 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
|
| Hamlet | |||
“Forget Anonymous. The craziest, most revelatory Shakespeare conspiracy theory film of the year was Sven Gade and Heinz Schall’s 1921 Hamlet… As Hamlet, born female but raised male to ensure the succession, Asta Nielsen – out-Garbo-ing Garbo – put the antic in Romantic with every precise and balletic gesture of yearning and despair, torn between Horatio and Ophelia more than duty and honour. A dazzling argument for the performative power of silent cinema, even treating a play of ‘Words, words, words’.” – Sophie Mayer, Sight & Sound "Some of the most memorable images from films of the 1930s are based on the idea of strong women who resist, even dissolve, gender boundaries: Dietrich, dressed in a man’s suit, offering a rare lesbian kiss in Blonde Venus; Hepburn convincing us she’s a boy in Sylvia Scarlett; Garbo as a mannish ruler, staring into the camera at the end of Queen Christina. If audiences were not entirely unprepared for such imagery, it was probably because of another star with a single name who was doing the same thing more than two decades earlier. This is not mere speculation; Garbo herself acknowledged the woman who co-starred with her in The Joyless Street, saying “she taught me everything I know”. The spiritual godmother of these women was Asta Nielsen, an unjustly forgotten Danish silent movie actress who is often called “the first great international star.” Asta, or “Die Asta” … made 74 films between 1910 and 1932. At first glance she seems an unlikely diva. Her enormous dark eyes, thin lips, masklike face, and slender, boyish figure contrast starkly with prevailing female body norms. But Asta, who started her own production company in 1921, became the model of the self-made, self-possessed androgynous artiste… One of Asta’s most interesting productions of the 1920s was Hamlet (1921). There was certainly precedent for major stage actresses playing male roles — Eleanora Duse did it often. But Asta brings a subtle twist to her version not by playing a man, but by playing a woman disguised as a man, adding another level of gender complexity. Hamlet was based less on Shakespeare than on a popular book of the time that said Hamlet was actually a girl forcibly raised as a boy in order to provide an heir to the Danish throne. At first the effect is more puzzling than effective, but the actress’s strategy becomes evident in sexually charged scenes between Asta/Hamlet and Horatio, who caress … in what surely appeared to viewers of the time … as a gay tryst. Asta brilliantly imparts the gender-unstable nature of the character in these scenes with Horatio and others with Fortinbras, whose encounters with Hamlet are also clearly coded as gay. The actress’s effortless creation of these subtle, sympathetic homosexual tableaux gives a tremendous vitality to this production. The fact that the film was truly hers — being the first film she made with her own production company — shows just how daring and modern she was." – Gary Morris, Bright Lights Film Journal Presented in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut. |
|
||
| Germany 1921 | |||
Directors: Svend Gade, Heinz Schall With: Asta Nielsen (Hamlet), Paul Conradi (King Hamlet), Mathilde Brandt (Queen Gertrude), E. von Winterstein (Claudius), Heinz Stieda (Horatio), Hans Junkermann (Polonius), Anton de Verdier (Laertes), Lilly Jacobsson (Ophelia), Fritz Achterberg (Fortinbrass) 111 mins, DV (4:3), black and white German intertitles with English subtitles M cert Auckland Film Society |
|||
