Review of Westfront 1918 (1930) by Andrey B — 06 Sep 2017

And I thought I'd seen it all, and I thought 'Paths of Glory' was probably the greatest WW1 movie (aside 'I Accuse', of course). Until I've seen this picture from a genius director G.

W. Pabst. Perfect and ingenious direction is what struck me from the very beginning. All scenes are shot in a careful and patient manner of a master. In this movie many features of such future directors as Kubrick and Spielberg can be traced.

The film looks stunningly realistic, documentary style and at the same time highly artistic. Those shots when a static camera impartially observe the battles are horrifyingly brutal and honest in depiction of true horrors of war.

Many tracking shots that capture the chaos, panic, deaths, explosions make it obvious whom future directors learned from. The monotonous and bleak everyday life of the trench warfare couldn't be portrayed better.

The nightmarish hospital scene at the end is painful to watch, a rare movie achieves this kind of intensity in portraying the madness and horrible effects of war. The scenes of home front are equally realistic, revealing and captivating - war is everywhere, it touches every aspect of life, everybody suffers.

After watching this movie I had a feeling that I'd spent some time in real trenches on real battlefields of WW1. You won't have this feeling watching any modern WW1 movie. Only those old movies can produce such an effect, when there were many veterans of that war, when the pain was still fresh and they knew the horrors of that war first-hand.

In fact, some actors from this movie were actually war veterans. It's a pity that those movies are almost forgotten by the modern audience and only those few interested in history of cinema as well as those who seek the truth about that war get to see this picture.