“How else could we describe her magic, except by showing her films?” The Pioneering Women of Cinema: Asta Nielsen program, screening with live music at Kundura Sinema on Sundays throughout March, is curated by Pamela Hutchinson – here she writes about ‘Die Asta’!

KUNDURA BLOG | FROM THE CURATOR’S PEN

Asta Nielsen on a German postcard.

Asta Nielsen was the greatest actress of the silent film era. She was also hugely famous, one of the very first international film stars. Audiences all over the world adored her as a symbol of glamour, modernity, sophistication, culture and androgyny. But all of this is easy to say. To grasp Asta Nielsen’s groundbreaking film career in all its glory, we need to see the films that turned her into a star, and the films she made because she had become one, among them the most magnificent of all.

Nielsen was born in 1881 in one of Copenhagen’s working-class districts. Although she grew up in real poverty, she always dreamed of going on the stage. She had a child at a very young age but refused to marry the child’s father – she was dreaming of a different life. She found work as an actress, but the Danish stage could not offer her the opportunities she longed for, so when a friend suggested that they make a film together to show the theater world the full extent of her talent, Nielsen seized the chance without a second thought.

The friend in question, the writer and director of The Abyss (1910), the provocative first film that launched Nielsen’s film career when she was 29, was Urban Gad. Gad was the first person Nielsen worked with in cinema, and before long he became her first husband as well. To convey the impact Nielsen made with her very first step into film, we are also showing this emotionally intense drama, in which she performs her notoriously sensual Gaucho dance. Gifted with an untapped talent, Nielsen had no inhibitions whatsoever and could connect instantly with the camera’s gaze. On film she could stir emotions like no one else. It is said that the Danish director Benjamin Christensen, passing through the studio while the film’s heartrending finale was being shot, paused to watch Asta’s performance and declared: “Now cinema has become an art.” Nielsen began her mission to invent modern screen acting with this raw portrayal of a woman caught between duty and desire.

Photograph: DFI Det Danske Filminstitut

The Abyss is paired with another of her first Danish films, the melodrama The Black Dream (1911), which reveals how quickly Nielsen developed a mesmerizing performance style, a distinctive and alluring aesthetic, and a command of melodrama. In it she plays a circus performer courted by two suitors, one young and handsome, the other old, rich and terribly jealous. Asta’s character goes to any lengths to save the man she truly loves.

Photograph: Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung

Nielsen had a mischievous side as well, and to show it we are also screening a few of the cross-dressing comedies she made after moving to Germany, where she shot most of her films – subversive comedies that were nonetheless hugely popular. Zapata’s Gang (1913/14) finds her playing an actress, this time on a location shoot in Italy. When a band of brigands steals the cast’s costumes, Asta is forced to improvise, and she makes such a convincing robber king that she even wins a female admirer.

Photograph: DFI Det Danske Filminstitut

The ABC of Love (1916) sees her as a young woman who, dismayed that her sweetheart is not manly enough, dresses as a man in a very elegant tailcoat to show him how a gentleman lover ought to behave – and then has to live with the consequences. Although many actresses in Weimar cinema played characters of the opposite sex, Nielsen, with her impish energy and slender, striking physique, was one of the most successful.

Photograph: DFF Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum e.V.

Nielsen’s boyish quality finds its most dramatic expression in her masterpiece, a lavish, feature-length adaptation of Hamlet (1921). Playing Shakespeare without dialogue was not the greatest liberty this film took with the original text. Nielsen plays a princess who has concealed her true gender all her life, posing as the Prince of Denmark in order to preserve the line of succession to the throne. In this version, Hamlet has a particular reason to feel alone at the Danish court, and her relationships with Ophelia and Horatio in particular are complicated by the secret she keeps.

After this film, we can never look at Nielsen’s magnificent performance in the same way again. As the young heir(ess), she cuts an iconic figure in black tights and a cape – or, in the words of Close-Up magazine, “a white passion flower on a black stalk.” Nielsen seems born to play this role. She offers a portrayal of grief as powerful as any tragedy demands, while drawing on her flair for comedy in the play’s manic scenes.

Photograph: Eye Filmmuseum

We close the program with two very special films by the woman whom German audiences of the 1920s embraced as “Die Asta.” In the surviving fragment of the 1913 feature The Film Primadonna, we watch Nielsen playing a fictionalized version of herself: a great star, producer and lover.

Photograph: DFI Det Danske Filminstitut

And in The Decline (1922), one of her finest works and yet one that has rarely been screened, Nielsen appears as a great, glamorous star who ruins herself for love. In later years, Nielsen rejected the glamour of her early period and appeared on screen as a vulnerable woman of her real age, no longer hiding behind expensive costumes and heavy makeup. In many scenes, such as the tragic climax of The Decline, she reminded us once again of the boundless, undeniable talent that had made her a star. In this film she takes on the roles of film star and actress, of lover and tragic heroine, reversing the improbable rags-to-riches trajectory of her own life. Without a doubt, one of the most powerful performances of her career!

Asta Nielsen, 1966. Photograph: Tage Nielsen-Scanpix

How else could we describe the magic of ‘Die Asta,’ except by showing her films? Words alone cannot do it. According to the Hungarian critic Béla Belász, Nielsen’s film performances created an entirely new language of their own: “Only when advances in cinematography enable us to assemble our first lexicon of gestures will we be in a position to gauge the extent of Asta Nielsen’s vocabulary of gestures.”

Pamela Hutchinson: An independent critic, curator and film historian based on the south coast of England. She writes for publications such as Sight and Sound, Criterion, Indicator, The Guardian and Empire, and regularly contributes commentary to BBC Radio. She is the author of the books “Pandora’s Box” and the forthcoming “BFI Film Classics on The Red Shoes,” and her essays, mostly on silent film, have appeared in many edited collections. For BFI Southbank she curated the film seasons “Marlene Dietrich: Falling in Love Again” and “In the Eyes of a Silent Star: The Films of Asta Nielsen”; together with Christina Newland, she also put together the nationwide touring program “Pre-Code Hollywood: Rules are Made to be Broken.” She currently edits Sight and Sound’s Weekly Film Bulletin and continues to run her website SilentLondon.co.uk, which offers an extensive body of writing on silent cinema.