Because All Quiet On The Western Front Is More Than Just A War Movie

There is a beautiful moment towards the end of Quiet on the west facade, sandwiched between several truly horrific (and one absolutely devastating) moments. Felix Kammerer’s Paul Bäumer attempts to return his friend Kat (Albrecht Schuch) to a field hospital in a church. He’s been shot and he’s bleeding profusely. Trying to stay cheerful, Kat remembers a pun she was playing. Rhyme with the last line someone sang. “Nothing rhymes with silly,” says Kat. “Nothing.” Paul thinks. “Shotgun rhymes with silly,” he says. Both men laugh. This is the last time anyone laughs Quiet on the west facade.

Edward Berger’s film recently picked up three BAFTAs, and it’s likely to top even a good handful of its nine Oscar nominations. But it’s not a typical war film. In Britain, the popular view of World War I is this quote from German General Ludendorff: that the heroic dead were lions led by donkeys in high command. This movie leans that way too, with German General Friedrichs (Devid Striesow) furious that he didn’t get a chance to get his boots dirty before taking office.

At the same time, however, this interpretation all silent does a lot of unexpected things. If you’ve ever seen a WW1 movie, you’ve seen the moonscapes of No Man’s Land, mud and corpses everywhere. They often indicate sensory overload, but tend to overload the senses themselves: the ears and eyes are filled with disorienting and chaotic sounds and sights. But Quiet on the west facade target your taste buds and also your nostrils. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a war movie so fascinated by food. A roast goose that men share sounds absolutely delicious. A vegetable broth is trampled into the mud as an attack breaks out towards the French lines. New recruits sing coffee, tea, sugar and wine. Friedrich pours the last drops of his own wine and throws away his dog’s scraps which the soldiers would treat as the best steak. Food is shorthand for joy and sensation in a world that has neither, and it’s filmed in a way that takes you straight into the soldiers’ senses, rediscovering those sensations that gave them the call of their humanity after having to suppress it for so long to survive. Trapped in a shack, smelling death everywhere, its smell, touch and taste fade away. Significantly, when Paul encounters the latest useless shipment, he growls and grins animally.

Felix Kammerer is particularly brilliant in the role of Paul. Surprisingly, this is Kammerer’s first big screen. His high cheekbones and staring eyes give him a skeletal appearance that makes him look as if he’s already dead. One of the most evocative images of the whole film is simply Kammerer’s face, when Paul realizes he has killed the Frenchman who fell into the same hole as him; half of his face is smeared with black mud, the other is covered with putrid greenish goo. The sergeant who told Paul he was going to die in the morning was right. The boy who forged his parents’ signatures to go to war is gone.

Here too there is a subtle poetry. Towards the beginning, the spindle of a sewing machine comes into action. As his needle mends a dead man’s uniform, ready to keep the next dead warm, his rhythmic snap turns into stuttering machine gun fire. The spinning wheel rhymes with the transmission of a truck that drives new recruits to their deaths. It’s all-out war, and the seamstress is as much a cog in the machine as the eighteen-year-old soldier.

It’s also very, very, very twisted. We’ve all seen people explode on screen, of course. But certain kinds of brutality Quiet on the west facade they are rare in their franchise. A man is hit by a tank, which works as expected. One of Paul’s teammates is given a flamethrower. Paul’s last fight with a French soldier sees him nearly drowned in mud. When dismissed by their master, the Iron Young are summoned to lofty ideas: God, the Kaiser, the Fatherland. But being noble is not possible. They rob a farmer, brutally kill, feel fear and shame instead of proudly marching to glory. There’s usually a little glimmer, some brotherhood in the trenches to clean up the mess. George Mackay came to Richard Madden 1917for example, and while Colonel Dax to Stanley Kubrick paths of glory he cannot stop a firing squad, at least he tells his commander what he thinks of him and prevents some regulars from returning to the front.

Quiet on the west facade no softening is allowed a bit. Nobody says why he fights. Soldiers’ friendship saves no one. No one becomes a hero. If the point of view is familiar to British eyes, the execution is uniquely German. Here, most WW1 stories have a aching nobility that comes with knowing that Britain and the allies won, in theory. With all silent, we see World War I from the point of view of a nation that plunged hundreds of thousands of young people into a terrible and exhausting conflict and then lost. There is no comfort to be found. It’s an army, and a nation, drunk from four years of all-out war, dazed and confused. Some of his men are drinking and shouting. Some are silent. Some deviate from reality: After being dragged to a field hospital, Paul can’t believe his dead friend Kat isn’t unconscious.

The last photo of the original. Quiet on the west facade from 1930 is one of the most elegant and moving films of German cinema: Paul looks over the ditch to see a rare butterfly and is shot. Not so, in Berger’s version. This time Paul is so completely drained that he attacks and kills efficiently and urgently. A few seconds before the end of the war, a French soldier who does not see him stabs him. He feels the sun on his skin and dies. They are not lions led by donkeys, they are boys led by deceived fools. That’s what makes this film so special: he looks you straight in the eye as he thrusts his bayonet.

All Quiet on the Western Front is now streaming on Netflix