In 1916, the Norwegian actress Aud Egede-Nissen joined female film pioneers all over the world – although most unaware of each other – when she founded a company under her own name in Berlin: the Egede Nissen Film Compagnie. Aud Egede-Nissen was a woman of many “firsts”: the first Norwegian woman to run a film company, the first to be credited as a producer, and the first to direct motion pictures. The scale of her output was remarkable: between 1916 and 1919, her company produced 29 feature films—nearly double the entire national output of Norway during that same decade. This PhD project reveals a striking discrepancy between Aud Egede-Nissen’s significant agency and her subsequent invisibility in the writing of film history.
Aud Egede-Nissen’s success was paradoxical, as she broke through legal and social barriers at a time and in a society where women were placed under a husband’s tutelage and discouraged from professional life. On-screen and in real life, Aud Egede-Nissen positioned herself where no woman had yet gone and in professions where women were not yet accepted. She negotiated the circumstances of an industry whose parameters—political, technological, and economic—were constantly changing. This dissertation investigates how Egede-Nissen negotiated the shifting parameters of a male-dominated industry to fill the prestigious role of a producer. Stardom served as the essential prerequisite that provided Egede-Nissen with the financial leverage to establish an eponymous company and exercise comprehensive creative autonomy over her own screenplays, roles, and production members
Through the films she produced—and often starred in—Aud Egede-Nissen engaged with the social and moral complexities facing women in WWI-Germany. She related these films to contemporary discourse on women’s societal role and amelioration. The Egede Nissen Film Compagnie released films in various genres; most of its output was in the melodramatic mode. In these melodramas, she explored women’s lives as they played out in deeply divided societies, and the films asked questions about women’s societal role— questions that gained urgency because they concerned issues that had not yet been resolved at a societal level.
Maria Fosheim Lund successfully defended her thesis on 1 June 2026.
Trial lecture
Designated topic: Speculative film historiography: theorising archival gaps.
Evaluation committee
- Professor Dagmar Brunow, Linnæus University (first opponent)
- Professor Malte Hagener, Philipps-Universität Marburg (second opponent)
- Professor Liv Hausken, University of Oslo (committee administrator)
Chair of the defence
- Professor Gunnar Liestøl, University of Oslo
Supervisors
- Professor Espen Ytreberg, University of Oslo
- Professor Jane Gaines, Columbia University