Im Westen nichts Neues

September 12, 2022 2:41 PM

A German film of _All Quiet on the Western Front_ The trailer for a new movie adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 novel All Quiet On The Western Front appeared.

Hollywood Reporter interview with director Edward Berger.

Previous film adaptations in 1930 and 1979.

Previously on MeFi: two quotes from the novel.

posted by doctornemo (31 comments total)

Red of Overly Sarcastic Productions did an overview of the novel, using footage from the 1979 adaptation.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:50 PM on September 12, 2022

So doing a war film, as a German, means looking at it differently. There are no heroes in war. Every death is a terrible death. I thought sharing this perspective might be interesting for other countries as well, countries that might see war differently.

We'll see. I haven't had occasion to contradict Truffaut's adage "Every film about war ends up being pro-war" On the other hand, I also haven't mustered the courage to watch Come and See.
posted by gwint at 3:06 PM on September 12, 2022 [6 favorites]

The original is a favorite but this looks like it could be good.
posted by octothorpe at 3:20 PM on September 12, 2022

Come and See is decidedly not pro war. Awful and incredible movie.
posted by glaucon at 3:49 PM on September 12, 2022 [10 favorites]

The original film from the 1920s is an absolute classic and the book is equally powerful. I'm not certain how it could be topped, but anything that keeps this story and its message in the public eye is appreciated.

I often think about this famous quote:

“Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out on themselves. Whoever survives the country wins. That would be much simpler and more than just this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting.”

It is easy to look back from over a century later at the sheer waste and idiocy of World War One, and realize the truth in Remarque's statement. It's much harder to do that for conflicts closer in time and space to us. I can't cheer for any war, not even against Hitler or against Putin's criminal regime. It seems that every generation politicians here have to whip up some new boogeyman for everyone in North America to hate. This time we promise you can hate this person and these people and still be a good person! Every war is a failure of morality and human decency. The older I get, the more I see nothing but the human cost of even "good" wars.

Here's a personal story. One of my great-grandfathers sailed to France in 1914 and was quoted in the local paper to the effect that "no man who doesn't want to go kill the savage Hun is a real man." His company was nearly wiped out in the Second Battle of Ypres, and he was invalided home the next year, having barely survived the battle. When he was interviewed upon his return, his comment was a much more subdued "you have no idea how good it is to be alive again after the hell we have gone through." I think about those two statements a lot.
posted by fortitude25 at 3:56 PM on September 12, 2022 [17 favorites]

The book is great, and the original film was a singular experience in my movie watching history. I'm not exactly looking forward to this, because it's hard to imagine how the first movie could be improved upon, but I'm hoping it will be good. I sort of feel like the book transcends the "side" of the conflict it is was written from, but maybe that's reductive, and a German realization of the book might bring a new perspective. I have a German copy of the book on my to-read shelf, so maybe I'll change my opinion after reading it again.

I've always hated that Truffaut quote. It says more about the people that believe it than it does about war movies.
posted by Alex404 at 4:30 PM on September 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

I've always hated that Truffaut quote. It says more about the people that believe it than it does about war movies.

I always took the quote as more of a commentary on whatever messages or insights the filmmaker intends ultimately being lost on a general public uninterested in such subtleties.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:17 PM on September 12, 2022 [8 favorites]

Looks very impressive. I watched 1917 recently and this would make a good companion piece.
posted by zardoz at 5:27 PM on September 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

L’enfer (Hell) [enhanced detail], 1921 painting by George Paul Leroux (Wikipédia bio, English translation). When there’s nowhere to run, the war dead don’t move.

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930 film) — Wikipedia: “A great number of German Army veterans were living in Los Angeles at the time of filming and were recruited as bit players and technical advisers” only 12 years after the war’s end. It will be very difficult for a new film production to match these veterans’ memories and expertise.

Where can I watch All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)? — Google results.
posted by cenoxo at 6:27 PM on September 12, 2022 [3 favorites]

The movie Grand Illusion is not pro war.

So pointed was Renoir's message that when the Germans occupied France, “Grand Illusion” was one of the first things they seized. It was "Cinematic Public Enemy No. 1,” propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels announced, ordering the original negative seized.

The Nazis were not at all kind to All Quiet on the Western Front, either to the book or the 1930 movie version, or to Remarque. His books were banned and burned and he was stripped of his citizenship.

Growing up in in the U.S. in the aftermath of "the good war" (World War II), the literature and films about World War I were an education and revelation on the true nature of war.
posted by gudrun at 6:31 PM on September 12, 2022

I've always hated that Truffaut quote. It says more about the people that believe it than it does about war movies.

I think that was exactly what he was saying. You can't control how people perceive your films and even if you make what you think is a 100% anti-war film, some viewers are always going to think all the violence is cool and exciting.
posted by octothorpe at 6:45 PM on September 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

"I know a man who made an anti war movie ... a good one"
posted by philip-random at 7:22 PM on September 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

re: Erich Maria Remarque, there's also the film version of A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958, directed by cult fave Douglas Sirk). It's not pro-war.

I recall seeing the Richard Thomas 1979 version of All Quiet, interesting for the Waltons subtext.

The book version of 'Jarhead' (2003) by Anthony Swofford describes how various 1970s anti-war films were re-purposed into gung-ho cannon-fodder material.

A 1959 German war film that's not pro-war that I could suggest is The Bridge. It takes youthful enthusiasm for conflict, and deals.
posted by ovvl at 8:32 PM on September 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

Every film about war ends up being pro-war.

I think this is spot on, and it's not just about war films, it's about a certain kind of failure to which cinema always is prone. Directors getting so caught up in their stories that they end up romanticizing whatever story they tell. How many mafia films have not been glorifying mob life?

Truffaut has a keen eye for a certain type of failure, where the director of the film may want to say one thing - give an anti-war message, for instance - but the director is using an aesthetic which says the opposite thing - war is cool, powerful, exciting. Just look at Oliver Stone and his "Wall Street" - he ended up glorifiying the lifestyle he wanted to criticize. I've seen this in movies again and again, where a naive director doesn't understand the tools and aesthetic he is using, and ends up telling the same glorifying story as always - crime is cool, war is cool ...

You can't use the tools of macho storytelling to tell an anti-macho story. If you don't understand this, the tools will win every time. Every filmmaker needs to understand his tools. Use them wisely - or they will use you.
posted by Termite at 11:09 PM on September 12, 2022 [7 favorites]

A jelly donut?
posted by clavdivs at 12:41 AM on September 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

I always took the quote as more of a commentary on whatever messages or insights the filmmaker intends ultimately being lost on a general public uninterested in such subtleties.

I mean fair enough... I think I've always held a grudge against Truffaut because he also famously walked out of Pather Panchali because "he didn't want to watch peasants eating with their hands". Apparently he later apologized for that.

Anyway, I understand the point, and it's obviously a fine line. It's just hard for me to imagine how people can watch movies like All Quiet on the Western Front, Full Metal Jacket, or Apocalypse Now and think "what an adventure!". Even a series that focus on heroism like Band of Brothers... I don't know... can people really watch that and think "I wish I was there!"

Obviously there's plenty of jingoistic war movies, but I'm still inclined to reject the statement. It doesn't strike me as difficult per se to make a horrifying war movie, because war is horror. You can of course focus on the heroic aspects of it, but if that's all you can imagine then you've probably just internalized the propaganda that nations produce to allow them to perpetrate wars in the first place.

(Also I've never seen Come and See. The Wikipedia plot synopsis is enough to blacken my day.)
posted by Alex404 at 1:10 AM on September 13, 2022 [4 favorites]

Dulce et Decorum Est....
posted by chavenet at 1:11 AM on September 13, 2022

One of the most (embarrassingly) surprising moments I've had in the last X-years, was going to the Museum of German History (Deutches Historiches Museum) and seeing the history of the last three hundred-odd years as told from that point of view as opposed to the North American/Anglo/Franco perspective I grew up with. It was a reminder that war happens to both sides - all the gore, heroism, fear, love, bravery, cowardice etc

It's good that a German production of this should be made and I hope it is a revelation on some level to all who spend the time to watch it.
posted by From Bklyn at 3:19 AM on September 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

Ernest Borgnine's performance in the 1979 adaptation leaves no doubt to his talent. He was a workhorse that never turned down a gig, so he was in Airwolf, but his role in AQOTWF truly reveals his full potential.

What I remember of his character was that he was respected, even loved, by his fellows, despite not being a fighter. I don't think he even fires a shot. His superpower was feeding the troops. He seemed to have food hidden on himself at all times, like a walking cornucopia. They loved him for it, he was worth a dozen Rambos. More than just bodily nourishment, he game them comfort - he let people know I care about you and I am going to help you. Wanna cigarette? Ok, you're alright.

Glorify that guy all you want.
posted by adept256 at 4:31 AM on September 13, 2022 [3 favorites]

"Every film about war ends up being pro-war"

Trojan Women

Two Women

some viewers are always going to think all the violence is cool and exciting.

Well, it's a human appetite in many, left over from evolution for better or worse. Underappreciated (speaking of German history) in much of the world is the Godawful damage done in Germany during the Thirty Years War.
posted by BWA at 5:04 AM on September 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

It's just hard for me to imagine how people can watch movies like All Quiet on the Western Front, Full Metal Jacket, or Apocalypse Now and think "what an adventure!". Even a series that focus on heroism like Band of Brothers... I don't know... can people really watch that and think "I wish I was there!"

I think you are discounting people’s relationship to movies. They are entertainments. And, perhaps most importantly, they are fictions, even when telling a true story (or a story built around true events). The very act of designing, staging, scoring, and filming makes them dreams, of a sort, to escape into.

I seriously doubt audiences wish they were there while watching FMJ or Apocalypse. But, when you think about the pieces from those movies that have become part of the modern zeitgeist, they most certainly are not the anti-war messages. It’s Duvall’s “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” or Ermey’s Sgt. Hartman. It’s helicopters blasting Ride of the Valkyries as they swoop in to attack. The message is lost in the production.

Personally, I think the one mainstream post-Vietnam movie that comes closest to being easy-to-grasp as “antiwar” is Stone’s Platoon. Maybe that has a lot to do with Stone having actually been there on the ground?

Perhaps, the only truly effective way to make an anti-war film in which the audiences would (hopefully) grasp the message, would be a straight-up documentary using as-it’s-happening, on-the-ground, battlefield footage from all sides of the conflict. With no narration and no music. Just raw war. No characters to empathize with or like. Just nameless people trying to avoid being killed while, themselves, killing.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:31 AM on September 13, 2022 [4 favorites]

It is easy to look back from over a century later at the sheer waste and idiocy of World War One, and realize the truth in Remarque's statement. It's much harder to do that for conflicts closer in time and space to us. I can't cheer for any war, not even against Hitler or against Putin's criminal regime.

I think it's more the other way round. It can be hard to see now why people went to war in 1914 looking back on it from more than a century later. But certainly in eg the UK and Canada, many people believed that the war was just and that they were fighting for liberal democracy against autocratic powers. You can see this view expressed for example in some of the novels of LM Montgomery. That it went as it did changed many people's views about war irrevocably. But it did not stop them supporting war entirely.
posted by plonkee at 9:02 AM on September 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

All books, all movies, all fiction takes place in a world that has a god.

Wars take place in a world without one.
posted by MrVisible at 10:25 AM on September 13, 2022 [6 favorites]

But, when you think about the pieces from those movies that have become part of the modern zeitgeist, they most certainly are not the anti-war messages. It’s Duvall’s “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” or Ermey’s Sgt. Hartman. It’s helicopters blasting Ride of the Valkyries as they swoop in to attack. The message is lost in the production.

I'll give you AN, Though the filming of that movie was like a small battle of its own. Marcos once or twice had to borrow his helecopters to fight insurgents, sent production back a few days. Still, it's war porn.
How Full Metal Jacket is a not anti war?
I've watched that movie with people who fought in four separate wars and the one universal reaction they have is either disinterest or they laugh their ass off especially how Kubrick encapsulated the sets on the second half of the movie. I even had a debate on the weather of the city Hue for which the second part of the movie takes place. All agree the first part is good.
but not all people agree, Something Kubrick reminded us for years. (people and machines rather)

Cinema Styles: Full Metal Jacket examines brutality of war.

Full Metal Jacket and Kubrick: The ultimate anti-war films

Revisiting Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket

What makes “Full Metal Jacket” an unconventional war story
The Tank scene, part 2. Notice how it's off, the tracking shot through off the timing of tank fire, making it look short and puffy when he did time it right. The slowed ROF to impact is near perfect. He could fuck with perception but did not fool the experienced solder.

Truffaut's adage is so opaque I can see through it. It's called money.

No characters to empathize with or like.
I agree for example, ' Victory at Sea'.

'The Short-Timers' by Gustav Hasford is well worth the read, not to understand FMJ but to see what Kubrick made of it.
posted by clavdivs at 7:12 PM on September 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

Perhaps, the only truly effective way to make an anti-war film in which the audiences would (hopefully) grasp the message, would be a straight-up documentary using as-it’s-happening, on-the-ground, battlefield footage from all sides of the conflict. With no narration and no music. Just raw war. No characters to empathize with or like. Just nameless people trying to avoid being killed while, themselves, killing.

I found this, though it has sound.

It's as if you don't watchThe Wild One for anti crime message like you don't watch AN for a T.S. Eliot seminar.
posted by clavdivs at 7:59 PM on September 13, 2022

Kirk Douglas Was Thankful Stanley Kubrick Stuck To His Guns With Paths Of Glory, Devin Meenan, SlashFilm, Aug. 20, 2022:

...In a 1969 interview with Roger Ebert, Douglas revealed how Kubrick almost changed "Paths of Glory" [WP] for the worse.

"You know, at one time with 'Paths of Glory,' even Kubrick wanted to cop out. He wanted to rewrite the script, make it a sort of B picture, a commercial thing. But I'm glad we stood by our guns. There's a picture that will always be good, years from now. I don't have to wait fifty years to know that; I know it now."

...Douglas first became interested in working with Kubrick after seeing "The Killing." Once they met, Douglas agreed to fund "Paths of Glory" through his production company, Bryna Productions [WP]. When he arrived in Munich to shoot the film, however, he discovered Kubrick had replaced the script which sold him on the project. The new one was, in Douglas' words, "a catastrophe." He abhorred the new script's corny dialogue and sanitized ending, writing in "The Ragman's Son":

"The general's car arrives screeching to halt the firing squad and he changes the men's death sentence to thirty days in the guardhouse. Then my character, Colonel Dax, goes off with the bad guy he's been fighting all through the movie ... to have a drink, as the general puts his arm around my shoulder."

When Douglas asked Kubrick why he'd changed the script, the director answered, "To make it commercial. I want to make money." Douglas pulled rank, declaring the movie wouldn't be made if the original script wasn't restored....

More in the article.

Production money talk$.
posted by cenoxo at 6:54 AM on September 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

How Full Metal Jacket is a not anti war?... All agree the first part is good.

A student in my war lit class back in the 1990s told me he was a sgt. He and his colleagues liked to watch Full Metal Jacket to get excited about their work.
posted by doctornemo at 1:32 PM on September 14, 2022

writing papers or drill.
posted by clavdivs at 3:01 PM on September 14, 2022

A student in my war lit class back in the 1990s told me he was a sgt. He and his colleagues liked to watch Full Metal Jacket to get excited about their work.

Amazing. To me the first half is a tragedy, how the way the army will break down a man and turn him into something he is not. The war is lost before even leaving American soil, which was very true in regards to the Vietnam war.
posted by zardoz at 6:17 PM on September 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

One unusual non-combat, non-war-glorifying film is The Hill (1965) [WP, IMDb], directed by Sydney Lumet and starring Sean Connery.
posted by cenoxo at 9:26 PM on September 14, 2022

When Douglas asked Kubrick why he'd changed the script, the director answered, "To make it commercial. I want to make money." Douglas pulled rank, declaring the movie wouldn't be made if the original script wasn't restored....

I'm glad he did, one-two punch of the executions and then the german girl singing to the soldiers is just devastating.
posted by octothorpe at 5:21 AM on September 15, 2022 [3 favorites]