“The story in brief: a still beautiful and still highly-accomplished singer says to her young lover, ‘No, we don’t want to get married, l’m too old for you’. The young lover then commits a mur­der because of her and is sent to prison for ten years. ‘I’ll wait for you’, she calls to him, and for ten long years the young man in his cell dreams of his beloved, picturing her as radiantly beautiful, like she was when they first met. But in the course of the ten years, the woman grows old and ugly. What is more – like every fanatical artist, Asta Nielsen goes to extremes – she even become repulsive. Sickness and misery draw her into the abyss of depravity. (How Nielsen portrays this! The fury with which this woman rubs salt in her wounds!) Then the great day comes. The shabby old woman with the ravaged face stands trembling in front of the prison gate from which the young man is about to emerge. He appears. He is convinced that his beloved is waiting him for him. He looks round. He walks slowly, looking everyone in the face. He sees a shabby old woman leaning half-faint against a tree – and passes her by, sadly. His beloved did not wait for him. What we see then are more than a hundred metres of Nielsen’s face in close-up! A flutter of hope, deathly fright, eyes calling stridently for help, then tears – visible, real – running down her gaunt cheeks, which suddenly, before our very eyes, wilt, as a soul dies – right there on the face of Asta Nielsen. We perceive all this close up and clearly, like the surgeon who holds the pulsating heart in his hand and counts the last beats”.

Béla Balazs, Schriften zum Film, Band 1: “Der sichtbare Mensch. Kritiken und Aufsatze 1922-1926”, Suhrkamp, Munchen, 1982