![]() Such events highlight the characters' faults and do not present them only as innocents caught in a bad war.Ī classic anti war film, All Quiet on the Western Front is a masterwork of filmmaking. When his older fellow after the event tells him not to think about it - it was not his fault and such things, he seems to accept it easily as a consolation and erase his own agency from the event. For example, when the protagonist kills a French soldier and stays in a crater wih him for a whole day, he feels guilty. On the surface the feilm may look as if it wants to promote a cheap humanism, but that is never the case when we examine the individual, rich episodes in meaning and conflict the heroes are dealing with. The unpatriotic politics behind the film are subversive enough to make the film count as an oddity in American cinema. ![]() The film shows true feeling and compassion for its characters, who fight a war they know nothing about. These indivudual episodes are excellently paced themselves. The narrative rhythm of the film might seem problematic at first but it is not if one understands that it comes in chapters, and individual episodes instead of a single escalating crescendo. The only filmmaker I know who later followed similar techniques to depict war scenes was Kubrick in that other masterpiece, Paths of Glory. They are not at all overdramatized with fast montage and sensational camera angles as Hollywood tends to do, especially with more modern films (see Saving Private Ryan) on the contrary, with clear, long takes and tracking shots depicts the attacks and counterattacks of the two armies, making the peculiar madness of the WWI trenches battles a devastaing view. The battle scenes are some of the best depicted on camera, at least from the other films I have seen. The cinematography is strikingly clear and makes excellent uses of contrasts of more than one planes throughout the film. Here the transition of one plane to the other is beautiful and full of meaning. For example, one could point to the wonderful shot in the beginning that shows German soldiers in the small town - the camera moves backwars and we find ourselves in a school where the teacher, instead of teaching Homer (as the first lines of Odyssey are written on the blackboard), makes a propaganda, ultra-patriotic speech that inspires the students to become soldiers. Magnificent film about war that has anti-war messages which may seem somewhat simplistic today, but are presented in a cinematic way that is anything but so.
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