Where to begin with Asta Nielsen

Women of the silent screen are often slotted into stereotypes, such as Pola Negri the vamp or Mary Pickford the ingénue. With Asta Nielsen, however, it’s difficult to pin her down as one established type, except simply as ‘Die Asta’. Over the course of her career, the Danish-born actor would appear on screen in a tragic heroine, a precocious girl or a scheming comedienne. Her name value alone was enough to market her films as a series to cinemas around Europe in the 1910s.

At this time film still clung onto the coattails of the stage for cultural legitimacy. Marketing materials would proclaim Nielsen to be “the Duse of cinema” referring to the Italian opera singer Eleanora Duse. Nielsen’s 1913 film Die Suffragette declares itself to be “a mimed play in five acts” in the title sequence, connecting it to the relatively more respected sphere of theatre. 

Nielsen had trained for the stage before breaking into film, but what sets her apart from her co-stars and contemporaries of the 1910s is her restraint. While many others often resorted to exaggerated gesticulations, an acting style more suited for performing on stage for a live audience than to a lifeless camera, Nielsen’s movements are more controlled and subtle, drawing the audience into the psychology of her characters rather than telegraphing it to the masses.

This makes her work inherently cinematic, rather than a direct translation from stage to screen, allowing her to portray memorable characters with a degree of sophistication.

An ideal introduction to Nielsen’s distinct style as an actor is her 1921 performance as Hamlet. At this point, she had a decade of film experience under her belt. Hamlet was the first film from Nielsen’s newest production company Art-Film. The familiarity of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy makes it approachable, while the quirks in the plot offer fresh avenues of appreciation.

Many women had played the Danish prince before Nielsen, perhaps most notably the international theatre star Sarah Bernhardt in 1899. Indeed, one of the earliest filmed Shakespeare scenes in existence is a 1900 reel of Bernhardt performing the climactic duel scene. However, while Bernhardt played Hamlet as though he were a man, what set Nielsen’s version apart was that her Hamlet was a woman who had been forced to hide her sex since birth.

This adds a layer of queer-coded complexity to her relationships with Horatio, Ophelia and the Danish court. The subtlety in Nielsen’s acting emphasises her otherness in contrast to the relatively exaggerated performance styles of her co-stars, such as Hans Junkermann’s portrayal of Polonius as a decrepit old man or Eduard von Winterstein’s depiction of Claudius’s boorish behaviour. Nielsen’s most intense moments as Hamlet derive their power from stillness: for instance, when she looks down at a court scene from which she is irrevocably alienated due to her birth and position.

The severe black of Nielsen’s costume appears almost modernist in contrast to the florid dress of other characters, and it complements her statuesque performance, faintly echoing Conrad Veidt’s turn as the somnambulist Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920).

From Hamlet there are two tempting directions you could take your journey with Asta Nielsen. Going back to her film debut in The Abyss (1910), it’s tantalising to see both how far she had come, while also discerning her already blooming potential. The story is relatively simple: Nielsen plays a young woman named Magda, whose decision to leave her strait-laced boyfriend for a circus performer leads to her tragic downfall.

Present-day audiences still gravitate towards the eroticism of a then-controversial scene in which Magda is performing onstage with her lover in a dance routine in which the hulking man is bound by a rope while Nielsen gyrates her hips around his body. The kinky exploration of power and submission is made more palpable through clever framing that makes the audience become aware of their own gaze. The performance is captured from stage-left, exposing the male theatre crew who are staring with mute intensity in the wings on stage-right. Glimpsed in the bottom right-hand corner of the frame, the trombonist in the pit has stopped playing altogether to watch as well.

For those fascinated by Hamlet’s gender-bending, The ABC of Love (1916) is a logical next step. In this mischievous comedy, Nielsen plays Lis, a young girl who yearns for romantic excitement. Disappointed by her awkward fiancé Philip, she disguises herself as a man and takes him on a wild night in Paris to teach him ‘how to be a man’.

Nielsen is playing a less subtle character, yet the nuances of her performance hint at the depth of her craft. Flickering glances reveal the inner workings of this playfully conniving character’s mind as she inserts herself into a man’s role.

In one scene she attracts two flirtatious women, and as they both sit on her lap, Nielsen’s face fluttering from the influence of alcohol and amorous attention shows us that Lis is hopelessly out of her depth.

The ABC of Love is not the only film where Nielsen, whose film career started when she was in her 30s, plays a character much younger than herself. In The Guinea Pig (1916) she plays a teenager who is mistakenly institutionalised, and in Little Angel (1913) she plays a 17-year-old who then pretends to be a 12-year-old. It’s disconcerting to say the least. Nielsen plays these roles with uncharacteristic exaggeration to convey the energetic precociousness of the more juvenile characters. 

This tips over into racism with Das Eskimobaby (1918) in which she plays an Inuit woman from Greenland who is brought over to Europe by an explorer. Her portrayal of an Indigenous woman displays similar mannerisms to her child characters, thereby reproducing the condescending perspectives of the European colonialists of the time. It unfortunately undermines Nielsen’s track record of psychological complexity.

Nielsen’s career is full of performances where she is able to tap into the matrix of emotions that animate human behaviour, yet Das Eskimobaby reveals her own limitations in extending the insight beyond that of European women.

A season of Asta Nielsen’s films runs at BFI Southbank from February to March 2021.