl-then famous only as an actress associated with the mountain films of Arnold Fanck-came upon an old folk legend about a marvelous blue light that emanates from the peak of Monte Cristallo when the moon is full, and which lures all the young villagers to it. Attracted by the legend, Riefenstahl formed a small company and shot The Blue Light in the Saarn Valley. She plays a wild gypsy-like girl, Junta, who is the only villager able to defy the death-entrancing qualities of the light (the others walk to it like somnambulists and fall to their death on the rocks), and who is thus considered a witch. The merits of The Blue Light are its exquisite photography and tremendously intoxicating atmosphere; though (made with the participation of) the famous Marxist critic Béla Balázs, it benefits from such fascist-associated but emotionally powerful themes as reliance on intuition, nature idolatry, cultivation of myth, and glorification of physical youth. Through the power of images and the insistence of legend, Riefenstahl as Junta becomes, in Siegfried Kracauer's words, "a true incarnation of elemental powers." (Treasures from the Eastman House, PFA '72)