Recently, a number of big budget films have come out dealing with World War I: 1917, Benediction, All Quiet on the Western Front, They Shall Not Grow Old, and even Wonder Woman reimagines a war now all but lost to collective memory. With the success of All Quiet on the Western Front at the Oscars, World War I continues to occupy a space in the popular mindset as a series of horror stories about trench warfare, vague imaginings of its aftermath, and the circumstances around it which launched both the Roaring Twenties and the rise of global fascism.
World War I was also the first war to be chronicled by film on a large scale. The first Best Picture winner Wings came out in 1927, less than a decade after the end of the war. At least one star, Richard Arlen, was himself a fighter pilot. But because of the nature of film, much of World War I remains in our memories as a silent war—explosions without sound, lips moving without voices to accompany them, an eerie silence where there should be noise.
Unlike World War II, which had its undoubted heroes and villains, it is nearly impossible to cast World War I as a battle between good and evil. Even those films that dealt with it in the aftermath—Wings, The Big Parade, J’accuse, Westfront 1918, the original All Quiet on the Western Front, Grand Illusion—struggled to frame the enemy as an enemy. All Quiet is an American film about German soldiers; The Big Parade details the pressure on a young man to fight to prove his masculinity. This was a war fought for unclear reasons by people little more than teenagers, and those that survived would often go on to become virulently outspoken opponents of war itself. The films are far removed from the excited propaganda that characterize films of World War II and its aftermath—Wings features men begging for forgiveness from bereaved parents, All Quiet ends in death. Less than a decade after it was over, the general public seemed to agree that war was less than glorious.
Which is why it’s so intriguing that we have returned to World War I as a topic and setting. The centennial has come and gone, but it remains clear in our collective consciousness, and we continue to probe into it with a strange compulsion and lack of direction. World War I proved a turning point, a result of internecine rivalries, confusing alliances, and a generational shift in both culture and the science of war itself. It was a shock to the system at an international level. At a popular level, there was no “keeping the world safe for democracy” or clear-cut villains—a fact which became even clearer as nations mired themselves in mud and blood. It provided a breeding ground for fascism, robbed an entire generation of health and safety, and launched a strange, conflicted period that ended in a worldwide depression—a time, it seems, that we are hysterically comparing with our own.
Perhaps what fascinates us so much now is the combination of remoteness and relatability—how clearly we see ourselves in this period of upheaval and confusion, where every nation thought they were the good guys only to discover that there were no good guys, and no bad guys either. There is an anxiety at the root of our contemporary World War I films that perhaps we are repeating history, but it is a nebulous anxiety, a search for some explanation we don’t really hope to find. We cannot look to a single period and say that it’s all happening again, but so many of the warnings we might take from the 1910s and 20s seem to be rising up a second, even a third, time. World War I was arguably the beginning of a sort of collective madness across the world, and the films of that period highlight just how pointless it all was. In that time’s strange silences and terrifying endlessness, perhaps we’re looking for some understanding of our own.
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