Westfront 1918 (1930)

Original title

Westfront 1918: Vier von der Infanterie

Directed by

Georg Wilhelm Pabst

Genre

drama film, silent film

Country

Weimar Republic

Runtime

1h 37m

Rated

16

Rating

6.5 of 10 from 60 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A group of German infantrymen live and die in the muddy trenches of World War I. The film shows the physical and mental toll of combat on the soldiers.

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What happens

Westfront 1918 is a German war film, set mostly in the trenches of the Western Front during World War I. It was directed in 1930 by G. W. Pabst, from a screenplay by Ladislaus Vajda based on the novel Four Infantrymen on the Western Front 1918 by Ernst Johannsen. The film shows the effect of the war on a group of infantrymen portrayed by an ensemble cast led by screen veterans Fritz Kampers and Gustav Diessl. The film bears a very strong resemblance to its close contemporary All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), an American production, although it has a much bleaker tone, consistent with Pabst's New Objectivity work through the late 1920s. It was particularly pioneering in its early use of sound – it was Pabst's first "talkie" – in that Pabst managed to record live audio during complex tracking shots through the trenches. Westfront 1918 was a critical success when it was released. Following the rise of National Socialism only a few years later, the new government banned the movie from public viewing for its extremely harsh criticism, similar to many war poets of the era it depicts, of the mechanized and systematic slaughter of a generation of young men during a mere four years of trench warfare. Nazi Party Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels accordingly denounced Westfront 1918 as, "cowardly defeatism". Some shots from the film were used for scene-setting purposes in a 1937 BBC Television adaptation of the play Journey's End. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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