Asphalt

Today was my second screening of the London Film Festival, after Brand Upon the Brain! — tonight's film was the rather more conventional silent "Asphalt" (thus titled in the original German), and it was preceeded by a long and entertaining description of just how it had been brought back from the Moscow state film archive by someone who had gone to Russia to look for something quite different, and of how it differed from the American release, which had until then been the only known surviving print.

Apparently the American distributors felt that the original cut was too 'slow', and removed a lot of the reaction shots in favour of extra titles explaining exactly who everyone was and what they were thinking; by the time it had been stressed to us three or four times how slow the Germans liked their films to be, I'm afraid I was feeling rather nervous as to whether this was really the version that I wanted to be seeing, given my bad experiences with some other German epics!

But the director's vision was vindicated — it's hard to image what the American cut can have been like, but since it is crystal-clear what is going on in the minds of the various protagonists, all the explanation must seem rather laboured. And fortunately, there was nothing like the 'one-minute close-up, followed by another minute on the other face' that we had been promised... or if there were, at least it didn't seem anything like that long.

Overall I was reminded of 'Carmen' (probably because I had just been watching Preminger's "Carmen Jones") but with a happy ending — happyish, anyway. Instead of killing the girl, he kills her lover; but then she gives herself up to save him, proving that she's really not all bad after all... The film is beautifully shot in the most fully-developed silent tradition, with conscious plays and parallels of images, and effects of lights: the street scenes take place on a gigantic set built expressly for the purpose. But I was never quite confident of the heroine's motivations (making it hard to sympathise) and I did feel that there were some plot ends left unresolved. Good — beautiful — but not I think unqualified great.