By Satyaki Chakraborty
The German film “All Quiet on the Western Front” won seven prizes, including best picture, at the British Academy Film Awards (BAFTAs) on Sunday. This was expected as the anti-war theme of the film had its echo among the BAFTA members during the current raging war in Ukraine and the threats of using nuclear weapons by some powers.
The 2022 film was the first film in German language made on Erich Maria Remarque’s great novel of that name originally published in 1928 in the context of the First World War. The first film adaptation in 1930 was made by the American Lewis Milestone and this English language film was really a milestone in the first phase of sound film making in Hollywood. The script followed mainly the novel and its impact on the film lovers as also the anti war movement in the pre Second World War period was mesmerizing. Later, a second film version was made in 1979 directed by Delbert Mann but this film did not have the same impact as the first film.. Now the third film of Edward Berger released last year has created an impact which can only be compared with the first film.
This 2022 film is directed by Edward Berger from a script he wrote with Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell, . This is much better than the second version which was packed with more plots and also giving the film’s own interpretation of how the young Germans were goaded to join the army..As an activist of the film society movement in Calcutta in 1960s, I saw the first adaptation at that time and the 2022 adaptation of Berger last year in Netflix. Whatever, I can remember of the first film, I can say that the first film was much better in terms of its total impact and the treatment of the young German soldiers. Berger adds some extra scenes but those do not add to explain the nature of violence in the war and how the soldiers of both the warring sides have become victims.
Within all the action, the narrative of young Paul Bäumer, the young German soldier making his way, learning what it is to kill, and trying to forge fellowship in this difficult situation is fine. Berger includes a parallel storyline in which real-life German vice-chancellor Matthias Erzberger tries to broker a peace with the French and others. This is totally out of the context. This addition does not fit with the mood in the latest developments in the book. The portrayal of the German generals as pragmatic and sober and the French negotiators as arrogant leads to a pro German bias in the last part of the film as if the war was prolonged.
At the fagend of the film there’s a sequence when Paul and his older army friend Katczinsky (Albrecht Schuch) go to steal a goose to eat from a French farm and run afoul of a dead-eyed French boy. Compare this with the last part of the 1930 film- two soldiers of opposite sides in a shell hole one dying. The faces of the two tell the horror of the war which Berger’s spectacles and great pictorial portrayal in the 2022 film, can not match.
But Berger’s film has masterpeices showing the ferocity of destruction during the war. Berger cuts to an aerial view of drifting smoke, which clears to reveal an array of corpses. A barrage of bullets suddenly pierces the near-still composition, and the camera turns to show the full extent of the carnage and the muck. This as the New York Times critic says is war as a violation of nature. “And that’s even before Berger trails a scared soldier named Heinrich (Jakob Schmidt), who charges ahead in a pair of unbroken shots — take that, “1917” — only to die offscreen. In a device that owes something to the red coat in “Schindler’s List,” Heinrich’s uniform will be stripped from his body, cleansed, stitched up, shipped to Northern Germany and eventually reused by Remarque’s protagonist, Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), who notices someone else’s name on the label.”
There are gripping moments in the film that resonate. When Paul trudges through the trench and collects dog tags from his fallen comrades, he finds a friend’s distinctive eyeglasses in the mud. Rats scurry to avoid the earthquake of approaching tanks. Paul, his face caked in dirt, tries to silence the dying gulps of the French soldier he has stabbed.
The younger generation who have not seen the 1930 film on Remarque’s novel will certainly like this Berger film for its big canvas, anti-war rhetoric, placing carnage in the backdrop of natural beauty, the comradeship of the young soldiers, but for those who have seen the first adaptation, old is gold. They can never forget the impact of the last scene in that 1930 film. (IPA Service)
