Name Bela Balazs Books Theory of the film Libretti Bluebeard's Castle | Role Film critic Parents Eugenia Lewy, Simon Bauer | |
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Died May 17, 1949, Jozsefvaros, Budapest, Hungary Movies The Blue Light, Somewhere in Europe, The Threepenny Opera, Grand Hotel, Sodom und Gomorrha Similar People Bela Bartok, Mihaly Babits, Endre Ady, Attila Jozsef, Geza von Radvanyi | ||
Bela Balazs ([ˈbeːlɒ ˈbɒlaːʒ]; 4 August 1884, Szeged – 17 May 1949, Budapest), born Herbert Bauer, was a Hungarian-Jewish film critic, aesthete, writer and poet.
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Career
Balazs was the son of German-born parents, adopting his nom de plume in newspaper articles written before his 1902 move to Budapest, where he studied Hungarian and German at the Eotvos Collegium.
Balazs was a moving force in the Sonntagskreis or Sunday Circle, the intellectual discussion group which he founded in the autumn of 1915 together with Lajos Fulep, Arnold Hauser, Gyorgy Lukacs and Karoly (Karl) Mannheim. Meetings were held at his flat on Sunday afternoons; already in December 1915 Balazs wrote in his diary of the success of the group.
He is perhaps best remembered as the librettist of Bluebeard's Castle which he originally wrote for his roommate Zoltan Kodaly, who in turn introduced him to the eventual composer of the opera, Bela Bartok. This collaboration continued with the scenario for the ballet The Wooden Prince.
The collapse of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic under Bela Kun in 1919 began a long period of exile in Vienna and Germany and, from 1933 until 1945, the Soviet Union. Gyorgy Lukacs, a close friend during their youth, became a bitter enemy during the ordeal of the Stalinist purges.
In Vienna he became a prolific writer of film reviews. His first book on film, Der Sichtbare Mensch (The Visible Man) (1924), helped found the German "film as a language" theory, which also exerted an influence on Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin. A popular consultant, he wrote the screenplay for G. W. Pabst's film of Die Dreigroschenoper (1931), which became the object of a scandal and lawsuit by Brecht (who admitted to not reading the script) during production.
Later, he co-wrote (with Carl Mayer) and helped Leni Riefenstahl direct the film Das Blaue Licht (1932). Riefenstahl later removed Balasz's and Mayer's names from the credits because they were Jewish. One of his best known films is Somewhere in Europe (It Happened in Europe, 1947), directed by Geza von Radvanyi.
His last years were marked by petty vexations at home and ever increasing recognition in the German-speaking world. 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 Bela Balazs Prize was founded and named for him as an award to recognize achievements in cinematography.