Film & History News British Conference Planned

portrays the mental torment of life in dugouts under days-long bombardment and in a brilliant sequence running over six minutes of screen time, he captures the all too unchanging pattern of combat in the West. The German troops suffer long bombardment, it lifts and they rush into the trenches to meet the attack. Waves of French troops charge with enough surviving murderous machine gun fire to reach the German trenches. The French come on but are finally broken by Germany artillery. The process reverses and the Germans counterattack, retaking their own trench and moving on to take the forward French trench. Here they seize what booty they can, realize they are too weak to face a counterattack, and fall back to their original lines. The cost: hundreds on both sides. The gain: absolutely nothing for either side. From the winter of 1914 to 1918 reality was all too close to this screen image. Milestone also leaves the viewer aware of an intriguing spectrum of death in terms ofpersonalization. On the one hand the war is presented as horribly personal, grappling in the trenches, cutting, hitting, gouging with anything available (and trench veterans created a ghastly array of improvised weapons for such fighting). At this end of the spectrum killing and death are highly personal. Only the speed of the action provided an emotional protective shield for the soldiers. Even this is stripped away from Paul in the moving re-creation of his killing of Duval. Paul is cut off and seeks refuge in a crater. A French attack passes by him, but upon their retreat a French soldier jumps into the same hole for shelter. Prepared, Paul stabs him mortally, but then must suffer as Duval slowly bleeds to death. Unable to leave, Paul must witness the results of his act and discovers something of the common humanity of man. On the other end of the spectrum are the results of ever-developing weapons technology. Men continually fall to artillery shells fired from afar, are cut down in masses by machine guns, or, as with Kat, are hit by bomb fragments dropped from an apparent speck in the sky. Here is no real chance to confront the cause of death, only a pervasive fatalism about the shell with one's name written on it. World War I ushered in a new level of destructiveness in warfare. With over 13,600,000 military dead and 34,000,000 wounded it indeed destroyed a generation. With so few positive gains, it stands condemned. These facts and judgments are vividly clear in All Quiet on the Western Front. They continue to make it an effective teaching tool despite the fact that it is almost 50 years old. FILM & HISTORY NEWS BRITISH CONFERENCE PLANNED The Inter University History Film Consortium is organizing, in conjunction with the Imperial War Museum and the British Film Archive, a conference on 'Film, Politics and Propaganda, 1918-45' at the Imperial War Museum, 1 8th-20 April 1979. The first three sessions will focus on film politics and propaganda in Britain, with two papers on the recently researched problems ofthe policies of British official propaganda abroad. The following sessions will examine propaganda and film from the government and antigovernment sides. Dr. J. A. Ramsden will show his recent 'Archive Series' production for the Consortium on Baldwin and discuss the conservative party's attitude and achievements in the field of film propaganda in the 1930s. Peter Stead will balance 69 this with a paper on the presentation of and by the labour movement on film in the inter-war years. The fourth session will, by contrast, examine similar problems in France in the 1930s and in particular in relation to the Popular Front. And in the final session Professor Droboshenko will consider the Soviet documentary movement in its heyday in the 1920s and in the 1930s, to be followed by an analysis of Soviet wartime newsreel and consideration of the problems ofthe mobilization ofthe Soviet public for the war effort. For registration and other information write D.W. Spring, Secretary, Department of History, University ofNottingham, Nottingham. NG 7 2 RG ANNUAL MEETING As announced in the A.H.A...