Asta talks! Impossible Love (1932), BFI Asta Nielsen Season

Three women: Ery Bos, Asta Nielsen and Ellen Schwanneke

It looks good from far away, just like me…

 

It’s no coincidence that the very first thing we see Asta Nielsen do in her first and only talkie is to put her finger to her lips to shush the chatter as her daughter gives a music recital. Only Die Asta could be so knowing and post-modern. She was fifty when she made this film and she looks great, lovely big smiles and gorgeous fashions, nothing like the rags of Joyless Street and, as with that film and so many others, she unrolls as stunning closing section… watching all of these films that’s one thing that stands out, the actress always left plenty in the tank for a sprint finish of audacious expression.

 

So many lines ring beyond the film, not least the one above and other’s relating to her age that she may well have improvised given their added poignance. The male characters in the film are mostly boorish and one constantly complains that a woman of her age with two grown daughters should simply resign which I took to be a mistranslation of retire but which the Kennington Bioscope’s Michelle Facey suggested was meant literally, Asta’s character being viewed by a conservative German man as wrong to still have personal ambition given her womanly responsibilities.

 

Maybe it was Asta’s age and her feeling that the parts were just drying up as younger actors swarmed. She made silent five films released in 1927 and headed off to the theatre before being lured back for Unmögliche Liebe (1932) and clearly decided that artistically that was enough and the stage would be where she would carry on before the changes in Germany forced her back to Copenhagen in 1936.

Asta Nielsen, Julius Falkenstein and Hilde Hildebrand

Directed by Erich Waschneck, Impossible Love is a little deliberate but also a very interesting film that is firmly centred on three women, sculptor and studio manager Vera Holgk (Asta), her eldest daughter Nora (Ery Bos) and youngest Toni (Ellen Schwanneke, who’d featured in the previous year’s Mädchen in Uniform). These three are the centre of the action and are largely surrounded by odd men.

 

Nora is, for some reason, in a relationship with the moneyed but foolish Leopold von Möllendorf (Anton Pointner) who, once engaged to his much younger partner, calls Vera Mutter like the man child he is, whilst also attempting to get Nora to give up the cello on the grounds that it is a most unfeminine instrument to play. He also thinks Vera should “resign” and surrender her selfish ambitions, declaring his family as “conservative” but not backward… Toni meanwhile has a relationship with a young man nearer her age, Erwin (Carl Balhaus) who works with her in a photographic studio and how is less intelligent and less realistic than she. Toni may be the youngest but she has insight and some of the film’s best lines.

 

Daftest of all is the Professor’s man servant Zimmermann (Julius Falkenstein, who, as Michelle reminded me, was so good in The Oyster Princess with Ossi Oswalda) but he’s meant to provide comedic relief and does so with practiced ease, some physical comedy, inappropriate napping and lots of outspoken lines that still cause a titter.

 

Asta still works hard on the casual details of real character

Tell me you still believe I can create great work? 

The exception to all this appears to be Professor Steinkampp (Hans Rehmann), a sculptor of repute and, even though younger, a suitor for Vera’s affections. Steinkampp pursues her with some style and then invites her to his studio to work on her own sculpture for a competition. At first, Vera, who has been running a commercial art studio, is doubtful she can still compete but with the Professor’s encouragement she is soon back in the groove, as it were. It’s a joy to watch Asta, fag in mouth and singing to herself as her character works… that’s how to use talkies for narrative continuity, her old tricks of seemingly casual distractions are accompanied by sound in this new environment. You can also see/hear the stage experience at play.

 

Vera has doubts and guilt about her growing feelings for Steinkampp and starts withholding some information from her daughters, the beginnings of a distance between them as she, for the first time in a long time, starts to put herself first. She wins the art competition and has to confess some of her new relationship but then things take a dramatic turn for the worst as Steinkampp’s old girlfriend, Martini (Hilde Hildebrand) sells her salacious story to the newspapers and all Himmel breaks loose…

 

Amidst the moral outrage, that Vera was seeing and staying with Steinkampp is the assertion that he helped her win the sculpture prize. Stuck up Möllendorf insists she responds publicly but Vera has nothing to say to the stuffed shirt and will deal with this in her manner. Nora is conflicted and leaves to stay with her man whilst Toni takes matters into her own hands to visit the newspaper and ask them to retract… she learns far more than she wants to hear.

 

A woman with agency, managing her life and business

Spoiler zone: Steinkampp is revealed to be married but his wife Katharina (Elisabeth Wendt) has lost her mind and is permanently residing in an asylum. Fair dos to the Professor, he makes sure that she is looked after and he wants a divorce but he hasn’t told Vera any of this and she is naturally devastated and, as he talks calmly with Toni about his plans to divorce and marry Vera, she is visiting Katharina… Wendt is made up like a supernatural Miss Haversham, golden hair floating around her head, a child’s mind but with enough left to know that her husband’s love is all the world to her.

 

Nieslen finally let’s rip in these circumstances and they are very powerful moments, it’s an over-egged scenario but she makes it work through all the years of skilled control and tears flow between the two. Even if Steinkampp had been completely open with Vera, how can he be forgiven this abandonment… Later, we see Asta sitting on a bench for a moment, she stands and walks into the darkness of the forest… out of life perhaps, but certainly out of film.

It's a perfect ending to her cinematic career and not dissimilar to that she confected at the end of the documentary she would direct about herself in 1968.

 

In this film, the family’s friends suggest she should just marry Steinkampp, “after all you can get married at 90 these days…” and, almost forty years later, that’s what Asta did, marrying a 70-year-old art dealer aged 88*. She didn’t let age deny her, just like Vera perhaps.

 

So, the end of a stunning season of films covering 22 years when Die Asta was the biggest movie star most people hadn’t heard of… not anymore! Thank you, BFI, programmer Pamela Hutchinson, the accompanists, archivists and all who made this happen. There’s still enough films left for a part two… just saying.

 

Julius Falkenstein and Ossi Oswalda in The Oyster Princes

*Julie K Allen of Brigham Young University, quotes the 18-year age gap in a review of Lotte Thrane's book, Maske og menneske: Asta Nielsen og hendes tid. (Copenhagen: Gads forlag 2019) in Scandinavian Studies, Volume 93, Issue 1.

She also quotes Thrane on her examination of Asta's the public and private persona: "...her mask and her private self. . . . From time to time the mask can even triumph over the physical face upon which the mask is based, so that it alone is visible - and is therefore mistaken for the person..."

Looking froward to an english translation of this book... 

Crimes and misdemeanours… In the Eyes of the Law (1919) with Stephen Horne, BFI Asta Nielsen Season

Any suffering is easier to bear if the goal is great…

 

More Asta magic that turns what could be a melodramatic take on Crime and Punishment into something altogether worth watching. The secret of her success and lasting impact certainly wasn’t the scripts she was given or the directors she worked with but the ways she was able to create character and to self-direct… can you imagine her working with Griffith or DeMille? She did work with Lubitsch but that film sadly no longer exists and it would be especially interesting to view now as she was very much the established star… It’s also such a shame that her Miss Julie and Hedda Gabler are no longer with us, but so it goes.

 

Here she delivers yet another distinct performance, from metropolitan newspaper reporter flirting easily with her co-worker, and fiancé, so naturistic you feel like you’re intruding… to a committed newshound on a case, exposing inequality and ruinous criminal practice to an avenging angel who effects change but at a moral and personal cost.

 

The statement at the top is something her character says near the end and isn’t that far away from Friedrich Nietzsche's words, He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How… a very apposite and necessary sentiment given the time after so many had died for Kaiser and country, a film made in the early days of the Weimar Republic when Germany was in recovery. Bruised and unbowed depending on your point of view.

 

In the Eyes of the Law (Nach dem Gesetz) is directed with fluid precision by Willy Grunwald, who worked with Nielsen on a number of films during this period and was obviously trusted to let the Danish diva get on with the real magic. There are, nevertheless, some well-constructed sequences and he really does show her to best effect as the film reaches its climactic sequence.

 

The film is presaged, as a number of Nielsen’s were, by some glamour shots of the actress smiling direct to camera and smelling a large bunch of roses, this is, as usual, a very knowing moment that seems to suggest that audience complicity is already guaranteed…

 

Asta’s Sonja Waler is dressed in some style as she breezes into the newspaper offices to briefly flirt with Arthur (Fritz Hartwig) before typing up her copy. The opening of the film feels like a rom com with some superb street shots of bustling Berlin – the locations are a glimpse on a lost world with cinematographer Max Lutze capturing the city in motion and one particularly delicious shot of Sonja and Arthur enjoying a champagne lunch high up in a café overlooking one of the main streets.

 

Lutze also captures the couple eating their sandwiches on the roof of the newspaper, Asta opening the bread to see what’s inside, an everyday action that almost no one else would think of. From a distance they spot her brother Eric (Otz Tollen) and doctor, with his colleague, Albert Holm (Theodor Loos). They invite them up and learn about Holm’s latest breakthrough which could greatly help the large numbers who are dying from lupus (remembering again that this was also the time of the Spanish flu pandemic).

 

Sonja wants to help raise the funds Holm desperately needs but her editor is less keen until she finds a way of popularising it. Never short of ides she decides to visit a wealthy industrialist whom she finds mid-argument with his son (Henri Peters-Arnolds). Her curiosity peaked by the elder man’s refusal to provide any further financial support, she follows the young man to a dingy part of town and a meeting he has with a money lender, Heere (Guido Herzfeld) who is bleeding his client dry.

 

Soon afterwards she hears that the youngster has shot himself, the latest casualty of the loan shark’s greed. Meanwhile, she visits her brother’s clinic and sees for herself the sad deaths of his patience, all of which could be preventable if funding could be made available.

 

Then Sonja’s aunt is ill and she is to travel to see her with her mother (Georgine Sobjeska) – she has not got long to live. It is then that Sonja, spurred on by the extremes of injustice, decides on an almost perfect plan to help the needy and punish the guilty… and it’s pretty ingenious at a time when not all such things were as well thought out – so props to writer Louis Levy!

 

The New Cinema Review said at the time that Nielsen’s “internalized play… makes one forget the shortcomings of logic ...” and you can say that about so many of these films although, this caper seems secure if only Sonja’s conscience allows it to be. There must be a reckoning of course and there’s a dogged policeman played by Bernhard Goetzke … so, once again we are treated to the actor’s emotional pyrotechnics; she never disappoints and, again, this is Sonja’s agony… unlike any other character I’ve seen.

 

Stephen Horne accompanied with Asta-assurance on piano, flute and accordion, and again one felt that different mix in his call and response with the action on screen. It’s been a full on three days of Nielsen films and we’re all deeply invested at this stage.

 

You still have time to experience the Asta impact as the films run until 15^th March. Booking and details on the BFI site.

A monster tragedy? Earth Spirit (1923), Stephen Horne and Pamela Hutchinson, BFI Asta Nielsen Season

Frank Wedekind’s play has multiple connections in silent film not least of which is Louise Brooks’ genuinely iconic performance in GW Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929) but before the 22-year old American became synonymous with the character of Lulu a 41-year old Dane acted herself quite differently into the role. The play had initially been written in 1894 as a single piece in five acts and subtitled A Monster Tragedy but Wedekind subsequently divided it into two plays: Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora’s Box first performed in 1904. Before Pabst re-joined the two for his film, Leopold Jessner made his version of the first part with Asta Nielsen and it’s fascinating to see the differences in approach and style.

 

It’s hardly fair but modern silent film viewers cannot start off watching Die Asta’s Lulu without thinking of Brooks but that quickly vanishes as you see how forcefully Nielsen goes about the role. Even before Brooks, for me there was Joanne Whalley in Ian MacDiarmid’s production of the play at the Donmar Warehouse in 1991, no bob, that was left to Belinda Lang as Countess Geschwitz, a sign of trying to escape Brooks’ iconicism in order to get to the root of this complex and controversial character: is Wedekind proto-feminist or does Lulu represent the “sins” of free sexuality? Maybe, yes… but more and it’s also about Lola Montez… about whom the internet virtually teems with rumour and suggestion.

Carl Ebert and Asta

 

It's not only modern audiences… Brooks herself had, of course, an opinion about Earth Spirit according to season programmer Pamela Hutchinson, who quotes the actress from Lulu in Hollywood, complaining about the earlier film’s ducking the lesbian aspects of the play and Nielsen’s lack of dance skill. Brooks also said that there we two types of actors, one’s like her who essentially played themselves and others, like Nielsen, who played their parts. Even looking at the Asta of Afgrunden you wouldn’t see her as a natural “Earth spirit”, a Lulu or untamed passions and yet… there she is. Asta is, literally, different in every film I’ve seen in this season and here is no different.

 

Asta’s Lulu is outrageous, more knowing and yet just as ruinously impetuous as Brooks’ version, she’s faithless and fancy free, carnal and reckless but… no one ever says no do they “Men”? Just as there are so many ways to read the play, there are so many ways to read Asta playing Lulu. As is becoming thrillingly clear from this season, the Dane never seemed to have played the same part twice and here again is another unique creation as she inhabits a character of her own making no matter, I’m sure, of the expert prompting from director Leopold Jessner.

 

As season curator, Pamela Hutchinson said in her introduction, Jessner was a noted theatre director and one of a number of heavy hitters from the stage involved in this production, script writer Carl Meyer, producer Richard Oswald et al, both a reflection of the seriousness with which the play was regarded and also the prestige of the star performer, who’s years of theatrical under-achievement were long behind her now, not only the premier screen star in Europe but also arguably the finest actor despite new challengers from Sweden, Germany and France.

A love-hate relationship? Asta and Albert Bassermann

Lulu has been having a long time dalliance with Dr Schoen (classically trained actor and former chemist, Albert Bassermann) who has married her off to the older Dr Goll (Gustav Rickelt) knowing she’ll run rings around him and be available when required. However, he reckons without Lulu’s endlessly playful nature and Schwarz (Carl Ebert), the handsome painter employed to portray her in sexy Pierrot costume, is soon seduced the minute Schoen takes his friend off to a cabaret.

 

Lulu is wild, tearing down the carefully arranged fabrics designed to filter the light in the huge high-ceilinged studio and wrapping around herself and her lover, who needs dance training when you can destroy the scenery and arouse physical passion at the same time. Sadly, Goll has come back early, perhaps suspecting intrigue and, desperately smashing down the door he finds the couple in flagrante or at least, tangled in fabrics, and after taking a swipe at the painter falls dead to the floor. Lulu’s mild irritation at this distraction speaks volumes and soon she is married to the painter.

 

The painter’s house is an expressionistic extension of his high (ceilinged) art and in time Lulu lolls around bored by his aesthetic intensity and waiting for fun. Cue her father/first benefactor, the sinister Schigolch (Alexander Granach) whom she welcomes by throwing herself prone onto opulent cushions and waving her heels in the air before pouring him two large ones which he drinks and she pours onto the carpet… not so out of control after all?

The novelty of art has worn off... Asta and Carl Ebert

Dr. Schoen remains in close attendance as does his son Alwa (Rudolf Forster) who, naturally, is drawn to Lulu like a moth to a naked candle flame… then we have the friends of Schigolch, a circus strong man Rodrigo (Heinrich George) and a poet Eulenber (Erwin Biswanger) opposite ends of the intellectual spectrum yet equally fascinated beyond their understanding.

 

All of the men see their sexuality reflected in Lulu’s dazzling energy. As with all her roles Nielsen makes you believe and there’s some daring subtext if you only look for it… Pamela told us to pay particular attention to Asta’s moth and there is a long essay on her “lip-ography” in this film right up until the sudden and quite shocking end.

 

Wedekind said that “Lulu is not a real character but the personification of primitive sexuality who inspires evil unaware. She plays a purely passive role…” How interesting then that from two different directions two women made her into something more in both the films of the twenties.

 

Stephen Horne who, as those of us who have his debut album, Silent Sirens know, has a particular rapport with the strong silent actresses and accompanied with some primal tones of his own playing piano, flute and accordion. Of these perhaps the flute caught the essential mysteries best, there’s something knowing and unknowable in Asta’s Lulu a force as well as an accident of nature.

 

So, another winner for the Dane and one that I’m looking forward to watching again. Her reputation and my appreciation grows with every screening.

 

The Nielsen season runs until 15^th March and Earth Spirit is screened again on Wednesday 9^th with accompaniment from Meg Morley, not to be missed!

 

Her infinite variety... Downfall (1923) with John Sweeney, introduced by Pamela Hutchinson, BFI Asta Nielsen Season

It was, with some spoilers, a day of three tragedies for Asta Nielsen at the BFI and whilst I knew what to expect from Hamlet and Lulu in Earth Spirit , I hadn’t expected to be quite so blown away by this film. The first reel is missing from Downfall aka Der Absturz but it’s the last two that really pack the punch and allow for an exceptional, heart-rending denouement with Asta’s character literally beyond her former lover’s comprehension.

 

It bought to mind the scene in Victor Sjöström’s Sons of Ingmar when Ingmar goes to meet the mother – and murderer – of their only child, born out of wedlock and, even after her years in jail, an almost impossible thing to forgive. To illustrate the powerful pain, Victor Sjöström has his great cinematographer, Julius Jaenzen shoot the couple against the Sun, dazzling Ingmar who can barely look at his former lover. In Downfall, Asta’s character has simply aged far more than her younger lover and, cruelly, for so many women over a certain age… she has become invisible, devoid of her make up and finery, the last vestiges of her youth… he literally does not notice her.

 

The way that Nielsen handles her aging is also remarkable, especially given this was made for and produced by her own film company and she was (gasp) 41 at the time the same age as Kim Kardashian (I know!) or, if you’re talking people with talent, Melanie Williams or Bryce Dallas Howard. She appears to be without make up – or much make up – or at least enough to make her look as old and unglamorous as possible and it’s fascinating to watch the amazing instrument that is her face keep on pushing out the meaning and dominating the narrative in or out of close up.

 

It's almost new wave… and old school heart-breaking.

 

Asta's Kaja at the top

On IMDB someone had said that Nielsen is less "well known" because she didn’t make any great films but whilst this is wrong with the likes of Hamlet, Earth Spirit, Joyless Street and Afgrunden around, it also ignores films like this one in which her performance level raises everything. And, having seen over a dozen of her films in this remarkable season, I’d say her other defining quality is of consistency and range; she never plays the same part twice with even broad comedies differentiated by her decision to find new avenues to explore within characters of her own construction… a remarkable ethic especially given the quality of some of the scripts.

 

Directed and written by Ludwig Wolff, Downfall sees Asta playing Kaja Falk, a popular singer of light opera approaching her middle years, who has become involved with the “vampiric” waster, Frank Lorris (Albert Bozenhard) who – based upon a synopsis for the missing opening section, literally sucks her dry of money and good will. She’s saved by the noble Count Lamotte (Ivan Bulatov) who offers her his villa to hide away from Lorris’ unwanted attentions.

 

Near the villa lives a handsome young fisherman, Peter Karsten (Gregori Chmara) and his pretty fiancée, Henrike Thomsen (the striking Charlotte Schultz) and the two are perfectly happy as they go about their simple life. When they glimpse Kaja’s fancy coach on its way to the villa, they laugh at the pretension until a hat box drops off and, urged past his reluctance by Henrike’s imploring, Peter catches up with the coach and, handing the box over, is instantly captivated by the demure singer.

 

Gregori Chmara exuding Daniel Craig vibes?

One thing leads to another and Kaja meets Peter on the sea shore and he takes her for a ride in his boat as Henrike looks on, knowing her heart is in trouble. Soon Peter is creeping up to the villa and seeing far more of Kaja than is healthy for either.

 

Evil Frank also tracks her down and starts to use the situation to his advantage… tragedy strikes when Lamotte confronts Peter on a steep coastal path and, after a short scuffle falls to his death. Peter takes the rap but both he and Katja vow to be true and to meet once he is released in ten years’ time. That decade takes its toll though and when he is released into the sunshine will he recognise his love?

 

There’s no denying that Katya’s fall from grace allows Asta Nielsen to really go through the gears and it’s truly fascinating to see her with hardly any make up during her character’s illness and decline. Though this period she’s drained of everything she has by Lorris, and it’s the combination of his influence and her growing frailty that makes for one of the most gripping sequences in her revelatory oeuvre.

On the slide

Struggling to regain her voice she attempts a comeback only to be faced with not just pity but contempt from her audience – given this was a project commissioned by herself, it’s clear she knew full well the contract between audience and star. As she said in her stunning 1968 documentary, “fame is but a word written in sand…” she knew what was coming, what had already started.

 

Yet watching her out of make-up. looking in horror at her unfamiliar face, being deadened by Lorris’ unyielding humiliations and finally, vanishing from the love of her life’s vision… is oddly rewarding. Certainly one of the most innovative and honest portrayals of tragedy in any of her films and proof, if any were needed, of her ability to transcend melodrama and to give something extra special entirely from within character.

 

John Sweeney accompanied, as he has many a dying swan, and was thoroughly embedded in this arc of decline with powerful classic chords and heart-rending lines, following our eye-line as the great star burns, flickers and crashes down, emptied of all light before her body stops moving.

You have to see this for yourselves...

One of the big surprises of this splendid season and there were two others still to come on this bumper Astaday.

 

There’s more Asta coming at the BFI, and Downfall screens again on 15th March with Cyrus Gabrysch accompanying, book now and I guarantee you will not be disappointed. Full details are on the BFI website.

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety... quotation from Antony and Cleopatra with a tip of the hat to Mrs P Hutchinson of Worthing-on-Sea who provided a most excellent introduction!