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ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT I3I
up the line, then to the machine-guns, then to the French.
Milestone's timing of shot-lengths and continuation of movement from one shot to another could not be better. The whole arrangement has been most intelligently thought out with scientific accuracy. Each shot fits into the next to build a sequence that assails our senses. When later in the film we see another attack, this time issuing from the German lines, the pan movement is reversed and we follow the spread of the bullets from right to left. Quite unconsciously to the audience but definitely calculated by Milestone, the conflict between the two sides is expressed by the movement of the camera. It may appear a small detail, but it is vastly efficacious in establishing the French and German enmity.1
As in Tell England, this is cutting as cutting should be used, to storm and stagger us as we sit in the cinema. It is an exciting type of cutting to express an exciting incident; just as slower and longer arrangements of shot-lengths arouse our more tragic senses, modulating between the physically exciting and the psychologically dramatic. We experience this latter mood to the full in the scene of Paul's death, which has already been described. As in the attack the pieces of celluloid are cut short with the material in motion, here Milestone cuts into long, measured lengths, his material at rest,
1 This particular method of cutting on movement is, I observe, used with great skill in The Front Page, a film that does much to raise Milestone in my estimation and that removes certain of the doubts expressed by the above remarks, which were written, of course, before the exhibition of this last picture.