Icons of Danish Modernity by Julie K. Allen

Author:Julie K. Allen [Allen, Julie K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction & Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, European, Scandinavian, Nonfiction, History, Scandinavia, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science
ISBN: 9780295804361
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2013-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

The scene is self-referential on multiple levels: the film audience watches the other characters in the scene watching Rudolph and Magda perform, while Nielsen plays Magda playing the gaucho girl under the gaze of fellow actors and the doubled audience of the theater and of the cinema. Relative to the film as a whole, the dance scene is so long that it is almost a film in itself, a vestige of the old cinema of attractions, “a little bit of vaudeville in a modern film.”41 At the same time, however, the gaucho dance sequence renegotiates the relationship between spectacle and storytelling in film. The strategies of controlling and multiplying the viewer's gaze call attention to film as spectacle and film viewing as spectatorship, while the dance itself, with its overt eroticism, highlights the ways in which gender and sexuality are constructed by the observed, embodied being. The entire sequence, however, is embedded within a narrative framework that lends emotional depth and complexity to the scene's obvious eroticism.

The blatant sensuality of Nielsen's performance in the gaucho dance still surprises modern audiences and embarrasses undergraduate film students, but it is worth noting that Nielsen's enactment of erotic desire is far more suggestive than explicit, leaving much to the imagination. In 1924 the influential Hungarian-born film commentator and theorist Béla Balázs described the subtlety of Nielsen's sexual appeal as “spiritualized eroticism”:

She is never undressed, she does not show her thighs like Anita Berber…, and yet this dancing harlot could take lessons from Asta Nielsen. Her belly dancing is tame compared to Asta Nielsen fully dressed…. [Asta Nielsen's] spiritualized eroticism is demonically dangerous, since it works at a distance through all of her clothes.42

Rather than attempting to shock audiences by baring her skin or depicting lewd behavior, Nielsen revealed her character's sensuality through her body language and smoldering gazes, as she later explained, “Unfamiliar as I was with the restraint required by film in erotic matters, I invested my rhythmic undertaking with all the longing, disappointed love, and burning passion that I could.”43 When she first saw the footage, Nielsen was taken aback by its “explosiveness” and was sure the dance would be censored, but the “pain and suffering” evident in her face throughout the dance provided “the fig leaf behind which the dance slipped past the censors.”44 Although censors in Norway, Sweden, and the United States continued to see Nielsen's eroticism, spiritualized or not, as a social danger, and cut the dance scene from the film entirely,45 in Denmark and Germany the film was merely designated as forbidden for children.

Yet although The Abyss invested Nielsen with an instant reputation for eroticism, contemporary reviews of the film suggest that her popularity did not depend, either primarily or exclusively, on her sex appeal. In a characteristic review in the Danish journal Masken in November 1910, the author praises Nielsen's acting abilities and laments that the prevailing taste for Viennese operettas in Copenhagen could not effectively utilize her “Baroque” style. He rejoices, however, that the medium of film is able to maximize both the effect and extent of Nielsen's talents.

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