Der Totentanz
R: Urban Gad, D: Asta Nielsen, Oskar Fuchs, Fritz Weidemann, D 1912, rekonstruierte Fassung, 36‘
Bella’s husband listens while she is playing the lute. A sudden ring and the engineer is ordered to his factory. An explosion injures him there and sparks a series of tragic events: Bella has to pick up a job as a vaudeville singer …
A fire flickering in the fire place, Bella’s husband listens while she is playing the lute. A sudden ring of the phone interrupts the cozy scene, calling him to his work place. An explosion at the factory injures him there and sparks a series of tragic events: not able to support her family otherwise, Bella has to pick up a job as a vaudeville singer. She falls in love with a composer and the breach of her matrimonial vow finally leads to her death.
“Scandalous!” a critic rants in 1913. Especially alarmed by Asta Nielsen’s dance performance, that she describes as an “oriental belly dance, snake-like, with the movements of a panther, clearly aiming at the sensual drives”, she demands “a lady of virtue should not awaken a man’s desires only to kill him in the end”. Maybe the critic is right – if it just didn’t look so beautiful on the big screen!

Die Filmprimadonna
R: Urban Gad, D: Asta Nielsen, Paul Otto, Fritz Weidemann, D 1913, rekonstruierte Fassung, 17‘
Asta Nielsen portrays a film star that attempts to influence every artistic decision during the process of film making. She falls ill and dies during the shot of her last scene.
In 1928 a newspaper journalist asked actress Asta Nielsen about artistic freedom. This is what she had to say: “With ‘Komödianten’ it was like this: Asta’s child dies, Asta has her main take, and everything else was left to me.”
In a marvelous way, “Die Filmprimadonna” gives proof of how Asta Nielsen regarded the process of film making as a process entirely controlled by herself. From script writing to print duplication, the film star that Nielsen portrays, oversees every step to assure the quality of the feature film. An exhausting task that is hard to live up to! The prima donna, while fatally in love with a philandering imposter, and at the same time desired by a young writer, falls ill. Her final performance will also become her own finale – a last dance and it’s a wrap! At least for the film within the film. In real life “Die Filmprimadonna” marks Asta Nielsen’s departure from Babelsberg and her start in the newly erected Tempelhof studios.