climactic chord in silent cinema It is interesting to note that this tape, as a rule, attributed to German expressionism, is largely similar to the paintings to a certain extent related to this direction of the noir genre, which is destined to be born much later than the release of Asphalt. About "black films" here remind and criminal plot, and the specifics of lighting, creating to an extremely dramatic monochrome picture, then darkened, then, on the contrary, contrast, and constantly appearing in the frame flights of stairwells, and thick shadows. Another “mothering” factor is the very central motif of the “asphalt jungle”, which opens the tape. The image of the street finds its climax in the first scene, in form, but not in content, similar to the characteristic Dzige Vertov: the beauty of the faceless mechanics of the action is more terrifying than delighting. The viewer is shown how robo-people rhythmically, synchronously, automatically lay the asphalt of these street “jungle”, at the same time with the help of already invisible tools of social organization, trying to equally fit their inhabitants there.
However, the most important thing to say about Joe May’s Asphalt comes from the place where the most significant differences between this picture and the concepts that appeared more than a decade later. The confrontation of characters characteristic in the future for this genre - a hero fighting criminals and a criminal femme fatale - are subjected to an unambiguous but refined irony, their social statuses decline in the dance of love, revealing the true essence of people, they are just two lovers, a man and a woman, and not an official and a thief. In contrast to the noir model, the hero’s feeling for a woman is presented not as a weakness that prevents the fulfillment of duty, but as something that requires and deserves respect. Here it is, a bitter irony of the history of cinema: in Germany, which is on the threshold of Nazism, the moral choice is in favor of love, against “rolling” into social asphalt, while in the United States of forties the problem is solved differently.
Mentally comparing “Asphalt” with, for example, the first German sound film, the cult “Blue Angel” by Joseph von Sternberg, released a year after it, one cannot but be amazed at the first quality level demonstrated. To reproach the “Blue Angel” in this, of course, not out of hand, but it is impossible to imagine it without sound, the central images are created largely by verbal elements, for example, with the help of the song of the heroine Dietrich, without which a significant part of the narrative would be lost; the camera is constrained due to the imperfection of sound recording equipment. The picture of May is easy to imagine without intertitles, it reveals a truly developed cinematic language, “pure”, poetic in a sense close to that laid in his works Pasolini, the maximum information here is encoded with the help of visual images, the plot unfolds without pathological dependence on textual explanation.
“Asphalt” seems to me an inimitable climax chord in the symphony of silent cinema. Such paintings make one involuntarily think about whether cinema chose the right path, deciding to completely surrender to the idea of sound.
10 out of 10