Lis, daughter of a Count, is due to meet her future husband. She gazes in joyful anticipation at a drawing which shows an imposing figure with a moustache. But the man chosen for her doesn’t end up living up to what Lis imagines. To her dismay, he proves to be a young unassuming type, shy and utterly inexperienced in matters of love. Spontaneously, Lis takes her fiancé on an unexpected, special educational journey. Luring him to Paris, she teaches him what love is really all about – even dressing as a man – frequenting grand hotels, bars and dance clubs.

Taking great delight in grotesque physical comedy, Asta Nielsen’s film presents supposedly archetypal male behaviour. On 19.8.1916, the film publication Erste Internationale Filmzeitung wrote: »The ABC of Love gives Asta Nielsen the chance to play the male role. She pulls off a brilliant caricature of a young, light-headed man about town.« The ABC of Love revels in Nielsen’s ability to transform herself into something different and in the fine details of her switching from one gender to another while maximising the comic effect of it.

Born 1881 in Copenhagen, Asta Nielsen was the first European film star to gain worldwide fame. She began her career in Denmark in 1910, and by 1911 already had a contract with the German film company Projektions-AG »Union«, with almost all her films shot in Berlin. In the 1910s she developed a special kind of feature film aesthetic, teaming up with the likes of cinematographer Guido Seeber and also author and director Urban Gad, to whom she was married for several years. In 1916 she then returned to Denmark, only coming back to Germany after the First World War. In the Weimar Republic, she worked with directors like Ernst Lubitsch, Georg Wilhelm Pabst or Joe May, but also set up her own production company to enable her to retain some autonomy over what she did. Her first sound film came out in 1932 – and it was also the very last film of her career: Unmögliche Liebe (Impossible Love).