Underground (1928)

Copyright Featured Image and Page Header Image: British Instructional Film (BIF).

De Britse zwijgende film Underground (Anthony Asquith, 1928) bespeelt veel registers.

 

Het begint met humorvolle observaties van alledaagse mensen in een overvolle metro, maar daarna wisselt de stemming naar een rivaliteitsdrama. Twee mannen hebben een oogje op dezelfde vrouw, een winkelmeisje dat zo verstandig is de beste van de twee te kiezen.

Dit verhaallijn geeft aanleiding tot het tonen van een zaterdagse picknick in een park. Het is een tedere romantische scène van twee schuchter verliefde mensen die opgewekt hun brood delen met een straatschoffie. Maar het geeft ook aanleiding tot een realistische kroegscène waar de twee rivalen handgemeen raken.

De verliezer van de twee rivalen ontpopt zich vervolgens als een demonische intrigant en stalker. Het lukt hem om zijn tegenstander onterecht te laten beschuldigen van onheus gedrag.

Voor een deel speelt de handeling zich af in een boarding house, een interieur waar expressionistische schaduwen prachtig tot hun recht komen in het trappenhuis.

De suspense wordt kundig opgebouwd, met als climax een surrealistische achtervolging en een sensationele ontknoping.

Underground – GB 1928, 84 minutes. Director & Writer: Anthony Asquith. Cast: Elissa Landi, Brian Aherne, Norah Baring, Cyril McLaglen.

Vertoningen in Nederland

• Filmhuis Den Haag, 18 april 2016, begeleid door Kevin Toma (piano).

Documentatie

• http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jan/08/anthony-asquith-underground-far-removed-familiar

• http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/06/remembering-anthony-asquiths-underground

• http://brightlightsfilm.com/more-than-just-another-day-underground-anthony-asquiths-first-feature-gets-the-deluxe-treatment/#.Vx4XhmM-eTY

• https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-forgotten-going-underground

• http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/spring2014/goulding1.pdf

• http://www.silentfilm.org/archive/underground(San Francisco Silent Film Festival)

• http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/544121/

• https://silentlondon.co.uk/2013/06/06/underground-dvdblu-ray-review/

• http://www.popmatters.com/review/173959-underground/

The Archive Gala of the BFI London Film Festival 2009.

Presentation of the restoration of Underground (1928), with a live performance by the Prima Vista Social Club featuring Neil Brand (piano), Romano Todesco (bass), Denis Biason (guitar), Günter Buchwald (violin) and Frank Bockius (drums).

• http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/exclusive/underground_london_moves_me.php

• http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49576

“Passions run deeper than the Northern Line in Anthony Asquith’s tale of love, jealousy, treachery and murder on the London Underground. Eighty years later, your average tube ride might not be quite as eventful, but anyone who has exploited the city’s public transport system to romantic advantage will find much to recognise.

Restored by the BFI National Archive and presented with a live performance of Neil Brand’s new score by the Prima Vista Social Club, Asquith’s working-class love story is one of the great British silent feature films. It’s also one of the great films about the capital – a journey through the Underground (many of the scenes were filmed at Waterloo) via old London boozers and open-topped buses to a climactic chase through Lots Road power station that magnificently reveals the smoking roofscape of the coal-fuelled city.

In the late 1920s Asquith, along with Hitchcock, was one of the most audacious young talents working in British film. At the age of only 26 he demonstrates an assured and spare style with some remarkably cinematic flourishes clearly inspired by contemporary German and Russian filmmakers.

For many years restoration of Underground presented insurmountable difficulties. With recent developments in digital technology available to the BFI’s film restoration team we have now been able to make a significant improvement to the surviving film elements.” Bron: Robin Baker and Bryony Dixon, BFI National Archive

Two other Asquith-films

• A Shooting Star (1927)

• A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929)

“Asquith’s late 1920s films do represent an inventory of silent film technique drawing upon various influences both from popular cinema and from the art film. Shooting Stars, set in the world of the film industry, is now regarded as an early example of meta-cinemacomparable to subsequent films by Hitchcock and Powell, and A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929), according to one film historian, is equal in its historical importance as a transitional film linking the silent and sound periods to Hitchcock’s more extensively analysed Blackmail (1929).” See also: https://bristolsilents.org.uk/2012/11/08/the-silent-films-of-anthony-asquith/

To be compared with:

The First Born (Miles Mander, 1928). Restoration presented at the Archive Gala of the BFI London Film Festival 2011.

• http://screensnapshots.blogspot.nl/2012/05/first-born-1928-miles-manders.html

• http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1366436/index.html

• http://www.silentfilm.org/pages/detail/5730(San Francisco Silent Film Festival)

• https://www.nyu.edu/projects/wke/notes/newschool/imagefiles/ns_880408.pdf

 The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (Alfred Hitchcock, 1927)

• http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2012/jul/30/my-favourite-hitchcock-the-lodger

• http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/438120/

Piccadilly (E.A. Dupont, 1929)

• http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/486639/

Hindle Wakes (Maurice Elvey, 1927)

• https://silentlondon.co.uk/2012/10/17/hindle-wakes-1927-an-unconventional-love-story/

• http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/449112/

The Way of Lost Souls/The Woman He Scorned (Paul Czinner, 1929)