All Quiet On The Western Front
Jan. 16th, 2015 11:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloI've seen it in several versions- including one that was tinted in the manner of silent movies- blue for night scenes etc. The first time was at school- when I begged my way out of my sick bed to get to the showing. The copy I just watched is taken from the one deposited at the Library of Congress- so as complete and well-scrubbed as possible. It's the greatest war movie ever made: Yes? No?
Well, surely the most influential. All the WWI tropes are here, but still fresh, never seen before. And there are things that have never been bettered- the battle scenes for example. They really are quite extraordinary. The sequence that intercuts a close up of a machine gunner with his view of the men he's killing, panning along the advancing line as they fall, is as powerful a vision of mechanised warfare as exists in any medium.
A myth about the early sound era is that they had to put the cameras in soundproofed cases- which took the movies back twenty years or more and- after the wonderful fluidity of the later silent fims- everything became stagy and static and studio-bound. But none of this applies to All Quiet. The camera pans, dollies, does everything but fly- and maybe it even does that in some of the panoramic shots of the battlefield. There are breathtaking trick shots- like the one right at the beginning where we back out of the street, where the troops are marching, and seamlessly, without a cut, into the classroom where the professor is holding forth.
The script is a little literary and some of the acting (but not that of the two older leads, Louis Wolheim and Slim Summerville) has the over-emphasis and over-statement associated with the silent era. So what? Screen acting was still a work in progress. You could call the movie primitive and it is- in the sense in which Duccio is primitive compared to Michelangelo- but primitive doesn't mean worse.
Well, surely the most influential. All the WWI tropes are here, but still fresh, never seen before. And there are things that have never been bettered- the battle scenes for example. They really are quite extraordinary. The sequence that intercuts a close up of a machine gunner with his view of the men he's killing, panning along the advancing line as they fall, is as powerful a vision of mechanised warfare as exists in any medium.
A myth about the early sound era is that they had to put the cameras in soundproofed cases- which took the movies back twenty years or more and- after the wonderful fluidity of the later silent fims- everything became stagy and static and studio-bound. But none of this applies to All Quiet. The camera pans, dollies, does everything but fly- and maybe it even does that in some of the panoramic shots of the battlefield. There are breathtaking trick shots- like the one right at the beginning where we back out of the street, where the troops are marching, and seamlessly, without a cut, into the classroom where the professor is holding forth.
The script is a little literary and some of the acting (but not that of the two older leads, Louis Wolheim and Slim Summerville) has the over-emphasis and over-statement associated with the silent era. So what? Screen acting was still a work in progress. You could call the movie primitive and it is- in the sense in which Duccio is primitive compared to Michelangelo- but primitive doesn't mean worse.
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Date: 2015-01-16 04:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-17 02:32 am (UTC)