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Asphalt (Masters Of Cinema)
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Our DVD Price: £15.99 RRP: 
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Film Description
One of the last great films of the silent era and set in the traffic-strewn Berlin of the late 1920s, Asphalt is a love story which begins when a well-dressed lady steals a precious stone from a jewellery shop. The policeman who catches her gradually succumbs to her charms, but her criminal background dooms their relationship. Betty Amann's salacious sensuality, May's grand direction, the spectacular sets and the photography of Guenther Rittau make this largely unknown film a major rediscovery.
Film Information
| Director | Joe May | ||||
| Starring | Betty Amann, Gustav Frohlich
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| Genre | Silent Film
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| Country | Germany | Language | SILENT | Year | 1929 |
DVD Extras
New restored transfer; Original German intertitles with optional English subtitles; Sumptuous new orchestral score by Karl-Ernst Sasse; new English subtitle translation; 16-page booklet with a new essay by film historian R. Dixon Smith.
Technical Details
| Certificate | PG | Length | 94 mins | Label | EUREK | ||
| Cat No | EKA40088 | Format | DVD | Colour | |||
| Region | 2 | Aspect | 1.33:1 | ||||
| Subtitles | English . | ||||||
5 Stills
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Review by R. Dixon Smith on 23rd February 2005
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.
View more reviews by R. Dixon Smith
Article - "Film Preservation: The Nitrate Era "
by R. Dixon Smith
Monday 7th April 2008
The year is 1908. The steady torrent of coins increases daily in nickelodeon parlors throughout the world, and every two months the entire population of the globe is exceeded by the number of people patronizing the world’s movie theatres.
But within several... View article in full
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This film is part of the following Film Collections
Including: Abhijan (Masters Of Cinema), Asphalt (Masters Of Cinema), Assassination (Masters Of Cinema), Bellissima (Masters of Cinema), Diary Of A Lost Girl, Edvard Munch (Masters of Cinema), F For Fake, Fantastic Planet, Faust (Murnau), Francesco Giullare Di Dio (Masters Of Cinema).
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