Westfront 1918 (1930)

Westfront 1918 (German: Vier von der Infanterie) is a German film, set mostly in the trenches of the Western Front during World War I. It was directed in 1930 by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, from the novel Vier von der Infanterie by Ernst Johannsen, and deals with the impact of the war on a group of infantrymen. It featured an ensemble cast led by screen veterans Fritz Kampers and Gustav Diessl; Diessl had been a prisoner of war for a year during the war.

The film bears resemblance to its close contemporary, the All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), an American production, although it has a bleaker tone consistent with Pabst's New Objectivity work through the late 1920s. It was particularly pioneering in its early use of sound—it was Pabst's first "talkie"—in that Pabst managed to record live audio during complex tracking shots through the trenches.

Westfront 1918 was a critical success when it was released, although it was often shown in truncated form. With the rise of National Socialism, the film quickly became considered by the German authorities as unsuitable for the people, notably for its obvious pacifism, and for its clear denunciation of war. This was an attitude that propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels would soon label as "cowardly defeatism".

Some shots from the film were used for scene-setting purposes in a 1937 BBC Television adaptation of the play Journey's End.

Synopsis

France 1918. In the last months of World War I, four infantrymen—Bayer, a young man known as 'the student' (Der Student), Karl and the lieutenant—spend a few rest-days behind the Front. Here, the student falls in love with the French peasant girl Yvette. Back at the Front, the four suffer again the everyday hardships of war, dirt trenches and danger of death. Bayer, Karl and the lieutenant become trapped when part of the trench collapses in, and the student digs them out. Later they are mistakenly fired upon by their own artillery due to a misjudgement of distance, and again they are saved by the student, who as a messenger risked his life to relay instructions to the soldiers setting the firing range of the artillery.

Actors