Béla Balázs – spisovateľ, filmový estét, scenárista

Béla Balázs (born Herbert Bauer) (Szeged, 1884 – Budapest, 1949) is one of the first theoreticians of cinematic art. He is a typical multicultural personality because of his Hungarian-German-Jewish origin – a Hungarian Jew after his father and German after his mother. He worked in Austria between 1919 and 1925, after that in Germany in 1925-1932 and then in the Soviet Union until the end of the war. He was not only a theoretician who had quickly understood the artistic possibilities of the film but he was also a screenwriter. His cooperation with the director Erwin Piscator and mainly Georg Wilhelm Pabst must be especially accentuated. He met Leni Riefenstahl in Berlin and worked as a screenwriter of her films. The result of this collaboration is their film Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light). However, the copingstone of his work is the screenplay of the film Valahol Európában (1947) (Somewhere in Europe), directed by Géza Radványi, which specialists consider a neorealist movie. He is also the author of the libretto for Béla Bartók's opera, A kékszakállú herceg vára (Duke Bluebeard's Castle). Besides he was a poet and writer of prose in Hungarian language, mainly his autobiographic novel Álmodó ifjúság (The Dreaming Youth) is a good lecture and part of its storyline takes place on the territory of present-day Slovakia, more exactly in the town of Levoča.