Two Films about Asta Nielsen

A Feature Film and a Documentary Film about the danish silent film actress Asta Nielsen.

Awards rained on The Tenth Muse

The Norwegian Director of Photography Harald Paalgard received the Award for Best Cinematography based on the following reason:

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: HARALD PAALGARD IN "AFGRUNDEN"

Shot in HDTV, the film displays all the vast possibilities of this new technology. The director of photography perfectly mastered the transitions between the black and white of the silent films and the modern digital images of tomorrow.

Vera Gebuhr received the Jurys Lifetime Achiement Award for her magnificent performance as Asta Nielsen in The Tenth Muse, and last but not least the Director Torben Skjødt Jensen received Politikens Audience Award.

Hamburg International Film Festival will show The Tenth Muse September 22.

The Tenth Muse

A modern feature film about Asta Nielsen - Europes biggest silent film star.

Yearnings, disasters, hope and an indomitable spirit. This is the story about the girl who came from the most abject poverty and made her own way to amazing worl fame and fortune. This is the story of a little girl who overcomes opposition and tragedy and yet ends up lonely in hell of old age - with her eyes turned towards death.

The film takes place in 1964, in Asta Nielsen's apartment, where she meets a filmmaker. His meeting with Asta Nielsen is for the purpose of making a film portrying her life - but he ends up being too close - too close to the thruth. Using flashbacks, we meet the young and beautiful Asta Nielsen, back to the time between 1895-1940.

Asta Nielsen receives the young filmmaker in her home. She seems surprisingly willing to talk and to participate in the portrait film the filmmaker intends to produce. Her private life behind the stage has always remained a mystery to the public. The filmmaker is thrilled: it is going to be a great story. However, the filmmaker gets more and more inquisitive and begins to question Asta Nielsen's description of her relationship with her daughter, Jesta. Asta Nielsen feels threatened and fires the filmmaker. Nevertheless, she is determined to take over the production of her own portrait film.

The story takes a turn and begins focusing on her daughter. Jesta becomes so appalled with the behaviour of her mother, that she for the first time, tells openly about her life in the shadow of "Die Asta": a cruel story about being given the role of being "ugly" and "a failure" in order for the mother's star to shine. Jesta finally relieves the burdens of her heart and tells everything - but it is more than she can bear - and she commits suicide. The filmmaker comes to realise that revealing other peoples' secret lives, is not without severe consequences.

Asta Nielsen is seen as the spiritual godmother of many famous actresses. With her enormous dark eyes, thin lips, mask-like face and slender, boyish figure she was perfect to become a diva. Between 1910 and 1932 she made 74 films. She is often called "the first great international star".

The worl premiere of The Tenth Muse is in August - during the Copenhagen International Film Festival, in the competition program.

The Talking Muse

She was the first Star in silent films - NOW she talks.

It is a known fact that antiquarian bookseller and carefree, innovative personality, Frede Smith, was so attached to Asta Nielsen that he was the shoulder she cried on during the period of grief after her daughter, Jesta's suiside in 1964.

Not many people have any idea of how deep their friendship was or how long they had been friends. Only now, several years after Frede Smith's death, a discovery of so much material and so many effects amongst his extensive possessions, can reveal the hidden truths. Not least, thanks to an enormous amount of large tape reels containing recordings of more than 80 hours telephone conversations between Asta and Frede during the period 1957-1959, as well as a number of conversations, from the same periode, that Frede had with Asta's daughter Jesta and her husband; Asta's son-in-law, Poul Vermehren. Altogether tape recordings made in secret by Frede Smith and hidden well for posterity.

The telephone conversations invite us into a quite unusually warm and loving friendship. Into a private, intimate sphere which Asta Nielsen otherwise shied away from in public. In her great autobiography The Silent Muse, she would not reveal anything of her private thoughts and experiences - about her daughter and her husband, her former marriages with the film director Urban Gad, the Swedish magnate Freddy Wingårdh and her Russian actor Gregori Chmara, whom she lived with for 13 years without being lawfully married.
About her many clashes with Danish mentality when she returns from Germany in 1937, her attitude towards Nazism, the Danish culture, her many rejections in trying to obtain a cinema concession in Denmark after the war, attempts at a come-back to the Danish theatre scene, her life which in many ways became lonely and bitter - and not least - her relationship to her daughter and son-in-law, especially her daughter's very characterstic fate, reflected through the daughter's battle with diabetes and overweight.

With Frede on the phone, the silent muse became the talking muse - and perhaps Frede was the film prima donna's last hope for glorious "golden days".

The film shows footage from a large number of Asta Nielsen's many films. She recorded, in total, 74 films during the period 1910 to 1932. An extensive, private arcive and personal effects which she also entrusted to Frede Smith, as well as plenty of private footage from Germany and Denmark.

Director: Torben Skjødt Jensen
Editing: Olivier Bugge Coutté

The dokumentary The Talking Muse will be shown August 12. and 14. on Odense Film Festval.