Westfront 1918

G.W. Pabst - 1930
Pabst continues to enjoy cutting off people's heads. The spaces he films are not strongly continuity (or rather they are, but there's a lack of cues), and these half-body framings again give that sense of a part of the world captured as a block, in an almost random edit, not concerned with the 'story'. This is more complicated here as Pabst's camera does move in quite fast tracks. These can seem a little rushed and uncontrolled, going along the line in a way Renoir had mastered in 'La Grande Illusion'. There is a scene in a bed which, due to Pabst's usually static blocking, seems oddly like a pan and scan job (and, incidentally, we have more of the idea of the perverse in the sexual we find in Pabst).
Nevertheless, this idea of rushed, grabbed footage works well, as indeed does the tracking generally along the line. We had before noticed Pabst's uneasiness in going outside; this is rectified here, and how (perhaps the fact this is clearly not a studio helps).
The images are 'terrific'; complex tones and nice depth in our scratchy print. There is a quite new sense of the choas of the front, pieces of the non-continuity world snatched. This film is stunningly good as a kind of 'montage of attractions', or rather repulsions, of the war. There is a Renoir-esque spirit in the terrific musical hall scenes, and of the ones where the man are 'hanging out'.
The bursts around an undefined area of the edit also avoids the morally dubious 'map-plotting' of your standard war film; we instead have unconnected by narrative crashes of terror, making this at once personal and post-human, sub-human. The terrible noise of the bombs makes this film evoke the idea of shell-shock in a way that seems to resound true. Dialogue becomes unimportant, except as a scream.
Their are elements, points of action, which are taken from 'All Quiet On The Western Front', but the non-narrative nature, and a technqiue so suited for the subject, makes this, from our vantage point which is still undereducated, Pabst's masterpiece.