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By 1929 the silent era had almost run its course in Europe. Talking pictures had already been launched in America in July 1928. As films began to depend more on dialogue than the artistic manipulation of visual images, more and more literal stage plays were photographed. Stories were told through words, not pictures; the marvellous ability to tell stories visually was, for a time, disregarded.
There are many examples of late silents that were far superior to early talkies, among them Abel Gance’s Napoleon, F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, Carl Th. Dreyer’s La passion de Jeanne d’Arc, and Dr. Arnold Fanck’s and G. W. Pabst’s Die weisse Hölle vom Piz Palü. One of the finest of these is Joe May’s Asphalt. A social-realist picture that belongs to a genre that the Germans call Strassenfilme (“street films”), Asphalt was made by Ufa, Germany’s most prestigious studio. It stars Betty Amann as a cheap shoplifter, and Gustav Fröhlich, the star of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, as the police constable whom she seduces.
Asphalt itself is the film’s central visual motif. The documentary-like prologue shows, through rapid and highly ryhthmic montage, the making of asphalt—night-time road construction, the application of hot asphalt to the roadway, sweat-begrimed road-workers pounding the raw material down with their implements—and how its use permits the thundering chaos of the city’s traffic, its automobiles and trams, its buses and advertisements. Although it lasts but a minute and a half, this opening sequence—with its occasional snatches of abstract geometric patterns—is one of the most beautiful montage sequences in all cinema.
It is said that every two months the entire population of the globe was exceeded in number by the total of all who visited the world’s silent films. Joe May’s Asphalt survives as a reminder of why this was so.

 

R. Dixon Smith on 23rd February 2005
View all 19 of R. Dixon Smith's reviews