Like Orson Welles a decade later, Milestone, from very early on, landed himself in the most precarious position: he made a film instantly dubbed “semi­nal,” “classic,” and the film to end, if not all wars, then all films. As is often the case with retrospective viewing of such works, one tends to seek faults to counter those historic claims. Yet, 95 years on, there are very few weak links in All Qui­et on the Western Front. For clarity, it is indeed a “masterpiece,” but more im­portantly, it is a guidebook to Milestone’s mise-en-scène.
Based on German author Erich Ma­ria Remarque’s best-selling novel about a group of credulous German boys recruit­ed as soldiers during World War I, the film is a descent into a hellscape of mud and barbed wire where whimpering boys are harvested by machine guns, flying debris reaches the lens and silences prove deadlier than the ruckus of barrage. Shot by Arthur Edeson and Karl Freund, the combat scenes feel like documentary foot­age. Indeed, I’ve lost count of how many documentary and fiction works have used them as stock footage. Milestone slices the screen with lines of marching soldiers and tracking shots over trenches. His window-frame shots are like Bruegel paintings reinterpreted by the Soviet for­malist filmmakers of the 1920s.
Visual elements condense the nov­el into objects, shots, and carefully lit scenes. The ending, involving a butterfly and a reaching hand (Milestone’s own), is improvised and does not belong to the novel. The butterfly, equivalent to the “all quiet” moment in the book, has since become a symbol of the film.
The film was a huge success in many countries except in Germany, where the Berlin screening of an already censored and German-dubbed version was inter­rupted by the goons of a then little-known Joseph Goebbels. They released mice into the cinema and detonated stink bombs, unwittingly convincing attendees that the horrors of the trenches were all too real. That violence spread across oth­er parts of Germany, and the film was banned until 1952. In the meantime, World War II happened.

Ehsan Khoshbakht