A Film Canon

If The Big Parade elaborates the technological sublimity of war, then All Quiet On The Western Front opts for gritty realism. Thematically, Milestone foregrounds Remarque's characterisation of WWI as a generational, rather than national, conflict, in which the real enemy is military bureaucracy, and all soldiers are ultimately brothers. This, in turn, undermines both the rhetoric of heroism and the conception of manhood upon which it is founded, producing an unusual compatability between masculinity and hysteria, and precluding conventional nobility. As soldier Paul Baumer (Lew Ayres) observes: "We live in the trenches out there. We fight. We try not to be killed. Sometimes we are. That's all". Stylistically, Milestone replaces Vidor's epic sweep with a pervasive claustrophobia, most obviously in the trenches themselves, but also in the iconic charges across no-man's-land, whose horror stems from the sense that each man is in his own private, incommunicable hell, bounded by smoke, dirt, gas and barbed wire, and suffused with a violence that must have struck contemporary audiences with the same impact as the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan. From this perspective, there is an intimate relationship between chaos and claustrophobia, which contextualises the otherwise incongruous emergence of wide- angle shots at key points in the narrative. These always serve to articulate the magnitude of chaos, rather than space, as if Milestone wants to emphasise that it is only the wholescale destruction of buildings that allows him to draw back his camera with such ease, and so dismantle the ethos of German monumentalism, and its Gothic-Christian foundation.