of Germany's most prestigious film studios. It was shot between October and December 1928 at the Ufa Studios in Neubabelsberg. Release Asphalt was distributed theatrically by UFA-Filmverleih GmbH and premiered in Berlin at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo on 11 March 1929. Asphalt was originally only available in a shortened version with English-language intertitles. In 1993, the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin discovered a print of Asphalt at the Gosfilmofond archive in Moscow which seemed to have been sourced from the original film negative. The chronology of scenes in print found differed from earlier versions and included extra scenes with German intertitles. The newly discovered version of the film was released on DVD by the Masters of Cinema on April 11, 2005 with a score by Karl-Ernst Sasse. Kino Video released the film on DVD again on July 18, 2006. Reception Fritz Walter, writing in the Berliner Börsen-Courier found the films theme of the conflict between duty and love to be "the banality of the film script". Lotte Eisner related to this statement, writing in 1965 that "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" Critic Siegfried Kracauers's review in Frankfurter Zeitung conversely commented that May "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" References Sources External links Asphalt at Rotten Tomatoes Bibliography 1929 films 1929 drama films German silent feature films German drama films German Expressionist films Films of the Weimar Republic German black-and-white films Films set in Germany Films set in Berlin Films directed by Joe May Films produced by Erich Pommer Films with screenplays by Joe May Films with screenplays by Hans Székely UFA GmbH films Silent drama films 1920s German films