A Filmmaker's Review: "Westfront, 1918" (1930)

G.W Pabst was a director who is probably most associated with being a filmmaker of the German conscience during the times of great turmoil like the war. The director who also is most associated with being part of the German 'talkies' and really did push the boat out when it came to script, realism and what you could and could not depict on the screen. In the film "Westfront, 1918" (1930), G.W Pabst attempts to depict the very realistic insights of human turmoil in Germany during the first World War. The series of different characters go through their own woes.

One set of characters are replacements on the first batallion, about to get a lesson in what war is really about when they are young and think it all fun and games because of the brotherhood, drinking and entertainment. Another set of characters sing from the trenches as men around them in no-man's land are blown up, shot at and they have to watch their friends die around them. When one soldier arrives home, he mistakenly thinks his wife is cheating on him when she is actually being provided food by that man. He leaves her coldly and she cries unable to make him understand. There are more and the truth of the film is that the war leaves its hyper-realistic and brutal marks on every single person whether they are a soldier or standing in the line of food handouts only to be told everything is sold-out.

Pabst's film style is absolutely brilliant. Everything is interconnected and you feel like you too, have been woven into the fabric of the story. From the trenches, you can really see how horrid the situation is for Karl and his friends when he arrives back to fight. Life in the trenches is portrayed as something to be massively feared. I love the scene where one character sees a dead body and the other guy goes, 'don't worry, we are heroes...' but August then states, 'if we were heroes, we would have gone home already...' then August chuckles about it.

The scene where the German army are practically getting blown up by the French is amazingly filmed, you just see these seas of dead bodies in the trenches, people running and the bombs going off. I think the best part about it is that there is no soundtrack, no distracting music. Everything is contained within that scene and you get these weird close ups of the bodies that add to that silent drama. There's nothing but bombs, guns and the Germans are just dropping dead like flies. It is brutal, horrifying and honestly, one of the best war scenes I have ever witnessed because it feels far too real.

Pabst makes excellent drama by drawing out these scenes for long amounts of time in order to make the audience pay vast amounts of attention of them. It is something that is seriously horrifying, brutal and far too honest to have come out of the era it came from. It is absolute carnage and has some of the greatest war scenes, some of the greatest and most terrifying scenes of injury and to know that it is entirely based on what happened to the Germans in the trenches, some younger than the legal age to be in the army, is something that absolutely horrifies us even to this day. I think that Pabst could definitely show this in his work because, like people of today can show the carnage of the Vietnam war - it was not that far off in time. It was well imprinted into the social consciousness - and now, it is imprinted into ours.