“Lower the flags in her honor; she is incomparable and without peer.” So wrote early film theorist Béla Balázs of Asta Nielsen in his 1924 book, Der Sichtbare Mensch /The Visible Man, arguing that the Danish actress’s capacity for expressive gesture transcended language, producing an emotional meaning, a felt sensibility, that was uniquely cinematic. It was also decidedly sensual. Indeed, anyone who has had the privilege of watching Nielsen's sinuous, writhing body as she lassos a hapless gaucho in the famous dance scene from her first film, Afgrunden /The Abyss (aka Woman Always Pays, 1910), will understand why her name became a symbol of emancipated femininity in innumerable countries almost overnight. This shocking expression of female sexual desire—this dance that declares lust and pride, longing and addiction, aggression and eroticism—reminds us that the history of cinema, at its finest, is a sensory affair, an affective charge that moves people in often unpredictable ways.

When I first saw “Die Asta” on-screen at the 2002 Giornate D’el Cinema Muto festival in Pordenone, Italy, the theater shimmered with an irrepressible energy. The film was Engelein /Up to Her Tricks (aka Little Angel, 1914), a comedy in which the thirty-two-year-old actress plays a seventeen-yearold girl pretending to be twelve in order that her uncle does not realize that her birth preceded her parents’ marriage. This somewhat bizarre plot intensifies when Jesta becomes attracted to her uncle. I can think of no other actress who could make this role not only believable but also whimsical, poignant, and strangely erotic. In one memorable scene, Asta as Jesta sits at a desk wearing a loose pinafore, carefully placing flowers one by one around a love letter she has written to her uncle. She is a gauche teenager, aching with unrequited love. But, as she swivels on the chair, spine curving slightly as she hugs herself and sighs, she glances down at her bare knee. Suddenly, she becomes a prepubescent girl. She pulls her knee up, fully absorbed, and begins to pick at what may be a scab or bruise. Is she child or woman? Innocent or decadent? Cherub or temptress? As Asta/Jesta swiveled back to the desk, cradling her uncle's pipe and miming a sucking gesture, I stood up, swept to my feet with fellow festivalgoers as the theater roared with applause.

Although she only ever visited the United States once, for an inadvertent six-month stay in New York City in the middle of World War I, the Danish silent-film star Asta Sofie Amalie Nielsen (1881–1972), who grew up in Malmö, Sweden, and Copenhagen, Denmark, embodied the American dream of a self-made woman. Raised in urban poverty owing to her father's chronic disability, Nielsen fought fiercely to become a theater actor, achieving modest success onstage in Scandinavia in the 1900s and considerably more in Germany in the 1920s and ’30s. While impressive, however, becoming an actor is not a particularly unusual accomplishment, nor does it explain why Asta Nielsen's picture was hung in soldiers’ barracks on both sides of the conflict in World War I, her name attached to hairstyles and menu items from Bangkok to Brisbane, and her praises sung by contemporary critics and modern scholars. To understand why Asta Nielsen became world-famous and remains historically significant, we need to look to her phenomenal contributions to the early film industry and her success at elevating the new medium from the fairground to high art. Through her seventy-two multireel narrative feature films, made in Denmark and Germany between 1910 and 1932, “Die Asta” became one of the first global stars of early film with a legacy of innovative, influential work, though her name is hardly remembered in the English-speaking world today.

Nielsen's is a rags-to-riches story of astonishing success achieved through talent, grit, and good timing: when she made her first film, Afgrunden/The Abyss (1910), which ran for an audacious forty-five minutes, she found herself on the leading edge of the wave of multireel feature films that would soon replace short films as the program standard. To some extent, Nielsen was just lucky to be in the right place at the right time, a gifted actor eager to make her mark just as the new technology of filmmaking matured enough to tell serious, extended stories. From her first film, with its melodramatic pathos and sensational gaucho dance, Nielsen went on to take the world by storm, astonishing audiences with the expressivity of her huge dark eyes, the versatility of her mobile face, the eroticism of her fully clothed body, and the consistent courage of the ethnically and socially diverse characters she played.

When I look back on my life, I see a narrow, sun-drenched path winding through it. It is covered with tiny little flowers in lovely, tender colors that a slender white hand never grew tired of sowing. The blossoms of every good thing stand here in a row, nodding to each other in fond understanding, hidden emotions, gentle thoughts, and deep harmonious joy. Their perfume is love, their name is sister.

She was called Johanne, and she was four and a half years older than me. I see her walking along the tiled edge of a gutter that seems endlessly wide to me as it carries a rushing river of cornflower-blue water away from a dye shop up the street. The sun bakes the small provincial street, so she holds a fragile little mahogany table over her head like a parasol to protect herself from the sun's rays.

My parents told me later that this memory picture must belong to the day when our sparse household goods arrived from Copenhagen in Malmö [Sweden], where my father—after a long period of unemployment—had gotten a job, thanks to my mother's brother, as a journeyman miller at Malmö's large steam mill, where my uncle held a rather high-level post.

I was one and a half years old at the time. My parents had only us two children; their first-born child had died at a year old, to my mother’s passionate sorrow, which, although it gradually became milder, lasted for many years. I remember accompanying her, as a grown girl, to the baby’s grave in Assistens Cemetery. She visited the grave every spring, picking a spray of white blossoms from a lovely low, thick-trunked tree that spread its white glamour over the nondescript grave. It appeared even smaller owing to the small gray circle of cement holding a few straggling flowers in the middle, while the harshness of the passing seasons had eradicated every trace of the hedge that had once guarded the child's rightful property.

As long as we lived in Malmö, my mother's sister sent her a spray of flowers from the grave, which lived a brief half-life in a glass of water on the dresser for a few days, after which they were placed in the uppermost drawer on top of my mother's confirmation hymnbook.

At a time when almost no one took film seriously as an art form, it was my firm intention to devote all my energies to the artistic possibilities that I had sensed, during the making of my first film, lay dormant in the medium. I knew that the way would be long and difficult, leading through many detours and countless compromises, but I doubt that I would have had the courage to embark on this task if I had truly understood the terrifying world of former confectionaries, itinerant showmen, and agents who had taken control of the industry at that time.

The success of The Abyss resulted in an offer to make two films with Deutsche Bioscop in Berlin. With cheerful blindness, I threw myself, with all my pent-up desire to perform, into an industry that had the single thought, the exclusive goal of selling any and all products for the greatest economic gain. The masses had to be won over for this to succeed, which was accomplished most quickly and easily by joining forces with the cheapest types of entertainment.

In America, recent immigrants from Eastern Europe became the pioneers. They abandoned their laboriously constructed businesses in that foreign land in order to catch the flood of small coins that flowed unceasingly into the cashboxes of the cinemas from the masses thirsting for entertainment. The most primitive feelings and urges, which, as is well known, are just as present in a Chinese coolie as in the sons of high society around the world, became the basic motifs of film. The fantasies of the masses had to be satisfied at all costs. If reality denied them, the silver screen supplied them for a few cents. The leap from being a poor young secretary to becoming the celebrated and envied wife of the big boss was presented as so easy and straightforward that only complete idiots would fail to undertake it. The chance of a beggar becoming a millionaire appeared to lie so obviously and obtrusively in every man's path that it could only be avoided by a miracle. Hope was offered to everyone who played in the lottery of fate, with a winner every time, and the lottery tickets, those small, optimistically colored stubs, were cheap and accessible to everyone.

Some of my readers may wonder why I have not discussed at all in these memoirs the side of my life that must have seemed most important to me, as a woman: love. It was in fact the melody of my life, though in a rather different key than usual. The only truly great love my heart has known is my only child, my daughter.

But 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. And, in fact, my daughter should have appeared in my book. For the experience of having a child means so immeasurably much for an actress's development, for her personal and artistic aura, so much that I can sense an indefinable lack in an actress who has never had a child.

I had two reasons for deciding not to mention her. First, I wanted to retain the right to protect the most important parts of my life for myself—that's how selfish a person can be. Second, if I had even started to talk about my daughter, I worry that there would not have been the least room left for anything else. If I were to try to convey the smallest part of the happiness and joys she has brought me from the first moment she was able to feel and think, then my book would be as extensive as the Bible.

I have long since retired from public performances, but that does not mean that my existence is static. My artistic impulses have found expression in a long-cherished love for painting. I have created a new form of painting, not with a brush and pigments but rather with colorful fabrics, from which I piece together people and animals, landscapes and flowers. Two Danish art dealers have put on exhibitions of my work, and fate has once more smiled on me and granted me new success.

And thus, after many wonderful experiences and many tempests, my life has found harmony. Whoever is able to hear the melodies of silence is able to enjoy symphonies of unfamiliar beauty.

Newspapers, magazine and literary supplements, dates of analysis and archive information.

Parameters of Analysis

The intention in undertaking this analysis was to gain an understanding of how the British press has discussed and used magical realism in relation to Latin America. As the general search term ‘Latin America’ returned far too many results to permit a close analysis of articles within the time frame of this project, however, search terms were restricted to specific terms such as ‘magical realism’, ‘magic realism’ and ‘lo real maravilloso’, in addition to the names of prominent Latin American magical realist authors and closely related authors of fantastic literature. Search terms therefore also consisted of: ‘Isabel Allende’, ‘Miguel Ángel Asturias’, ‘Jorge Luis Borges’, ‘Alejo Carpentier’, ‘Cortázar’, ‘José Donoso’, ‘Laura Esquivel’, ‘Carlos Fuentes’, ‘García Márquez’, ‘Juan Rulfo’ and ‘Vargas Llosa’. Forenames were included if surnames alone once again generated too many results to permit a close analysis within the time frame of the project, or if surnames alone returned articles relating to figures who were not the author. If too many results were still generated by these search terms (for example, more than fifty articles for one search term in one decade and one newspaper alone), and thereby threatened to impede the process of analysis, the search was narrowed by including additional terms alongside authors’ names, such as ‘magic’ and/or ‘Latin America’. In the case of the London Review of Books, search terms were entered into the Review’s website to find relevant articles, and then read using the University of Manchester’s hard copy archive.

Post-Screening Questionnaire

Dear Sir/Madam, I would be most grateful if you could answer a couple of brief questions for me as part of my research (please continue overleaf if you need more space):

• 1) What did you like/dislike about this film?

• 2) What did the film tell you about Latin America?

Please circle as appropriate: I am male/female aged 20 or below / 21–30 / 31–40 / 41–50 / 51–60 / 61–70 / 71+

If you would be willing to discuss ¡Viva! and Latin America in more depth with me, please provide a contact email address or telephone number: ________________________________________________________

Thank you very much for your time, Nicola Jones, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester.

Post-Screening Questionnaire Respondent Profile (Sex/Age)

List of Interview Questions

Part One: ¡Viva!

• 1) Why do you go to ¡Viva!?

• 2) What do you like/dislike about the festival?

• 3) How often have you been to the festival?

• 4) How do you choose what films to see?

• 5) Are there any films you particularly liked/disliked this year? What did they tell you about Latin America?

• 6) Were there any films you particularly liked/disliked in previous years? What did they tell you about Latin America?

• 7) Has ¡Viva! changed over the years?

• 8) What do the lead images of the festival say to you? Do they appeal to you, and why?

• 9) How does ¡Viva! portray Latin America? Do you think ¡Viva! offers an authentic portrayal of Latin America?

• 10) If you could organise ¡Viva!, what would you like to see?

Part Two: Latin America in General

• 11) How would you describe Latin American culture?

• 12) How else do you experience Latin American culture in Manchester? In general?

• 13) Have you ever been to Latin America? If so, tell me about it. Was your experience what you were expecting?

• 14) Are you familiar with the concept of magical realism? There is an idea that this is reflective of Latin American culture. Do you agree with this based on your knowledge and experience of Latin American culture?

• 15) How does Latin American culture compare/contrast with Spanish culture? With British culture?

Culture plays a fundamental role in the development and promotion, both national and international, of twenty-first-century Manchester. As Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester City Council since 1996, stated in the 2010 prospectus for Manchester’s cultural ambition: ‘The past decade has seen culture transform the experience of living and working in the city. As a consequence, culture now matters more than ever to Manchester’s many communities ….The city’s cultural potential is now fundamental to its future economic and social potential and to our ambition as a world-class city’ (Manchester Cultural Partnership, 2010, p. 4).. In this chapter, I examine how the specific notion of culture promoted by city officials, which was encouraged through a programme of culture-led urban regeneration in Manchester during the 1980s and 1990s, has centred on the development of high-brow cultural institutions and events, such as museums and arts festivals, as well as the formation of cultural quarters. While some of these, particularly the latter, incorporate local immigrant culture into the cultural landscape of the city, such inclusion only occurs when the culture of local immigrants is deemed to contribute significantly to the city’s economy and/or cosmopolitan image. Moreover, it is a formulaic and exoticised production of this culture that is visible within Manchester. Such a construction presents the consumer with a familiar Other, one they recognise from cultural stereotypes and which has also been hybridised with British cultural norms to enable its easier consumption. Despite Manchester’s long history of immigration and its reputation as one of the most multicultural cities in the UK (University of Manchester, 2013), the production and consumption of local immigrant culture coincides with studies of cosmopolitan consumption discussed in chapter 1, in which consumers seek to perform ‘safe’ and ‘uncomplicated’ cosmopolitan identities. Such identities centre on a temporary engagement with a cultural Other which bestows cultural capital but entails minimal interaction with immigrants themselves and requires little transformation or self-reflection on the part of the consumer (see Buettner, 2008; Delanty, 2009; Gilroy, 2004; Tanaka, 2008; Torres and Buriel, 2010).

In contrast to other local immigrant cultures, such as Chinese or South Asian, which benefit from a history of substantial migration to the city, Latin American culture has only emerged in Manchester in the last few decades.

In order to examine one way in which Latin America has been encoded in the UK at a discursive level during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this chapter presents an analysis of Latin American magical realism in the British press from 1940 to 2015. Prior to the 1990s, Latin American culture, through mediums such as film, food, music and sport, was much less globalised than it is today. Travel to the region remained expensive for the majority of the British public and Latin America constituted an unpopular destination due to the region’s growing association with revolutions, dictatorships, guerrilla warfare and drug barons throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Literature was therefore a primary way in which Latin America was consumed in the UK and, during the second half of the twentieth century, magical realism became the foremost literary style associated with the region. In this chapter, I trace how magical realism became synonymous with the idea of Latin America in the British national press and how, over several decades, this association was mediated into a set of complementary codes, themes and journalistic narrative techniques that similarly came to exemplify Latin America. I begin by highlighting how the idea of Latin America and its literature in the press during the 1940s and 1950s was one of exoticism. The literature of the region then became associated with the surreal and unconventional in the 1960s as a result of the work of the Boom writers. Following the worldwide success of Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967) (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970), and the global expansion of Latin American magical realism, similar notions of strangeness and surrealism were gradually transferred to Latin America itself. For example, from 1967 and throughout the 1970s, academics and journalists in the press began to use words and themes concerning magic, mystery and unreality to describe the region. By the end of the twentieth century, despite the many scholars, literary journalists and Latin American writers who had begun to vociferously critique the association, these codes and themes deriving from magical realism had become a ‘primary interpretation’ (Hall et al., 1978) when describing Latin American cultural reality in the British press.