All Quiet On the Western Front (2022)

What more is there to be said about war that Griffith and Gance and Eisenstein and Vidor and Renoir and Kurosawa and Kubrick and all the rest haven't said already? A new adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's classic pacifist novel All Quiet on the Western Front* is available streaming on Netflix. It covers a lot of old ground but fails to cover it creatively or memorably. 

World War I wasn't the first war of attrition - a war that was little more than the systematic slaughter of millions of people, mostly German men, Frenchmen and Englishmen - but it was a demarcation dividing one age from another. According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, "some 8,500,000 soldiers died as a result of wounds and/or disease," in a war that lasted a little more than four years. But the Great War has also had an extraordinary afterlife. Veterans of the war - poets, playwrights, novelists, and filmmakers, as well as memoirists - took their combat experience as their subject and created works of art that have fixed the war in our collective consciousness. The tone of nearly all Great War literature was pacifist and anti-war. 

According to Andrew Kelly, whose book Cinema and the Great War I recommend, Lewis Milestone's movie adaptation of All Quiet of is "The measure for all anti-war cinema." But it's a very tricky term, "anti-war cinema." As I mentioned before, battle scenes have occupied the creative resources of some of the greatest filmmakers, quite understandably because of their extreme visual impact. Shots of dozens, sometimes hundreds of people doing violence to one another are unlikely to leave any viewer feeling ambivalent about them. Film is a kinetic art - hence the word cinema. Our eyes are attracted irresistibly to movement. And what could possibly be more kinetic in a film than a battle scene? 

The trouble with battle scenes for the filmmaker is precisely their ability to thrill. Even when, as in Apocalypse Now, a filmmaker tries to show that war is of its nature insane, he often succumbs to the spectacular qualities of combat. If one were to ask viewers of Apocalypse Now to name their favorite scene, I doubt that many would fail to name the famous morning helicopter raid, with speakers on board the helicopters blasting Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" and a deranged Colonel telling us how the napalm smells like victory. 

50 years after the event, Philip Larkin could write in his poem "MCMXIV": 

Never such innocence, 

Never before or since, 

As changed itself to past 

Without a word—the men 

Leaving the gardens tidy, 

The thousands of marriages 

Lasting a little while longer: 

Never such innocence again. 

I haven't read Remarque's novel, which Goebbels banned, prompting Remarque to seek refuge first in Switzerland and then in America, but I've now seen three movie adaptations of it: Lewis Milestone's 1930 version, with its extraordinary photography by Arthur Edeson, the 1979 version, made for television, directed by Delbert Mann, and now a German-language version directed by Edward Berger. Of the three, Milestone's is the best, probably because it was made only 12 years after the war ended and the world's attitude toward war hadn't yet been overwhelmed by the Nazis. 

Early in the new film, after the viewer has already been introduced to the trenches (I almost used the adjective "hellish," but the word seems clichéd), a group of the latest cannon fodder leaves school in cheers, enlists in the Army and marches off, just as Larkin wrote, "Grinning as if it were all/An August Bank Holiday lark". We are shown in explicit detail how the uniforms they are marching in were recycled from the bodies of soldiers killed in action: the blood rinsed away, the bullet holes sewn shut. 

Fed the same bullshit nationalism that a generation of French and English armies had been, the enthusiasm with which this group of young German men enlist in the army and march off to war is not even allowed its irony - Edward Berger underscores these scenes with disturbing noises - not music - throughout. We all know by now what they're headed for. After lengthy scenes of trench warfare carnage, an extended lull behind the lines muddles the film’s pacing. There is one scene I must single out in which Paul and his friend Kat (Albrecht Schuch) open letters from home while sitting bare-arsed using an improvised latrine. Paul is the central character, played by as unprepossessing an actor - Felix Kamerer - as could be found on either side of the front. I suppose he was cast because of his sheer averageness (I couldn't avoid being reminded of a younger Karl Malden). 

Two years ago on this day I reviewed the Sam Mendes film 1917. All Quiet begins the same year, on the German side of the lines. Kudos (I guess) to the movie's makeup department for showing us what the corpses of combat casualties look like in living - livid - color. The cinematography is by James Friend, a Brit, and it's often beautiful despite the ghastliness of so much of his subjects. 1.78:1 is the aspect ratio and it sometimes seems even wider, but the film exploits it far too much. What was needed wasn't the panoramic but the claustrophobic. I don't think even David Lean would've tried for epic moments given such a subject. The best scene in the film isolates Paul and a French soldier in a huge bomb crater. Paul mortally stabs the Frenchman several times but must then witness his protracted death. Paul draws his knife to cut open the soldier's tunic and calms him by repeating the word "Kamarad!" Helplessly, he tries to close the wounds and stop the blood from flowing from the Frenchman's mouth. After he dies, he tells the dead man he's sorry and he finds a photo of a woman and child in his pockets and a packet of letters. I can't say that this and other scenes, like the final scene of Paul's own death, are unmoving. They are all just short of veritable. 

Finally, the people who adapted Remarque's novel committed a curious and serious error by chosing to introduce non-fictional scenes involving Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Remarque's novel was narrated by Paul, and he tells the story simply and honestly. His narrative is cut short at the end by a matter-of-fact report of his death and the words announced by wire services at the 11th hour on November 11, 1918: Im Westen nichts Neues - All Quiet on the Western Front. 

I can find no pressing need for this film, at this time. The only good reason I can think of for why it was made is neglect. Either no one has seen Lewis Milestone's 1930 version or they don't want to see it. After all, it's a grey movie with photographic qualities that are no longer appreciated when CGI can do it so much more easily - and the mayhem is more "graphic." Paul Fussell's great book The Great War and Modern Memory may have to be renamed The Great War and Modern Amnesia. Is it possible today to communicate the message of Remarque's novel to the people it was intended to reach? The people - like Putin and Xi - who aren't convinced of the futility of war? 

*first published 96 years ago yesterday.