| Béla Balázs (August 4, 1884,
Szeged – May 17, 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 writings on film, Der Sichtbare Mensch (The Visible Man)
(1924), helped found German "film as a language" theory, which exerted an influence
on Eisenstein and Pudovkin as well.
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 (or 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, Béla Bartók. György Lukács also was among his
friends.
In 1949 he received the most distinguished prize in Hungary, the Kossuth Prize, and after him the
Béla Balázs Prize
was founded in 1958 to award achievements regarding the cinematic
arts.
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