IT is the silence that terrifies us in this film about the First World War, not the noise. It is not the battle that scares us in the film but the peace and the lull between attacks.
The film is All Quiet on the Western Front, a title immortalized as an idiomatic expression, which means nothing is happening at all. You can almost hear Samuel Beckett’s characters, standing on a hump, moaning: “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful.”
But nothing is awfully existential about All Quiet in this cinema. What we have is a raw materiality of years preserving boundaries in a period when nations were defined by what they possessed in square miles. But this film is framed by nations eating up territories and altering geographies. By the end of the war in 1918, which began in 1914, nothing much has been altered on the western front.
All Quiet is about the first modern historically modern war. While great battles in the past were named after hills and plains upon which the fighting took place, here we are dealing with a conflict approximated to have been global.
How important are the lives of individuals when nations wage war? How meaningful is dying for one’s country and fighting for your people’s honor? How valid are wars?
All Quiet begins in the middle of the war. In a school, young men are fired up by the desire to be at the battlefront. A school head adds to the passion of these individuals who think they are the hope of their nation, the force that will help Germany win the old dispute. Will we be the ones who will march to Paris? As this first World War fills the screen with haunting images, another war has been seared in our collective memories—the arrival and departure of the Second World War, its histories of viciousness several times improved over the First. If improvement means a wider swath of destabilization and hunger and more deaths.
And so the youth marches onto the battlefield. And the conceit of cinema takes over—wide fields photographed for their calm beauty, trees growing up to the sky in conversation with some transcendence, the horizon to remind us of eternity. Then suddenly, we are in the trenches. Sodden, dirty, wet. The rains fall on the thick coats of men while they remain stolid, almost unmindful of the discomfort that we, in the comfort of our homes or cinema, are wishing away. Earlier on, we see these woolen coats being taken off dead bodies and washed and mended for the next soldiers to wear. The youthful, pink faces of men that left the graceful towns and cities are now caked with gray mud. Eyes, some more open with terror and some vacant, stare out. Are they regretting the valor in their chest? It appears more are accepting about the war and the grand roles they needed to play. Remember this was the period when ethnicity-colored citizenships and marked borders. To be a good person of a particular nation was to be ready to die at the altar of bravery, acts that were preserved by the purple prose of old soldiers and statesmen.
The war being played out is also about arms that are presently not allowed (officially, that is) anymore. And so we are shocked how gas was then the go-to effective means of conquest.
But All Quiet is not just about this strange war. It is about the forgotten details. Resting after a heavy fighting, an officer looks around and singles out a soldier unharmed or at least spaced-out enough to be given a pouch into which he will put half of the dog tags worn by soldiers, presently dead and accounted only by that thin stainless steel ID.
All Quiet is about youth wasted. It is about the relentless pride in staying firm against surrender even if entire platoons are gone. Even if there are more corpses than living, fighting men. In the book, All Quiet on the Western Front, written by Erich Maria Remarque, a veteran of the First World War, there is a favorite quote about the youth of war: “We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing from ourselves, from our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.”
Then All Quiet is about face-to-face hand combats. Unshakeable is the scene with Paul (a grand film debut from theater’s Felix Kammerer), the young German soldier, encountering a young French combatant. They fight to death, with Paul breathing heavily beside the enemy gradually fading away. He stares into the eyes of the Frenchman and we know he regrets stabbing him.
How did young soldiers (who would become the next generation birthing the next generation for the second war) forget the faces of those they killed? These thoughts become real in the film. They stare back at us—the absence of meaning in wars.
There are cinematic lessons in the film. One is its cinematography; images so acutely beautiful provide a counterpoint to the cruelties we impose on other humans.
The sound design is an interjection of metallic riffs and drum beats; music sparing is used lushly only in a few moments. The performances of the actors are so real because the war as remembered has been staged with such sharpness—men rush headlong ready to kill, and each minute, down in the trench, death is more possible than life.
The film, which is the first German adaptation of Remarque’s novel, won the Oscar for Best International Feature for Germany. It also won the awards of Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, and Best Original Score.
All Quiet on the Western Front is directed by Edward Berger. It is distributed by and streaming on Netflix.