Westfront 1918 [Criterion Collection] [Blu-ray]

Director: Georg Wilhelm Pabst Georg Wilhelm Pabst

Overview

Westfront 1918 (aka Comrades of 1918) was the first talkie effort from German filmmaker G. W. Pabst, which he made for Nero Films, a production company headed up by Seymour Nebenzahl. Like the contemporary Hollywood production All Quiet on the Western Front, Pabst's film is a bitter, melancholy antiwar statement. The story concentrates on four German soldiers, sent to the front in the waning days of World War 1. The futility of killing an enemy who is already dead spiritually, and of being killed for a cause that has for all intents and purposes been resolved, is brought home to the viewer with both barrels. The astonishingly fluid camerawork of Fritz Arno puts the spectator in the thick of the battle, and the effect is both terrifying and heartbreaking To watch only a few moments of Westfront 1918, one might think that Pabst had been making sound pictures all his life, rather than a mere couple of months.

Product Details

Release Date:	01/30/2018
UPC:	0715515209113
Original Release:	1930
Rating:	NR
Source:	Criterion Collection
Region Code:	A
Presentation:	[B&W]
Language:	English
Time:	1:36:00
Sales rank:	12,956

Special Features

2k Digital Restoration with uncompressed monaural soundtrack; Hour-long French television broadcast of World War I veterans reacting to the film in 1969; Interview from 2016 with film scholar Jan-Christopher Horak; New restoration demonstration featuring Martin Koerber and Julia Wallmüller of the Deutsche Kinemathek; Brief audio interview from 1988 with Editor Jean Oser; New English subtitle translation; Plus: An essay by author and critic Luc Sante

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Gustav Diessl	Karl
Claus Clausen	The Lieutenant
Hans-Joachim Moebis	The Student
Fritz Kampers	The Bavarian
Jackie Monnier	Jacqueline
Hanna Hoessrich	Karl's Wife
Else Heller	Karl's Mother
Vladimir Sokoloff	An Orderly
Carl Ballhaus	The Butcher Boy
Gustav Püttjer	Actor

Technical Credits

Peter Martin Lampel

Ladislaus Vajda

P.M. Lampel

Georg Wilhelm Pabst	Director
Seymour Nebenzal	Producer
Peter Martin Lampel	Screenwriter
Ladislaus Vajda	Screenwriter,Screenwriter
P.M. Lampel	Screenwriter