All Quiet on the Western Front

11 November is Armistice Day, marking the armistice signed between the Allies and Germany at Compiegne, France, on 11 November 1918; it later became Veterans Day in the United States and Remembrance Day across the Commonwealth. Today pairs two films that think about war from the far side of its ending. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) films the First World War head on and remains the best-known anti-war work of the early sound era. The Banshees of Inisherin is set in April 1923, as the Irish Civil War nears its end, yet its camera never leaves the daily life of a small island. One puts war at the centre of the frame, the other leaves it off screen. Ninety-two years apart, both ask how people go on living with one another after the guns stop. The pair also fills the archive's thinnest decade, the 2020s, and adds two directors not yet represented here, Lewis Milestone and Martin McDonagh.

一战初期，德国小镇上，Kantorek 教授在课堂上向学生们宣讲保卫祖国的荣光。以 Paul Bäumer 为首的一群少年热血报名，先撞上昔日温和的邮差、如今当了班长的 Himmelstoss，被他操练得体无完肤。抵达西线后，他们被编入第二连，由老兵「Kat」Katczinsky 带着认识真正的战壕：重新架设前沿铁丝网、掩体里连日不断的炮击、越来越少的食物，还有第一次领到任务时谁都藏不住的慌。影片把这条线一段段往前推，后半段的走向不宜提前说破。

It was the first film to win both the Academy Award for Outstanding Production and Best Director, and the first Best Picture winner adapted from a finished novel. It entered the United States National Film Registry in 1990, made the American Film Institute's inaugural 100 Years...100 Movies list in 1997, and was ranked the seventh-greatest American epic in the AFI poll of 2008. Its authority comes from particulars rather than declarations: a recruit's boots, a ration, endless bombardment in a dugout. That concreteness also made it objectionable in Germany. Its Berlin premiere on 4 December 1930 was disrupted by Nazi stormtroopers, it was banned on 11 December, banned again in 1933, and only re-released in West Berlin in April 1952. The Library of Congress undertook an exhaustive restoration, assembling all surviving footage into a 133-minute version. As a film published in 1930, it entered the United States public domain on 1 January 2026.