Maske og menneske: Asta Nielsen og hendes tid by Lotte Thrane (review)

This delightful new book about the pioneering Danish silent film star Asta Nielsen is one I wish I could have written. It’s not a typical biography or scholarly monograph, though it incorporates elements of both in its array of connected but freestanding essays. With its first-person narrator and kaleidoscopic lens, it feels as intimate, colorful, and occasionally as salacious as a tabloid, but is grounded by much deeper theoretical framing, narrative sophistication, and richer historical detail than a tabloid is capable of. It has the heft and gloss of a coffee-table book, with marginal annotations and far more (color!) images than most academic books can afford, but at a very reasonable price. The book thus attempts as delicate a balancing act between genres, styles, and audiences as it documents Nielsen herself undertaking in her life and career. Written by Lotte Thrane, who has published widely on Danish art, culture, and literature, Maske og menneske is a tour de force that offers both an entertaining read for people who have never even heard of Asta Nielsen and valuable new information and insights for scholars who have been studying her for years.

In contrast to Poul Malmkjær’s rather similarly titled biography, Asta: Mennesket, myten og filmstjernen, which appeared in 2000, Thrane is not an apologist trying to polish Nielsen’s professional halo, but rather a detective piecing together the multifaceted reality of Nielsen’s legacy as a performer on stage, screen, paper, and canvas. Thrane describes Nielsen as an early practitioner of autofiction, based on the discrepancies between the facts of Nielsen’s life and her own account of them in her memoirs. She points out how Nielsen arranges people and events in her texts in a performative way that serves the story, if not the reality. Nielsen’s selective writing was particularly protective of her personal life, which has given her fans room to fill in the blanks themselves for more than a century. Thrane has no scruples about revealing Nielsen’s secrets, including the no-longer secret identity of the man who fathered Nielsen’s only child, Jesta (spoiler: it’s a law student you’ve never heard of), her intimate relationship with a younger German musician named Rudolf Mendler just before the World War II, and her sexual banter at age seventy-six with the thirty-five-year-younger homosexual antiquities dealer Frede Schmidt.

Gossip is not the point, however, though it does point toward Thrane’s interest in the mythologies that have grown up around Nielsen the star, to the point of obscuring Nielsen the person. Thrane’s focus in this book is Asta Nielsen’s lifelong balancing act between her persona as die Asta and her real life, between “sin maske og sig selv som menneske. . . . Undertiden kan masken endda sejre over det fysiske ansigt, der levered masken, så det kun er den, der ses—og derfor forveksles med mennesket” (p. 7) [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]. In pursuing the complex story of Nielsen as a whole person—not just a film star and diva, but also a poor kid who made good, a high-powered career woman, a lover, an artist, an author, and proto-feminist, among other things—Thrane covers a lot of ground. She frames the book in terms of overarching philosophical problems, such as the complicated relationship between people’s public and private selves, and familiar issues from media studies, in particular the extent to which celebrities become public property, but she also dives deep into the minutiae of Nielsen’s recorded telephone conversations with Schmidt, her careful choice of flamboyant hats, her love affairs, her relationship to the Berlin avant-garde, and countless other topics.

Thrane’s decision to lead off with a chapter that is...