Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch All Quiet on the Western Front
2022 · Edward Berger · All Quiet on the Western Front on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the uniform in the opening: stripped, washed, stitched, reissued. (setting)
Berger opens on a dead boy's coat traveling back through a laundry and a sewing room, then onto Paul. No music. The cuts are flat and observational, the rhythm of an inventory.
Payoff: The film states its argument before a line of dialogue: the army treats bodies as stock and recycles the packaging. In the reading: impulse-image. The reading calls this an impulse-image: beneath the uniforms sits a raw appetite, the state's hunger for bodies, running one direction only.
Notice the camera alternating between faces in close and vast empty wides. (camera)
Friend's handheld camera rides inside Paul's tunnel vision, then pulls back into anamorphic wides where men fall in lines across empty ground. Neither distance gives you a safe place to stand.
Payoff: You are held either too near to see what is happening or too far to help. Both positions strip you of agency. In the reading: crisis-of-the-action-image. The reading calls this the crisis of the action-image: Paul can see everything and change nothing, so watching replaces doing.
Listen for the ringing silence right after each artillery hit. (sound)
Kruse mixes shells so they land wrong: concussive, ear-clearing, then an absence. Voices break up and vanish under bombardment. Bertelmann's three-note harmonium slides in and out of the landscape noise with no clear threshold.
Payoff: You cannot separate the score from the war, so the film gives you no aesthetic outside to retreat into.
Watch Kammerer's posture collapse a little further in every scene. (performance)
Kammerer had no film credits before this. He plays Paul through the body: shoulders dropping, the eyes losing the ability to focus on anything outside himself, a face learning the economy of fear.
Payoff: There is no voiceover here. What happens to Paul registers in flesh and stance, so you read the war off his body. In the reading: attitudes & postures. The reading calls this a cinema of the body: what time does to Kammerer's posture carries the argument, not what he decides.
Look at the trench corridors: low ceilings, right angles, openings onto mud. (staging)
Berger builds the trenches out of German Expressionism and the war paintings of Otto Dix: labyrinths that funnel men toward apertures framing nothing. Then the assaults invert it into open ground with nowhere to hide.
Payoff: Confinement and exposure are the only two options the geography offers, and the soldiers have no say over which one they get.
Once you have seen it
Track the cuts between the trench and Erzberger's railway carriage. (cutting)
Berger cross-cuts mud against carpet, lamplight, and Brühl negotiating in warm rooms. The structure is the one classical cinema built for a last-minute rescue. Here it is arranged so the rescue cannot arrive.
Payoff: The cutting is doing the killing. Kubrick used the same shape in Paths of Glory, and Weir in Gallipoli.
Watch the clock through the last hours before eleven. (structure)
The armistice is signed hours before it takes effect at eleven. General Friedrichs orders one more advance inside that gap. Berger paces the interval so you feel every minute of it.
Payoff: This strand is not in Remarque. It turns a personal loss into a charge against the men who ordered the advance.
Time how long the trench scenes run before Willi cuts. (cutting)
Willi holds the trench material far longer than contemporary action editing allows. Nothing is accelerated. The long hold is where the dread is manufactured, not in the fast cutting other war films rely on.
Payoff: Duration itself is the instrument. The film makes you wait inside the fear instead of staging excitement out of it.
Carry this in: Watch the uniform in the first five minutes. Berger shows you the whole war before anyone speaks a line.