Béla Balázs

Béla Balázs (born Herbert Bauer) was a Hungarian film critic, aesthetician, writer, and poet of Jewish heritage, renowned as a pioneer of motion picture criticism and a proponent of formalist film theory. He authored influential works on film technique and provided the libretto for Béla Bartók's opera 'Duke Bluebeard's Castle'. Balázs lectured at the Moscow Film Academy and later taught at the Budapest Academy of Dramatic Art after returning to Hungary post-World War II.