Importing Asta Nielsen: The International Film Star in the Making, 1910–1914 ed. by Martin Loiperdinger and Uli Jung (review)

The standard historical account of early film stardom focuses primarily on the American cinema. Such histories privilege the evolution of a star system initiated by major figures such as Florence Lawrence, Mary Pickford, and Charlie Chaplin in the early 1910s. Importing Asta Nielsen: The International Film Star in the Making, 1910–1914, offers a carefully researched riposte to this standard history. A collection of essays on transnational stardom taking Danish actress Asta Nielsen’s early career as its case study, this second volume of KINtop, Studies in Early Cinema moves beyond the standard view through thoroughgoing archival research. The book offers a broader view of Nielsen’s career across national borders and demonstrates how her emerging stardom was shaped by a variety of aesthetic, economic, national, and discursive forces. The book is invaluable for scholars interested in the reception of stardom and performance across varying national, cultural, and social contexts, and will be a useful text for historians looking to add more nuance to their understanding of the star system’s early development.

The book collects papers delivered at the German Film Museum in September of 2011 for the international conference, “Importing Asta Nielsen: Cinema-going and the Making of the Star System in the Early 1910s.” In the introduction, the editors point out how important the development of the feature-length film was to the economic survival of European film industries. As they suggest, Nielsen’s stardom was key to the development of the feature. Her appeal to different audiences – she was well-received by both the cultural elite and the working class throughout most of Europe – insured the economic viability of an art form undergoing a fundamental shift towards standardized forms of distribution and production. The more than two dozen essays in the book explore Nielsen’s early career within these intersecting contexts of production, distribution, and reception, scrutinizing “the role Asta Nielsen films played in different film markets of various countries, in distribution and exhibition practices, in the competition between local cinemas, in the innovation in film marketing and film advertising, in short, in the establishment of a new basis for film markets in many countries around the world” (2).

The book is structured in seven parts. Part one, “Asta Nielsen in Denmark,” focuses primarily on the early presentation in Denmark of Nielsen’s breakthrough film, Afgrunden (known in English under various names, including The Woman Also Pays; 1910), highlighting Nielsen’s importance in the rivalries between early exhibitors. Casper Tybjerg, for example, points out how competitors, upon learning that a rival firm had booked a Nielsen picture, responded with other films with similar subject matter (22). Essays in this section also focus on the initial ambivalence of Nielsen’s reception in Denmark as well as her contrasting reception in Iceland, a country that for centuries was a colony of Denmark. The second part of the collection, “Afgrunden – Debut Film of an Unknown Actress,” features three pieces analyzing the circulation of the film in, respectively, Finland, Poland, and Egypt. These chapters demonstrate how varying conditions of censorship impacted the exhibition and reception of Nielsen’s first film, with particular reference to the “gaucho dance” she performs near its conclusion (70-74). The study of the relationship between Nielsen’s early stardom and film censorship is revisited in the fifth part of the book, “Censorship versus Art Discourse.” These chapters highlight the role Nielsen’s films (and again, her gaucho dance in Afgrunden in particular) played in emerging discourses about how erotic cinematic content was to be regulated.

Other sections in the book look closely at Nielsen’s impact in larger international markets, including Germany, Switzerland, Spain, and the United States. Part three, “The Making of the Film Star in Germany,” looks at the impact of Nielsen in Berlin, Metz, and Mannheim prior to World War I. Martin Loiperdinger, for example, studies how Nielsen constituted a specific...