What’s striking about the Danish actor Asta Nielsen’s debut film The Abyss, marketed in the English-speaking world in the 1910s as Woman Always Pays, is how frankly it acknowledges and depicts female desire and its costs, as the original English title makes plain. Asta’s character Magda is a buttoned-up, middle- class piano teacher engaged to a pastor’s son named Knud (Robert Dinesen), who runs off with a circus cowboy, driven by the desire for more—more passion, more freedom, more life. Tellingly, she meets the cowboy, Rudolf (Poul Reumert), immediately after declining to attend church with Knud and his parents. Rudolf introduces Magda to a more permissive but also more precarious milieu, but, by the middle of the forty-minute film, he is cheating on her with another performer (played by Emilie Sannom), and Magda has to learn how to fight for what she wants.
The famously provocative gaucho dance at the film’s center, so named because Rudolf and Magda’s outfits evoke those of South American cattle herders, puts Magda’s desire centerstage as they perform, with an implied theatrical audience largely offscreen to the right and the cinema audience watching from the wings. In her 1946 memoir, The Silent Muse, Asta describes the goal of the scene as transporting Nordic viewers to a more sensual, southern place: “Reumert and I, wearing a type of cowboy costumes, had the task of depicting in a dance number how earthly love, if common beliefs are correct, burns hotter and more passionately on the prairie than at our latitude.” At first Magda and Rudolf stomp their feet and fling their arms, then they circle each other, bumping their chests together, and finally she begins a sensuous dance, ties him up with her rope, and writhes against him with the back of her body for nearly a minute before pulling him to the ground and apparently biting his neck. Most of this part of the dance was improvised, as Asta confesses: “Pressed up close against him [Reumert], I undertook my lovesick writhing around the poor victim; ignorant as I was of the subtlety film requires in this discipline so foreign to me, I poured everything I knew of longing, disappointed love, and burning desire into my rhythmic endeavor.” As a twenty-nine-year-old working-class single mother struggling to make it in the competitive Copenhagen theater scene, Asta knew a lot about disappointment, longing, and desire. The sensuality of the scene is unmistakable and unprecedented on film—Asta recalled that when Reumert saw the scene for the first time, he cried out, “I was told the film was in a cold bath; IT REALLY NEEDED IT!” This dance sequence was so shocking for its time that the Swedish censor cut it out entirely; that prudishness is what preserved the dance sequence in pristine condition for nearly a century as most prints were replayed into illegibility across the world over the next several years.
It’s not just the physical eroticism of the dance that is shocking. No longer laced into a corset, Magda wears a snug satin dress unmarred by bra or stocking lines as she grinds against Rudolf’s bound body. The visibility of Magda’s existential desire, painted on her face and expressed through the movement of her hips, is even more compelling. She desperately wants to keep Rudolf and the unfettered life they have chased together. In western Europe in 1910, however, this was apparently too much for a woman to ask. At the end of the dance, Magda picks a fight with her rival, who is cozying up to Rudolf, and they lose their jobs. They slide down the social ladder to a café where Magda plays piano in the shadows while Rudolf drinks and plays cards with his friends. He seems to have lost interest in Magda entirely, at least until Knud turns up and arranges a meeting with Magda to offer her his assistance getting back into polite society. Rudolf bursts in and starts a fight with Knud, so Magda steps in to protect her former fiancé. In the struggle, Magda stabs Rudolf fatally with a table knife; in so doing, she kills her own dreams.
The final scene, when Magda is escorted, stone-faced, down the hotel stairs by the police, was actually the first scene of the film to be shot, marking Asta’s first performance in front of a movie camera. She asked Urban Gad, the director whom she would marry two years later and collaborate with on nearly three dozen films, if they could shoot the scene without rehearsing it at all first, so that she could simply “think herself” into the character’s emotions. Fortunately, he trusted her judgment, and the result is mesmerizing. The bleak desperation in Magda’s face as she is led away is not, I believe, meant to convey simply fear of punishment for Rudolf’s death, but rather the emptying out of her desires, the end of her hopes of freedom.
As is well-known, the dance sequence in The Abyss made the film a blockbuster and Asta Nielsen one of the first global film stars, an object of desire for producers, distributors, exhibitors, and moviegoers worldwide. Wanting to feel close to her, fans from Berlin to Singapore named cinemas, waltzes, cigarettes, and haircuts after her and poured out their hearts to her in letters; soldiers on both sides of World War I even hung picture postcards of her to decorate their trenches. Between 1910 and 1932, Asta made another seventy-one films in Denmark and Germany, many of which are funny, heart-wrenching, visually compelling, and thought-provoking—my favorites include Engelein (Little Angel), Das Eskimobaby, and Hamlet. Yet none of them conveys quite the same degree of raw sensuality and emotional force as The Abyss, perhaps because it came about due to Asta’s own intense desire to prove that she was capable of more than minor roles in Copenhagen theaters. Given the spotlight, she seized it and forever changed the history of film.
THE ABYSS preceded THE CLOWN at SFSFF 2026 and was also accompanied by Guenter Buchwald and Franck Bockius