Asta Nielsen: Fleur du Mal

01.19.10

Asta Nielsen is another one of those piquant silent film actors who intrigue me. A sort of dark flower, she has a very striking, iconic image, with a bone-white face, heavily contrasting huge dark eyes, and whimsical, rather mercurial expressions. Her features and the positioning of her body in stills (her look in 1921′s Hamlet!) I think give her almost a spooky appearance, and also a somehow modern look, as though she belongs more walking down the street around where I live than on the long-dead, silent screen. Now largely unknown, she was one of the most popular actresses of the 1910s and one of the first stars of the silver screen.

Born in 1881, she was a Danish actress who played in over 70 films, almost all of which were made in Germany. She was known for portraying passionate women caught in tragedy, and for the erotic quality of her performances. She brought a more subtle, naturalistic, and minimalistic acting style to cinema, in contrast to many silent actors who used theatricality – much like my beloved Louise Brooks did later on in the late ’20s. She also played Lulu in the 1923 adaptation of the Wedekind play, Erdgeist (“Earth Spirit”), which role Louise Brooks was to play in 1928 in Pabst’s Die Büchse der Pandora.

“‘Asta Nielsen’ means the power to speak of pathos, to see pain, and to find the middle path between Baudelaire’s flower of evil and the sick rose of which Blake sang.”
- M. S. Fonseca

Here are a few pictures of Asta below: