DIE ASTA AND THE AVANT-GARDE

Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen

The New Art of Cinema and the Star System The Danish actress Asta Nielsen (1881-1972) was the first film star to inspire worldwide adoration. Urban Gad’s The Abyss/Afgrunden (1910), in which she played the leading role, made her famous at al- most one stroke. The alluring gypsy dance that she performed with Poul Reumert was certainly risqué compared to the usual attractions served up by the contemporaneous – and comparatively virginal – American beauties Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish; but she should not be seen as an early European incarnation of the female “vamp” that became popular around the time of World War I with actresses like Theda Bara, Pola Negri, Mae Murray and Gloria Swanson – all typecast during the formative years of the Hollywood studio system. “Die Asta”, as she was named throughout the world, managed her own career (most of the time with Gad, her first husband) and was never confined to a type. Her characterizations were always subtle, and throughout her career she portrayed a range of diverse onscreen personae. Her international film career ran from 1910 to 1932. During that time, notwithstanding the Great War, she made 70 films in Germany, most of them silent. Besides The Abyss, she made only three more films in Denmark, two in 1911 (The Black Dream and The Ballet Dancer) and one in 1918 (Towards the Light). In 1937 she fled Berlin for Copenhagen and a lower profile, remaining there until her death. Her greatest attribute was a personal and intellectual interpretation of the transition from the dramatic female individuality of Nordic theatrical tradition (the tradition of Ibsen and Strindberg), to the filmic representation of passion, emotion and sexuality attached to 92 Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen the female body and face as readable but as yet unstandardised filmic signs. She herself was aware of this, in 1919 outlining her views on the distinctions between Hollywood and North European cinema:

Our strength is in the acting because we have real actors and artists. American films you see are not based on acting. The type is the won- derful characteristic of American cinema. You will always find splen- did types in those films but no accomplished acting performance whose purpose and core is the spiritual life of a specific human being (Quoted in Thomsen 1997).

Greta Garbo, who entered the film scene 14 years after Nielsen, made the full transition and became a full-blown Hollywood star. Throughout her whole career she fought in vain against being type- cast as a cold beauty from the North. She and Nielsen both appeared in G. W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street (1925) in Germany, before Garbo left for Hollywood with Mauritz Stiller. The Weimar scene (with its German- and Austrian-born directors, including Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, G. W. Pabst, and Josef von Sternberg) was indeed an im- portant source of inspiration for Hollywood’s representations of fe- male beauty. Von Sternberg’s astute casting of Marlene Dietrich opposite Emil Jannings in Der Blaue Engel (1930) is a remarkable example of how German expressionism could be both transformed into fetishism (viz. Dietrich’s famous legs), and commodified by the star system through the use of an absorbing and reflective screen icon. According to Patrice Petro, Marlene Dietrich and Louise Brooks can be seen as “convenient figures upon which to project male subjectivity in crisis” (Petro 1989: 159). In his comparison of Louise Brooks and Asta Nielsen, Petro explains why Brooks’s clear- cut avant-garde icon, as well as Dietrich’s more broadly accepted star icon, had to surpass that of Nielsen (as well as Henny Porten):

The intense, dramatically focused gaze of Nielsen, for example, offers a striking contrast to the unfocused, almost mirrorlike gaze of Brooks, and it is hardly coincidental that Brooks’s screen debut in- volved a remake of Pandora’s Box – a film which originally featured Nielsen in the starring role. (Petro 1989: 160)

Although Nielsen’s performances are not typically ‘avant-garde’, she