“The film The Great Moment deals with a classic women’s theme, namely, motherhood. In doing so it combines melodramatic with very realistic components, so that clear borderlines are difficult to draw. The initial fascination which the film awakened in me had to do with its final scene, a red-tinted conflagration, the high point in a drama about a poor young mother forced to give her beloved child up for adoption. The strong emotions unleashed by this impressed me so much that my main focus, when engaging with the film, was to work out the melodramatic elements. Having watched it a second time, however, it transpired that my memory of that overwhelming red did not just draw its force from the film’s dramatic end, but had already been anticipated in the conflicts surrounding the child. The film is about living and surviving under difficult circumstances, about loss and pain, but also about pow­er play. The red frenzy at the end provides an emotional and aes- thetic pleasure, but what proved more lasting in the analysis were the perspectives on motherhood and the relationship between the two women fighting for the child. The film is about love, but also and quite unsentimentally about possession of the child; in the sacrifice at the end natural motherhood asserts itself, but it is not presented as the only guarantee of the child’s well-being”.

Heike Klippel, “Roter Rausch”, in Sprache der Liebe, Asta Nielsen, ihre Filme, ihr Kino 1910-1933, Filmarchivs Austria, Vienna, 2007 (forthcoming)