The Masters of Cinema Series

Catalogue

Ufa Style and the End of Silent Cinema in Joe May’s Asphalt

by R. Dixon Smith, 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 the earliest motion pictures had afforded the novelty of movement for movement’s sake, so the first talkies were popular merely because they talked. Overnight, the cinema had lost its sophistication and became primitive all over again; a novelty killed a highly perfected art. The limitations of early sound films were many, and the first talkies were generally inferior to the later silents. Mechanical limitations were the worst liabilities. The camera now had to be encased in a soundproof booth to prevent its whirring mechanism from reaching the microphones, thereby rendering the camera crudely immobile, inflexible, and stationary. The microphone was usually hidden in a stage prop, away from which the actors could not stray, thereby restricting and limiting the action to a narrower stage. As films began to depend more on dialogue than the artistic manipulation of visual images, more and more literal stage plays were photographed, which relied less and less on creative editing. Dialogue simply supplanted camerawork; because of lengthy dialogue passages, scenes lasted longer, cuts were relatively fewer. Stories were told through words, not pictures; the marvellous ability to tell stories visually was, for a time, disregarded. The coming of sound ruined the universality of silent pictures; or, put another way, a picture is indeed worth a thousand words.

There are many examples of late silents that were far superior to early talkies, among them F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt, King Vidor’s The Crowd, Carl Th. Dreyer’s La passion de Jeanne d’Arc, Paul Leni’s The Man Who Laughs, Josef von Sternberg’s The Docks of New York, Victor Sjöström’s The Wind, Marco de Gastyne’s La merveilleuse vie de Jeanne d’Arc, E. A. Dupont’s Piccadilly, G. W. Pabst’s Die Büchse der Pandora, Alexander Dovzhenko’s Arsenal, Hanns Schwarz’ Die wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrowna, Anthony Asquith’s A Cottage on Dartmoor, 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. May is best remembered for the two-part Das indische Grabmal (1921), co-scripted by Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, and starring Conrad Veidt, and for Asphalt. Born Julius Otto Mandl in Vienna, he adopted the name May from his actress wife’s stage name, Mia May. He began directing films in Berlin in 1912 and founded his own production company, May-Film, in 1915. He quickly became one of the most prolific of the early German film pioneers.

By the mid-‘20s, German Expressionist films largely gave way to the spirit of die neue Sachlichkeit (“the new objectivity�), a matter-of-fact probing of psychological and social problems. The crises of the immediate post–First World War period had seen wild improvisation in the arts in Germany, while the comparative stability of the second half of that decade inspired a desire for reality and permanence. Social realism replaced fantasy. Many of the social-realist films of this period belong to a genre that the Germans call Strassenfilme (“street films�), sordid and commonplace stories of social disintegration, poverty, starvation, and prostitution, the most representative of which are Karl Grune’s Die Strasse (1923), G. W. Pabst’s Die freudlose Gasse (1925), and Bruno Rahn’s Dirnentragödie (1927).

Asphalt was made by Ufa, Germany’s most prestigious studio, and produced by the legendary Erich Pommer, responsible for such classics as Die Spinnen, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Der müde Tod, Das indische Grabmal, Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, Die Nibelungen, Michael, Der letzte Mann, Varieté, Tartüff, Faust, Metropolis, and Spione. Joe May co-wrote the script. The sets were designed by Erich Kettelhut (Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, Metropolis, Berlin: Die Symphonie der Grossstadt), with the uncredited assistance of Robert Herlth (Der müde Tod, Der letzte Mann, Tartüff, Faust) and Walter Röhrig (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Tartüff, Faust). The cinematographer was Günther Rittau (Die Nibelungen, Metropolis, Der blaue Engel). The film starred Betty Amann as a cheap shoplifter; Gustav Fröhlich, the star of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, as the police constable whom she seduces; Hans Adalbert Schlettow, who had appeared in Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler and Die Nibelungen, as her criminal associate whom the young policeman kills in a fight; and veteran character actor Albert Steinrück, who had co-starred in Paul Wegener’s Der Golem: Wie er in die Welt kam, as the constable’s father, the Chief Constable; Steinrück died on 11 February 1929, exactly a month before Asphalt was released. The film was shot between October and December 1928 at the Ufa Studios in Neubabelsberg.

Asphalt was premiered on 11 March 1929 at Berlin’s prestigious Ufa-Palast am Zoo. Critics noted the cheap, pulp-fiction nature of the plot but also praised May’s skill and the stunning cinematography and editing. Fritz Walter, writing in the Berliner Börsen-Courier, called the conflict between duty and love “Die Banalität des Filmmanuskripts� (“the banality of the film script�).1 Film historian Lotte Eisner, writing in 1965, agreed:

Unhappily this deployment of abstract art remains external to the luxurious studio street à la Ufa, who were never ones to hesitate over a few extra buses or another hundred or so extras. So this self-styled ‘daring’ is not an integral part of the action, which is a wholly conventional love story.

Within this insipid plot Joe May occasionally remembers his artistic ambitions. Then we get the high-angle shot of the street where the young Fröhlich, the Führer of the crossroads, on duty as a policeman, dominates the traffic—a shot in which the German taste for ordered ornamentation comes through yet again.²

Eisner seemed content simply to criticise what she saw as May’s “pretensions to avant-garde artistryâ€?,³ Critic Siegfried Kracauer’s Frankfurter Zeitung review, on the other hand, found the direction appealing:

He has all the finesse of his craft, he accomplishes all that he wants to. There are few prose writers that can convey the posh couple’s taxi ride as tightly as he does. Similarly, the wide shots are used and sustained with enormous strength of style, and the roaming camera is extremely skilled in the way it reveals human co-existence and spaces.⁴

Eisner clearly found both film and director too slick and commercial. It is difficult to understand her disenchantment, however, especially when she conceded that:

The suggestive chiaroscuro of the early hours while the workmen lay the asphalt, and the shots of legs, feet and tools pounding the still-liquid mass, could come from some artistically made documentary. The climbing smoke, the gear-wheels of a steam-roller as it lumbers forward, and the various overprinted details of wheels owe their origin to the symphony of the machines in Metropolis. We have also tangled visions of simultaneous criss-crossing superimpositions, mingling, linking, and complementing each other as in Ruttmann’s Berlin or Richter’s Rennsymphonie, which attempted to capture the street’s meaning with an abstract, quintessential turmoil of traffic.⁵

Here we have a characteristic example of the pains Ufa always took to employ all the technical achievements of the art film in their box-office hits. Joe May leaves nothing out: he profits from the use of light and shade, depicts the road-workers from Ruttmann’s Berlin lit suggestively in the light of dawn, employs daring shots showing no more than their legs and their tools pounding the asphalt. Steam rises, the steam roller with its wheel gear dissolves in fade-ins and superimpositions. It’s like looking at one of those machine symphonies created by the French avant-garde.⁶

Asphalt itself is the film’s central visual motif. The documentary-like prologue shows, through rapid and highly rhythmic 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.

May’s pictorial style abounds in shots that excite the eye. In one montage sequence, we see images of heavy traffic. May employs a split screen as vehicles travel from all four corners of the screen to converge in the middle of the image; the first shot of the next scene, showing a bird cage, replaces the automobiles in the very centre of the shot in a short, smooth dissolve. The celebrated seduction scene in Else’s apartment is handled with similar imagination. She goes into another room, ostensibly to fetch her papers, while Constable Holk waits impatiently, absentmindedly holding her umbrella. The restless camera follows his gaze as he impatiently examines the flat. Her umbrella and his boots are shown together—contrasting images of femininity and masculinity. When she fails to reappear, Holk checks his watch and finally goes to look for her, only to find her in bed, wearing nothing but a black slip. Holk leaves the bedroom with Else in pursuit. She throws her arms around him and pleads with him, but he tears her arms from his neck and throws her to the floor. A low-angle shot shows her writhing on the floor, arching her body suggestively. Her body language clearly reveals her erotic intentions. As the constable attempts to leave, Else leaps upon him, wrapping her legs around his hips. Holk finally submits as she forcibly kisses him. May cuts to a low-angle shot of her bare feet rubbing up and down against his boots, as he finally drops her umbrella. The camera moves slightly from her feet to his policeman’s cap, which now lies on the floor—another contrast between femininity and masculinity. But this time the cap—that symbol of masculine authority—is seen to represent lost authority. The scene fades out. As film historian Hans Günther Pflaum puts it, “All that needs to be said has been saidâ€?⁷—visually and succinctly.

Asphalt was the culmination of Ufa’s studio-produced films. In Siegfried, the first of Fritz Lang’s two Nibelungen films, Siegfried rides through a huge oak forest. That forest was built entirely in the studio. F. W. Murnau created his city streets and the massive Hotel Adlon for Der letzte Mann within the same studio. Similarly, much of Asphalt takes place seemingly outdoors in bustling traffic. This too was created entirely in the studio. The montage sequence with which Asphalt begins has already been described in detail. This may well have been a triumph of style over substance—but what style.

Seen today, Asphalt is no more sordid or tawdry than E. A. Dupont’s Varieté (1925) or Josef von Sternberg’s Der blaue Engel (1930), two of the finest films ever made in Germany. If analysed objectively, for instance, The Blue Angel is a fairly cheap yarn centering on sex and sadism, but von Sternberg’s style made it one of the finest early sound classics produced in any country. So, too, because of its visual style, Asphalt has earned an enviable place in the history of German cinema.

Silent films had given mankind its first universal language. Within but three decades a crude novelty became the dominant cultural force of the mechanised world, and 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.

Footnotes

¹ – Fritz Walter in the Berliner Börsen-Courier, 12 March 1929, quoted in Gero Gandert, ed., Der Film der Weimarer Republik: 1929—Ein Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Kritik (Berlin and New York, Walter de Gruyter, 1993), p. 28.

² – Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), p. 267.

³ – Ibid.

⁴ – Siegfried Kracauer in the Frankfurter Zeitung, 28 March 1929, quoted in Hans Günther Pflaum, German Silent Movie Classics (Munchen and Wiesbaden: Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung and Transit Film, 2002), p. 146.

⁵ – Eisner, p. 266.

⁶ – Quoted in Pflaum, p. 147.

⁷ – Pflaum, p. 149.