I am human, and nothing beautiful bores me.

and that's it

B.K. Jun 15, 2020

I return to Asta and Urban. Urban Gad And the Star He Loved

Over half a year ago, I wrote an abundant essay about Urban Gad making the famous film "Afgrunden" with Asta Nielsen debuting on camera at the time. The essay was clumsy and boring. I erased it from this blog. I decided to write it again. This time I am going to present the events as if from Urban Gad's point of view. There is a lot written about Asta, but I came across the obvious idea that Great Asta would never exist if Urban was not madly in love with her. The thought of an essay about them, including Polish literary connections to the story of these two Danes, i.e. references to Bruno Schulz, has haunted me for many years.
I think that in a month or two I will finish the new essay.

It turned out after a newer review of the internet network that half a year ago, Mrs. Lisbeth Richter Larsen in the online magazine Kosmorama wrote a very interesting text about the forgotten Urban, and started it quite like me (although less pompously) that "without Urban Gad there would be no Asta Nielsen" .


I put here a piece from the new version of my essay:

(the title of the essay will be Urban Gad And the Star He Loved)

What did Urban know about Asta's acting that he dared to propose her performance in his film? He had no professional knowledge of acting studies, had no experience as a director, he knew as much about the secrets of theater as he saw when his mother's plays were being prepared. He probably didn't even make a minute of his own movie. But he could see the world like a painter and think like a painter. He imagined Asta as a model for portraiture, but not on canvas easels, but on the canvas of the movie screen. Urban, artistically sensitive, was fascinated by new art with a new way of creating images, in addition to moving ones. For most people, it was entertainment, new fashion, a stunning invention, or a magical daydream factory. For him - a new type of fine art. Let us remember that the film "didn't talk" then, the film images, although moving, were as silent as the images of Giotto, Rafael, and Van Gogh.

Urban Gad has discovered that Asta Nielsen's acting is filmogenic. He discovered that on the theater stage she was losing her talent. He imagined that he could paint this actress with light on a large canvas. If he knew, and he knew for certain, what kind of woman he would "paint" with the camera lens, then he could imagine in what forms on the palette of motion to display her.

A few weeks after his proposal, he showed Asta the manuscript, the first version of the script. Years later, she described her impressions of reading with zeal, which was not reduced by the passage of time - "He ignited in me a passionate desire to meet the challenge of acting. He looked at me and my talents through and through, sensing the possibilities of film drama."