Muybridge and mobility with an introduction

film, alongside her screen work. So in addition to on-set anecdotes and accounts of diplomatic controversies at her hot-ticket promotional appearances, this book offers an insight into the divergent paths of stage and screen practice, and stardom, in the 1920s. Nielsen records these changes, and she makes film history happen. Allen’s publication makes it happen all over again. Nielsen’s experience was of course coloured by her success. She accumulates many victories and compliments across the course of the book, but the tone is not entirely triumphalist. This is partly because she is recounting the highlights of her career from a distance, after the slightly humbling experience of returning to Denmark, the country she left in order to achieve stardom, where she found herself much less revered, even resented. Tactfully, all she conveys of this comedown is a recollection of her fear as she leaves Germany: ‘What place do I have in a country that has become so foreign to me?’ (312) The story she tells is also a selective one. Nielsen is rigorously coy about her private life, including lovers and husbands only when (or if) they are artistic collaborators and making no mention of her daughter. She writes in an epilogue, ‘my book was intended to paint a picture of my work in film and the theater, which audiences have a right to know something about, that is to say a picture of me that belongs to the public’ (315). While this may frustrate readers of a biographical bent, Nielsen’s conviction that her work, rather than her romances, is of primary interest is central to her star identity. Nielsen’s creations on screen, like her creation on the printed page, are her own, and therefore the true ‘Die Asta’ – the public persona of a complex and brilliant woman.