Please excuse any cross-postings of this message. For a German film class I'm teaching, I picked up a copy of Leni Riefenstahl's early film _The Blue Light_ at the local art video store because the copy I had ordered through my university was blocked by our recent Canadian blizzards. I was shocked to discover that the version I rented was _not_, as I had expected, a 70-min. long sound film with English subtitles (the print Facets offers is 77 mins., if I recall correctly), but rather a 40-min. long silent film with English intertitles and the most god-awful unsynchronized and out-of-tune generic silent-movie piano score. The sheer length of a couple of the intertitles (more than screen-filling, they spilled out of view on two sides) made it quite clear that a few long speeches had been unwisely transcribed for them (and poorly translated as well). All in all, it gave the impression that an early distributor had seen an easy way to cheaply convert a foreign film into an English-language one: wipe the soundtrack, cut out anything that wasn't more visually than verbally oriented, and slap in some title cards. This must have been done almost immediately on the film's release, since I can't imagine anyone in 1937, say, seeing a silent film as a big audience draw--except perhaps in the utter boondocks. (The cheesy piano soundtrack, I think, is on the other hand an addition by the present video distributor.) The film ends with a Pathescope logo, so I assume that British Pathe may have been the culprit (the dialogue in some of the titles seems more British than American, though it may be the American of the period). Does anyone out there know anything about the provenance or history of this short silent version of _Blue Light_? Was this repackaging done frequently in the transition period from silent film to sound? Are there better-known or more egregious examples that I'm ignorant of? Curiously yours, Paul M. Malone Visiting Assistant Professor Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3G1 CANADA ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.tcf.ua.edu/ScreenSite