Asphalt (1929) + Parasite (2019) - The use of German Expressionism in Modern Film

Asphalt is a 1929 German silent film directed by Joe May, starring Gustav Frohlich and Betty Amann. The film centers around Else, a clever and manipulative thief, after she is caught stealing a diamond from a jeweler. She tricks Albert, the policeman taking her to prison, using crocodile tears, convincing him to take her back to her home to get her documents. Once there, she seduces him, and he no longer attempts to take her into police custody. Else feels compelled to send him a gift of cigars and his ID back, which she had taken to admire. Upon receiving the gift, Albert is angry at first and shows up at her home, believing this to be an attempt to buy him off. Not long after being in Else’s presence, though, he caves once again and asks her to be with him forever as his wife. She believes she is not good enough for him because of her criminal history and shows him all of her stolen belongings. While this is happening, Else’s boyfriend enters, sees Else and Albert embracing, and starts a fight with Albert, resulting in Albert accidentally killing the man. Albert leaves and returns to his parents, and Albert’s father, a policeman too, determines that Albert must turn himself in for the murder. Else discovers this is happening and chooses to turn herself in as well for her crimes. Albert is not taken into custody, and he sees Else being taken away. He professes his love for her again and tells her he will wait for her, and Else smiles before she is escorted to jail. 

This film, released in 1929, is one of the final films produced by the UFA. It was met with mixed reviews from critics, but it is currently considered a classic and a silent film masterpiece. In this film, Joe May calls attention to societal fears of Berlin becoming corrupt, and the phrase “asphalt culture” became used to refer to people who prefer shallow, material lifestyles to appreciating natural life. “Asphalt culture” was also used by Joseph Goebbels, a Nazi politician, as a dog whistle for antisemitism, similarly referencing materialistic behavior. The film highlights lots of thematic contrasts, including simple morality and humility versus extravagance and questionable morals, so it is representative and critical of this aspect of the social climate of the time.

Asphalt is categorized as German Expressionism. While it does not use every trait of expressionist film, it does use the following: exaggerated acting and movement, bold value contrast, a strong focus on character emotions, questions of morality and character, and a downward spiral into disorder. Asphalt uses intense contrast, making use of very heavy vignettes, dark scenes, and both dark and light clothing. This film exhibits camerawork techniques advancing, as there are fast-paced moving shots and POV shots. There is a strong focus on character emotions and facial expressions. There are lots of lingering shots up close to the actors as they contort their faces into emotionally charged, hard-to-read expressions. The characterization of Else is very strong. Many of her shots show her turned away from either the other characters in the scene or the camera, and the audience sees a lot of her exposed neck and shoulders without her face, which highlights her traits of deception, mystery, and seduction. Once her love for Albert starts to feel real, more of her shots show her turning towards Albert and the camera, and her entire face is shown more than before. Compared to expressionist films from previous years, Asphalt appears to be subtly drawing the film style out of the abstract and more into the subtleties of storytelling. 

Parasite is a Korean film from 2019 directed by Bong Joon Ho. The movie follows the Kims, a low-class, basement-dwelling family, and the Parks, an extremely rich, naive family, both families consisting of the two married parents with a son and a daughter. The Kims fake credentials and frame the Parks' employees to get them fired and take their place, infiltrating the Park household one by one. Once the whole Kim family is employed together, the Parks’ house and belongings are now at their disposal. One night, the Parks are gone on a family trip, and the Kims have gotten cocky and are drinking and making a mess of the house when the wrongfully fired maid, Moon Gwang, returns to the house and reveals her husband has been secretly living in a basement compartment to escape debt collectors. She threatens to expose the Kims, leading to a violent struggle between the two families. As the Parks return, the Kim mother fatally injures Moon Gwang, and the Kim father locks the compartment, leaving them to die, and the Kims rush to clean up their mess and exit quietly. That night, the Kims’ basement home is flooded, forcing them to sleep in a public shelter, and leaving most of their belongings destroyed. The next day, while assisting at the Park's young son's birthday party, the Kim son opens the basement compartment in an attempt to kill them once and for all, but Moon Gwang’s husband severely injures him with a heavy rock to his head. He escapes the basement, grabs a knife from the kitchen, and fatally stabs the Kim daughter in the middle of the party. As the Kim father is standing over his dying daughter, the Park father ignores the situation and repeatedly yells at him to give him their car keys. In an act of blind rage, the Kim father takes the knife and kills the Park Father. He disappears into the chaos, hiding in the house’s basement compartment. The Kim son, left with brain damage, vows to get rich and buy the Park house to free his father from the basement.

This movie includes many touches of German Expressionist film. Some of these aspects include the use of strong shapes and lines in shot composition, many shots that allow the characters to meld into their environment instead of standing out from it, moments of intense facial acting and exaggerated movements, long sections lacking dialogue with music setting the emotional tone of the scene, questions of morality, downward spiral into chaos, and an ambiguous ending sequence that may or may not be real. The parts that feel most strongly connected to Expressionism are the story’s themes, the audience’s ability to commiserate with the characters, and the way the characters are shot as an equal part of their environment. The story involves lots of muddy morality, where it feels like nobody is in the right, but at the same time, they are all relatively justified. The way the movie’s tone changes so drastically after the first half and devolves into an intense, unpredictable, nail-biter feels very reminiscent of how expressionist films tend to establish the characters and situation and then create unexpected twists and turns that make the story much more wild and surprising. All of the characters in this film are victims of their environment as well as the people around them. This allows the audience to feel the emotions and pain of all of the characters, as well as finish the film reflecting on what they have to be grateful for, whether about the people in their lives or their physical environment. Even the Park’s house, an incredibly luxurious and expensive place, feels lifeless, loveless, and isolating. The Kims benefit from the Park’s money together, but they never feel happy or loving. Finally, most of the movie is shot inside the Park house. The house’s architecture and interior are vast, spacious, and minimal, creating lots of harsh, large-scale shapes. Many shots in the house depict the characters as if they are confined to the shapes and at the house’s mercy, not meant to stand out from the space. The way characters are no more important than their environment is a significant trait of German Expressionist film. Parasite, similar to the philosophy of expressionism, rarely includes frames that could not be individually treated as their own art piece. The visual strength of shot composition and character expression rarely dips for the sake of prioritizing the action happening in this film. 

There are strong themes and filmmaking tools in both movies that are very similar to each other. Both films highlight a theme of order and calmness versus chaos. The opening few scenes of Asphalt establish a very clear contrast between the chaos, noise, and bustle of Berlin and the calmness and peace inside Albert’s family home. Chaotic city scenes use multiple shots superimposed together and fast-paced, lively music. The scenes in his home have slower-paced shots and more delicate music. In the story, this establishes the difference between his family background and his life as a policeman, which informs his dilemma of being torn between his duty and his feelings for Else, a criminal. In Parasite, the scenes that take place in the Kims’ home and neighborhood include lots of visual clutter, background noise, and on-edge character behavior. The scenes that take place in the Park’s house are extremely minimalist, quiet, and peaceful in a surface-level way. The scene where the Kims become careless and drink in the Park’s house introduces this visual clutter and noise into this space for the first time through broken alcohol bottles, junk food all around the table and the floor, and the family all talking over each other, which shows the Kims becoming too lax and failing to separate their real lives from their phony professional lives. This is also very fittingly the scene that introduces chaos into the story. In both films, this theme is about where the characters originate from next to what they are drawn to, and the inherent confusion between the two. 

While Asphalt makes use of prolonged shots of one character or interaction to wallow in the emotion and reaction of the moment, Parasite does not linger on emotions using long shots of one thing. The film does maintain the emotions of the characters, but it is preserved through every story beat being heavily motivated by the last. In Asphalt, when Albert returns to Else’s apartment angry at first, there are multiple separate shots where his expressions show his confusion and inner conflict, where the exact emotion on his face is not discernible. This vague yet highly expressive acting is very communicative to the audience. Both of their feelings are passionate yet contradictory, like other aspects of the story and film. Parasite’s treatment of building emotions is different, but similarly effective. The night after the chaos ensues at the Park’s house with the fired maid and her husband, the Kim father must problem-solve quickly to get him and his family out of the situation. After a night of wading through his flooded home, wrangling his emotional adult children, and running face-first into all of his mistakes, he has to show up the next morning as the Parks’ collected, mature, easy-going driver. His emotion throughout this day builds so intensely, but it is shown through him being in the background of the Park family’s life, quietly seething, with no energy to put any kind of expression on his face. The more he is asked to do ridiculous, unnecessary tasks for the family, the more tense and drained he seems. It is this series of infuriating events that leads directly to the moment his daughter is killed, so it is only natural that the Park’s father so wickedly overlooking that is what finally drives the Kim father to his emotional peak: murder.

Asphalt and Parasite, films released 90 years apart and belonging to such distinct styles and cultures, have a significant amount of storytelling tricks and filmmaking choices in common. They both use a strong buildup of and concentration on emotion and revolve around the theme of contrasting and conflicting lifestyles. These commonalities are not surface-level, but they live deep in the authentic artistic liberties of each filmmaker and demonstrate how significant the silent film era was for pioneering storytelling in the film medium.