World War I wasn't represented in the randomly selected films we watch on this show for 20 episodes.

The first film we watched set during the Great War was the African Queen and we had to break with the

random selection model to shoehorn in all quiet on the Western front just in time

for the 100th anniversary of the armistice. The conventional wisdom is that it's a less filmic world war than its successor,

but that's kind of a simplistic way of understanding why there are so few films on our list that represent

it.

I think partly this owes to the fact that the war took place

very early in the history of cinema,

and perhaps its participants and observers

were less likely to use the conventions of film as a mental

framework for understanding the stories they had experienced.

The flurries of art, theatre, and literature that came out of Western Europe after 1918 and before the late 19-18. and

before the late 1930s

were paradigm shifting radical explorations of the trauma suffered by

and at the hands of those populations.

But remember that All Quiet came out in 1930

and was the first talky to take home an Oscar.

This was a medium in its nascent,

and by the time it had matured,

a new Eurogenic global conflict had come and gone and

was an even bigger trauma to attempt to unpack and understand. It's interesting to

think about to what extent today's film is an exploration of World War II rather than

...