Western Front 1918
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Western Front 1918 - Four of the Infantry |
 | |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1930 |
| length | 97 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | GW Pabst |
| script |
Ladislaus Vajda Peter Martin Lampel |
| production | Seymour minor |
| music | Alexander Laszlo |
| camera |
Fritz Arno Wagner Charles Métain |
| cut | Wolfgang Loë-Bagier |
| occupation | |
| |
Western Front 1918 - Vier von der Infanterie is a German anti-war film by GW Pabst from 1930.
action
France 1918 . In the last months of the First World War, four infantrymen - the Bavarian, the student, Karl and the lieutenant - spent a few days of rest behind the front. The student falls in love with the French farm girl Yvette. Back at the front, the four suffer anew the everyday war life with privation, dirt and danger of death. The Bavarian, Karl and the lieutenant are buried, the student digs them up. Later they accidentally come under fire from their own artillery, and again the student saves them: As a reporter , he risks his life to have the fire stopped.
Karl is given leave to go to starving homeland and promptly catches his wife in bed with a journeyman butcher. He returns to the front, bitter and unreconciled. In his absence, the student was stabbed in hand-to-hand combat. His corpse is still lying in the mud of a shell hole, only one hand protruding. An enemy offensive is announced. Finally, the tank-backed large-scale attack by French infantry broke over the thin German lines. While fighting off the onslaught, Karl and the Bavarian were seriously wounded, the other members of the group were killed. The lieutenant had a nervous breakdown and fell mentally deranged. Continuously shouting "Hurray", he salutes a pile of corpses. He is taken to the field hospital, as is Karl and the Bavarian. In a fever, Karl sees his wife again and dies with the words "We are all to blame!" You cover him up, but his hand hangs out sideways. A French wounded man lying next to him takes it in his own and says: “Enemies - no - comrades.” The final overlay “End” is provided with a question mark and an exclamation mark.
backgrounds
By 1930 war films were booming in Germany. One of the few exceptions was the Western Front 1918 produced by Nero-Film , which premiered in Berlin on May 23, 1930 , 7 months before the American anti-war film Im Westen . The script is based on the novel Vier von der Infanterie by Ernst Johannsen . The buildings are by Ernő Metzner .
Stylistically, the film achieves an astonishingly high degree of realism, especially in the trench and fight scenes. The monotony of dying reinforces the oppressive impression of authenticity. Next to it are “small” silent scenes, for example when the student observes how grave crosses are being made on the assembly line in a field joiner's workshop, or how Karl's mother does not want to leave her place in the grocery line when she sees her son again.
But Pabst wanted more than just realism: “I am a realist? From my very first film on, I chose realistic subjects, but with the intention of being resolutely a stylist. ... Realism has to be a trampoline from which you jump higher and higher; in itself it has no value. It's about overcoming reality. Realism is a means, not an end ”. (quoted in: Bandmann / Hembus, p. 21). It is not the battle scenes but the individual fates of the four soldiers that make Pabst's actual pacifist statement clear: the belief in the power of international solidarity among ordinary people.
In 1933 the film was banned because it showed "a very one-sided and therefore untrue representation of the war" and would jeopardize the "vital interest of the state in maintaining and strengthening the will of the people to fight" (text of the application for a ban in the German Film Institute).
The film was first shown on German television on December 19, 1970 at 11:05 p.m. on ZDF .
Reviews
- “Besides everything, everything that I saw in winter, a sound film these days affected me the deepest: because it bares the face of the war in the most rude manner for non-participants. The impression is overwhelming for weeks, months. This should be demonstrated on every New Year's Day, once at the beginning of the year; in every village, in every school; ex officio, by law. What are plays? "( Alfred Kerr in the Berliner Tageblatt 1930, quoted in: Bandmann / Hembus, p. 19)
- “The urge to faithfully reproduce the horror that prevails here has outgrown two scenes that almost cross the boundaries of what can be said. One: a lone battle ends with an infantryman being suffocated in the swamp in front of everyone. (The fact that you can later see a dead hand sticking out of the seething mud is superfluous showmanship.) The other: the front hospital in the church with mutilated people, nurses and doctors who can hardly continue their trade because they are exhausted. It is as if medieval images of torture had come to life ”. ( Siegfried Kracauer in the Frankfurter Zeitung 1930, quoted in: Bandmann / Hembus, p. 21)
- “Western Front 1918” is the only war denouncing film that denies the army any favors - in that respect it is a purer work than Milestone's (not to mention the discouraging complicity with the ideal soldier that one in the French films of that time come across again and again) ”. (Roger Boussinot: L'Encyclopédie du Cinema . Paris 1967)
- "The war film" Western Front 1918 "... refuses ... even the most secret glorification of the war as a site of" human probation ". He appears as the perfection of horror that he is. For four infantrymen, the context in which the war was initially to be classified is gradually breaking apart. If they initially appear as actors, the anonymous power of war then gains more and more power over them until their identity falls apart completely: in madness or in an absurd death. ... The camera scans the battlefield in artless, slow and uneven journeys, revealing the horror in epic succession. The political cause of this remains outside the scope of the camera. ”( Ulrich Gregor , Enno Patalas : Geschichte des Films. 1895–1939 . Vol. 1. Reinbek 1976, p. 141)
- "Above all, the coarse staging and representation of the domestic family dramas and the sentimental evocation of a universal brotherhood disturb a film that ... impresses with its harsh realism, with which it depicts the monotony and horrors of the trench war from a German perspective." (Liz-Anne Bawden (Ed.): Rororo Filmlexikon . Vol. 3. Reinbek 1978, p. 761f.)
- "With» Western Front 1918 «we have before us the first of the three sound films with which GW Pabst ... crowned his brilliantly started career in silent film ... before he fell into mediocrity and opportunism." (Bandmann / Hembus, P. 19)
literature
- Christa Bandmann, Joe Hembus : Western Front 1918 . In: Dies .: Classics of the German sound film . Goldmann, Munich 1980, pp. 19-21, ISBN 3-442-10207-3 .
- Christiane Mückenberger Western Front 1918 . In Günther Dahlke, Günther Karl (Hrsg.): German feature films from the beginnings to 1933. A film guide . Henschel Verlag, 2nd edition, Berlin 1993, p. 221 ff. ISBN 3-89487-009-5 .
- Marc Vanden Berghe: La mémoire impossible. Western Front 1918 de GW Pabst. Grande Guerre, soldiers, automates. Le film et saproblemématique vus par la “Petite Illustration” (1931) , Brussel 2001.
- Four of the infantry. Your Last Days on the Western Front 1918 (Ernst Johannsen) (audio book) (Ed .: Andre Kagelmann & Reinhold Keiner), ISBN 978-3-939988-03-8 .
- Christian Hißnauer: Western Front 1918 - Four of the Infantry . In: Film genres: War film . Edited by Thomas Klein, Marcus Stiglegger and Bodo Traber. Stuttgart: Reclam 2006, pp. 57-60 [with references]. ISBN 978-3-15-018411-0 .
- Andre Kagelmann u. Reinhold Keiner: “Death begins to reap people and animals casually.” Reflections on Ernst Johannsen's novel Vier von der Infanterie and GW Pabst's film WESTFRONT 1918. In: Ernst Johannsen: Vier von der Infanterie. Her last days on the Western Front in 1918. Ed. dens. Kassel: Media Net-Edition 2014. pp. 80–113. ISBN 978-3-939988-23-6 .
See also
Web links
- Western Front in 1918 at the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Western Front 1918 at filmportal.de (including contemporary reviews, premiere poster, photos)
- Western Front 1918 on YouTube