Silence prevails on the West Bank of Germany, and death inhabits the dead bodies of soldiers, relentlessly chasing the living, in a snapshot in which the bodies are represented from afar as a fossil carving of a history of successive wars. This is how director Edward Berger opens All Quiet on the Western Front, which won four Academy Awards for best cinematography, soundtrack and production design at the ceremony held on Sunday evening, March 12th.

The seeds from which the film matured sprouted in the heart of a book holocaust, as the Nazi party that ruled Germany in the 1930s set fire to books including copies of Erich Remarque's novel "All Quiet on the Western Front", the best-selling German novel of all time, which Louis Milestone first directed in a movie with the same title in 1930, and he won the Oscar for Best Picture and Best Director as well.

The Oscars Leaning Toward Sadness

In Berger's modern version, the director summarizes one of the main themes of his story in only one element, which is a coat. At the beginning of the film, we see dead soldiers stripped of their bloody coats and shoes, to be recycled and presented to new recruits. To a name that got stuck in the jacket presented to him, and the officer tore it off and threw it aside. This is a detail that gives us a more comprehensive perspective on war, where people fall out of accounts, faces and names change, and coats are inherited.

From the first moment, Berger takes advantage of nature to adapt to the destinies of his heroes, and its impact appears clearly in the film. For example, in a climate closer to warmth, Powell decides to go voluntarily to the First World War, like his comrades, but those bright dreamy fantasies and national enthusiasm about it will dissipate as they penetrate so that the weather is autumn before That a violent winter of extreme cold, paleness, and panic befalls them, and the film transports us - only through the weather - to the exact required state.

Berger flashes his film every once in a while with solar threads whenever his characters dream or cling to hope, but snow is like death, and nothing remains but ruin.

In this context, Berger informs us, in successive sequences, of the scourge of war and loss, grandiloquent slogans and harsh facts, but he very professionally makes the shattering of Powell's glasses a point of enlightenment in which the hero collides with his reality after the two high frames that he has always looked at the world with have been shattered, so that he unwillingly looks forward to some truth. It is happening.

We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.

• Erich Maria Remarque

A Chasm Between Those Who Fight And Those Who Decide

Violence surrounds the film, to the extent that art critic Brandon Tinsley notes a fondness for "violence" in a way that impairs the psychological development of the characters, in addition to his reference to the fact that the film misunderstood the novel", a perspective confirmed by the film's addition of a parallel story outside the novel that depicts the armistice negotiations to end the war.

However, those negotiations captured a watershed between those declaring war and those waging it, which we can consider one of the film's main strengths. That safe distance separating decision-makers and price-payers is expressed by Berger by confining the first category to ivory palaces and spacious offices, and by suffocating the other category among the trenches. It also shows the stark contrast between soldiers who drink polluted water in the open under bombardment and diplomats and generals who drink coffee at home.

In a parallel story, we find German Vice Chancellor Matthias Erzberger trying to broker peace with the French. Writer Glenn Kenny asks why this detail is included, suspecting that it is an attempt to prove that in the Great War, there were some good Germans. It is an attempt to restructure the narrative of power or siding with Germany over any other party during the telling of the story.

A Cinema That Condemns War, Or Does It Honour It?

Berger's film runs parallel to Remarque's novel in condemning war, to be classified among the anti-war films. That cinema may criticize armed conflicts in the belief that it is useless and consumes all parties, and this comes in an important context now, which is the Russian invasion of Ukraine a year ago, which made the film win the Oscar very expected. But are these films really anti-war or proud of it?

Arguments intensified among critics in this matter, prompting journalist Tom Brooke to scrutinize it, quoting a quote attributed to French director François Truffaut: "There is no such thing as an anti-war film."

Truffaut believed that these films would inevitably glorify combat by portraying adventure, conflict, and close friendship between soldiers. Dennis Rothermel, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at California State University, who has done extensive research on anti-war films, tells Brock that to be anti-war films must balance two perspectives: the random losses of deadly combat, and the human dimension involved in those losses. Which makes the dead more than just numbers or dumped corpses.

This applies to the movie "All Quiet in the Western Bank". In one of the shots, we glimpse Paul's face smeared with mud, obliterating half of his features so that the mud itself here on his face is a metaphor for his loss of humanity. He rushes to kill a French soldier with several stab wounds, and minutes later he approaches his enemy who is taking his last breaths, examining the pockets of his jacket, to find a picture of his wife and son, letters and documents, so that the vision becomes clear to Paul after it was absent from him.

But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony--Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?

• Erich Maria Remarque

In the end, Powell faces death in the film with a metaphor for life that he carries in his pocket, an insect closer to a beetle that he keeps in a matchbox as an amulet of luck, hoping to return to an outside world waiting for him, but we see the war forcing him to lose everything he made sure to keep in his pocket, to give up About everything related to that ordinary life far from his hell, then she leaves him with a rigid look, empty hands, and a pierced heart.

In contrast to the film, the novel elaborates on another image of suffering, which is the declaration of the end of the war and the return to the homeland. The writer had just returned from the war, feeling his alienation from those around him, and a shock from which perhaps nothing saved him except his rejection of everything he went through.

In this context, the novel depicts the frustrations of its era, realistically and with an insightful eye. It struck a nerve with the survivors, even if it came in a declarative language and a style described as terse and indifferent, which sparked some controversy due to its topics, in which the language may be expected to stir a feeling in its writer. Anger, anger, or even sympathy.

Overall, as a huge fan of the book, this movie felt like a slap to the face and the fact that it won an Oscar felt like a kick to the gut. The movie strays from the book and the very message it pretends to portray I honestly don't know what the people who saw it, praised it, and even the people who gave it the awards were even watching.

Sources:

The Most Overrated Movie of This Oscars Season - The Atlantic
‘All Quiet on the Western Front’: A German’s grim view of World War I - The Washington Post
Is there any such thing as an ‘anti-war film’? - BBC Culture
All Quiet on the Western Front - Britanica