ASTA NIELSEN - THE SILENT MUSE

By: Grey Daisies

Shakespeare is reputed to have used 15,000 words. When our first dictionary of the language of gesture has been compiled
with the help of cinematography, only then can the expressive treasures of Asta Nielsen be appreciated. —Béla Balázs

sta Nielsen (11 September 1881 – 24 May 1972) was a Danish silent film actress who was one of the most popular leading ladies of the 1910s and one of the first international movie stars. Of her 74 films between 1910 and 1932, seventy were made in Germany where she was known simply as “Die Asta” (“The Asta”). Noted for her large dark eyes, mask-like face and boyish figure, Nielsen most often portrayed strong-willed passionate women trapped by tragic consequences. Due to the erotic nature of her performances, Nielsen’s films were heavily censored in the United States and her work remained relatively obscure to American audiences. She is credited with transforming movie acting from overt theatricality to a more subtle naturalistic style. Contrary to the practice of actors of the time toward excessive and emphatic gestures, Nielsen launched a style more suited to the cinematographic medium, characterized by her strife, by the play of various expressions which she completed with a distant gaze, holding generally to one point of view and then cut away, in contrast to the montage editing of America. Nielsen founded her own film studio in Berlin during the 1920s, but returned to Denmark in 1936 after the rise of Nazism in Germany. A private figure in her later years, Nielsen became a collage artist and an author. She began her literary career at 65. Danish Nobel Laureate in Literature Johannes V. Jensen wrote of her memoirs: “If you weren’t a great actress, then you would have become a great author.” In fact, she continued writing – stories, articles for newspapers and, later, a series of radio lectures entitled “Growing Old: A New Life”. At the same time, she produced some successful work as a visual artist: “I created a new form of painting, not with brush and paint, but with colorful fabric from which I assemble people and animals, landscapes and flowers.”

sta Sofie Amalie Nielsen was born in the Vesterbro section of Copenhagen, Denmark, the daughter of an often unemployed blacksmith and a washerwoman. Nielsen’s family moved several times during her childhood while her father sought employment. They lived for several years in Malmö, Sweden where her father worked in a corn millery and then a factory. After he lost those jobs, they returned to live in the Nørrebro section of Copenhagen. Nielsen’s father died when she was fourteen years old. At the age of eighteen, Nielsen was accepted into the acting school of the Royal Danish Theatre. During her time there, she studied closely with the Royal Danish Actor, Peter Jerndorff. In 1901, twenty-year-old Nielsen became pregnant and gave birth to her daughter, Jesta. Nielsen never revealed the identity of the father, and chose to raise her child alone with the help of her mother and older sister.

Nielsen graduated from the Theater school in 1902. For the next three years she worked at the Dagmar Theatre, then toured in Norway and Sweden from 1905 to 1907 with De Otte and the Peter Fjelstrup companies. Returning to Denmark, she was employed at Det Ny Theater from 1907 to 1910. Although she worked steadily as a stage actress, her performances remained unremarkable. Danish historian Robert Neiiedam wrote that Nielsen’s unique physical attraction, which was of great value on the screen, was limited on stage by her deep and uneven speaking voice.

ielsen began her film career in 1910, starring in director Urban Gad’s 1910 tragedy Afgrunden (The Abyss). Nielsen’s minimalist acting style was evidenced in her successful portrayal of a naive young woman lured into a tragic life. Her overt sexuality in the film’s gaucho dance scene established the erotic quality for which Nielsen became known.
This vulgar “gaucho-dance” was what most viewers remembered, but critics of the time also applauded Asta’s naturalistic acting, unknown in a silent cinema noted for its wild theatrical gesturing and overwrought grimacing. Her admirable use (similar to what Lillian Gish began to create much later) of her face and her gaze—a tremor of the eyelids or her immense eyes spoke concisely—made audiences feel a dialogue was transmitted despite the silence of the film. In her autobiography, the actress commented on this: “I realized that one had to detach oneself completely from one’s surroundings in order to be able to perform an important scene in a dramatic film. The opportunity to develop character and mood gradually, something denied the film actor, can only be replaced by a kind of ‘auto-suggestion.’” Throughout her career she used this trance state at key moments to force the viewer to respond imaginatively to what was happening — an effect that, combined with her masklike face and minimal gestures, gives the strange feeling of watching a present-day actress who has dropped suddenly into silent movies.
The film’s success encouraged her to continue making silent films. Nielsen and Gad married and, after making several films, they moved to Germany because her talent was not understood by the Danish film industry.

Asta Nielsen with writer/director Urban Gad

n 1911 she was contracted to German producer Paul Davidson for $80,000 a year, then the highest salary for a film star. Nielsen is called the first international movie star, challenged only by French comic Max Linder, also famous throughout Europe and in America by that time. In a Russian popularity poll of 1911 Nielsen was voted the world’s top female movie star, behind Linder and ahead of her Danish compatriot Valdemar Psilander. She remained popular on both sides through World War I and in 1915 (before the United States’ entry into it) she visited New York City to study American film techniques. Never limited to the role of femme fatale, Nielsen played flappers, proletarians, Inuit, gypsies, young males and children (in her mid-30s she played a 12-year-old) with equal zest. Asta Nielsen is usually attributed with the sole authorship of her films. She developed and shaped her screen personas and knew how to utilize the scope of the young art form of film to influence all production processes of her movies. Apart from the close artistic partnership with her husband and director Urban Gad, Asta Nielsen appreciated the creative exchange with cameraman Guido Seeber, who in the early days of cinema ranked among the pioneers in regard to camera techniques.

In 1920, Nielsen formed her own production company (Art-Film GmbH) and produced three of her films including a free adaptation of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, daringly casting herself as the gender-bending Prince of Denmark.

In 1925 she was famously co-starred with that other great Scandinavian diva, Greta Garbo, in Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street). Garbo herself acknowledged the woman who co-starred with her, saying “she taught me everything I know”. Nielsen continued as a legend of the screen in Germany. After the Nazis came to power she was offered her own studio by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Understanding the implications well, she instead fled the country home to Denmark.

ielsen worked in film until start of sound movies. Nielsen made only one feature movie with sound – Unmögliche Liebe (Impossible Love), but was unable to adapt her “silent language” to the new medium of montage editing and retired from the screen in 1932. Thereafter, Nielsen acted only on stage. In 1936, after 25 triumphant years in Germany, Nielsen returned to Denmark. Although she had once behaved “insolently” towards Hitler at a gala dinner (they were seated at the same table), Nazi Germany would have liked to keep her as a jewel in its firmament of stars. But Asta wasn’t interested. Nielsen left Germany in 1936 after the rise of Nazism, returning to Denmark where she wrote articles on art and politics and a two-volume autobiography (“Den tiende Muse” aka “The Silent Muse”). During the Second World War she provided money for Allan O. Hagedorff, a young Dane living in Germany, to assist Jews by sending food parcels to concentration camp-prisoners.

She directed her first film at 86. After a film about her life did not meet with her approval, she set to work on the project herself. The result was her film Asta Nielsen, which won a prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1968. She also received an award for her significant achievements concerning the development of film art.

At 88 years of age, Asta Nielsen married her third husband, Christian Theede, an art dealer 18 years her junior and the great love of her life.

She died in 1972 as a result of a severe accident.

Asta Nielsen is the only female artist in film who can be considered outright as a genius and whose artistic
   achievements have the unforced quality of natural events. Everyone who has ever enjoyed the pleasure
   of her friendship knows that she, like all the other real greats in the world of art, is also a significant human
   being whose exceptional sense of humor and deep wisdom about life are without parallel. —Paul Wegener

- Further readings (Books, Articles)

Den tiende Muse (Danish Edition) by Asta Nielsen, 1945-46 (translated and published in German as Die schweigende Muse, 1961)
Filmstjernen Asta Nielsen by Marguerite Engberg, 1999
Asta Nielsen Breve 1911-71 by Ib Monty, 1998
Liebe mit Achtzig: Asta Nielsen – Christian Theede, Briefe by Bärbel Dalichow/Allan O. Hagedorff, 1997
Unmögliche Liebe. Asta Nielsen, ihr Kino (Vol. 1) & Nachtfalter. Asta Nielsen, ihre Filme edited by Eric de Kuyper/Karola Gramann/Sabine Nessel/Heide Schlüpmann/Michael Wedel, 2010
Asta Nielsen. Ihr Leben in Fotodokumenten, Selbstzeugnissen und zeitgenössischen Betrachtungen by Renate Seydel/Allan Hagedorff, 1981
Asta Nielsen und die Sprechbühne by Erwin Magnus
Asta Nielsen & Hamlet’s Gender-Benders by Charles Marowitz
Bright Lights Film Journal – Asta Nielsen by Gary Morris
Asta Nielsen Biography fembio.org
Unsung Divas of the Silent Screen – Asta Nielsen by Greta de Groat
Asta Nielsen – Der Stern des Stummfilms German fan site by Helmut Schmidt

- Images etc.

Asta Nielsen, Self portrait – collage (1920) Asta Nielsen Hamlet bust

Newspaper advertisement for Afgrunden (1910) Asta Nielsen – Denmark stamp

Karl Lagerfeld photographs supermodel Freja Beha Erichsen for Vogue Germany’s editorial » Asta Nielsen «. Model Freja Beha Erichsen stars as famed silent screen siren Asta Nielsen, the Danish beauty who wooed the world in the 1910s, her influence on German cinema was a clear choice for Lagerfeld.

The following is a chronological list of all surviving films (though some of them only in fragments) Asta Nielsen has starred in. If you ever get the chance to see some of these films please do so. A compelling performer and artistic innovator, Nielsen’s films certainly deserve a worldwide audience.