Robert Aickman’s Favourite Film: The Blue Light

In 1966 Robert Aickman devoted most of Chapter Twenty-Four of The Attempted Rescue to a lengthy description of his favourite film, Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light (1932). He wrote: 

 

I saw it again and again, as an allegory so near to my heart

   In The Blue Light the heroine, Junta (Riefenstahl), lives apart from her fellow villagers, and is popularly considered to be a witch. She is shown roaming over the mountains and through the woods as a free spirit. At the time of the full moon, light enters a grotto on the mountainside, illuminating the crystals inside which give off a beautiful blue light. This place is sacred to Junta. However, the blue light can also be seen from a distance by the young men of the village. The light appears to bewitch them and when they attempt to reach it they fall to their deaths.

   The hero, Vigo, a painter from the city, visits the village and falls in love with Junta, despite (or because of?) her persecution at the hands of the locals. He later saves her from the villagers after another young man dies, and follows her to the cabin where she lives. At the next full moon he sees her climbing to the grotto and follows her, finding her inside in a state of ecstasy, bathed in the mystical blue light.

 

Junta in the grotto on the mountainside

   Vigo realises the value of the crystals, and now he knows how to reach the grotto. He hopes to help both Junta and the villagers by revealing his knowledge. The villagers remove the crystals and sell them, but Junta is devastated by the desecration of her sacred place, and by her misplaced trust in the hapless hero. Her body is discovered by Vigo after she falls to her death. 

   For Aickman the allegory is clear—there is truth, beauty, mystery and love in this world, but it is destroyed by the greed and ignorance of modern man.

When The Blue Light was re-released on DVD in 2010, it was reviewed in Video Watchdog (#159) by Aickman’s old friend, Ramsey Campbell, who pointed out that there had been several different edits of the film over the years (including a silent version with inappropriate music and many cuts, as well as one prepared by Riefenstahl herself in which the uncanny elements are downplayed). Campbell also pointed out another apparent variant—the one that Aickman relates in The Attempted Rescue.

 

[Aickman] has Vigo learning of the blue light when he watches all the men of the village attempt to scale the mountain with ladders, and Vigo later climbs the mountain in their company but reaches the summit alone. In Aickman’s version it’s Vigo who finds the cave despoiled because ‘the villagers have called in experts’, and the film ends with him roaming the mountains and vainly calling Junta’s name. I don’t think any amount of re-editing could change the film so radically, and must conclude that this vision was to some extent Aickman’s own.

 

   It is very odd that Robert Aickman should get the plot of his favourite film so wrong—a film that he had seen ‘again and again’, and often cited as an example of great film-making. Although he did not have the modern luxury of being able to view the film at home whenever he wanted to, being such an admirer, and living in London, he would have had many opportunities to see it over the years. 

   For Aickman to call the villagers who mine the crystals ‘experts’ is characteristic Aickmanesque propaganda—he distrusted experts, and although this might be viewed as an affectation or an excuse for his own shortcomings, it was nevertheless sincere (and it may have resulted in his early death). 

   However, to have made errors in describing the plot is more difficult to explain. Aickman re-tells the story from the idealised viewpoint of the hero, Vigo, and it is his part in the story that is altered and embellished. It seems possible that Aickman was so enamoured of the film, and thought about it so often, that he imagined alternative scenarios, and that these became more real to him than the film he had seen. We know that he was a great admirer of Riefenstahl, and even went so far as to write to her. An old friend has said he was ‘potty’ about her. When he wrote about Riefenstahl in The Attempted Rescue he portrayed her as a beautiful victim and refused to accept that she was anything other than innocent in her associations with Hitler and the Nazis. It is not too fanciful to believe that in Aickman’s imagination he merged Riefenstahl and her character, Junta, who is likewise persecuted. He may even have imagined himself as Vigo, the doomed lover of the beautiful heroine who must be revealed as innocent of the crimes of which she is accused.

 

Vigo and Junta

It is telling that when Aickman and Elizabeth Jane Howard were putting together the stories that would be published as We Are for the Dark, Aickman considered using a pen name—Robert Vigo:

Corrected title page of typescript of We Are For the Dark

 

You can order Robert Aickman: An Attempted Biography now. It will be published February 3rd, 2022.

Robert Aickman: An Attempted Biography, by R.B. Russell, Tartarus Press, 2022

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Heather Smith, and Artellus, Ltd.

All photos, unless otherwise stated, are copyright Estate of Robert Aickman/British Library/R.B. Russell, and are not to be reproduced without permission and acknowledgement.