Kubrick made the most morally certain film of his career. That certainty is also the film’s most precise limitation.
| — | Distance |
|---|---|
| Château to the front line | 4.3 kilometres |
| Defendants’ table to judges’ bench | 12 metres |
| Execution post to the courtroom wall | 400 metres |
| Camera to Kirk Douglas’s face, courtroom | 18 inches |
| Camera to Corporal Paris’s face, same scene | 6 feet |
| Camera to Private Ferol’s face, same scene | 8 feet |
| Camera to Private Arnaud’s face, same scene | 7 feet |
These numbers are the film.
| Director | Stanley Kubrick |
|---|---|
| Year | 1957 |
| Runtime | 88 minutes |
| Cast | Kirk Douglas, Ralph Meeker, Adolphe Menjou, George Macready |
| Award | National Film Registry, Library of Congress; Writers Guild of America, 100 Greatest Screenplays |
| Streaming | MUBI, Max |
Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) is set during the First World War on the Western Front, in the French sector, in 1916. General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) orders General Mireau (George Macready) to take the Ant Hill — a heavily fortified German position — despite Mireau’s private assessment that the assault has a near-zero probability of success. Mireau orders it anyway, after Broulard hints at a promotion. The assault fails. Two companies retreat under fire. Mireau, looking for someone to blame, orders his artillery to fire on his own retreating men — an order the artillery commander refuses to execute — and then demands a court martial of the entire regiment for cowardice. Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), the regiment’s commanding officer and a defence attorney in civilian life, volunteers to defend the men. Three soldiers are selected at random to stand trial. The trial is a formality. They are shot at dawn. The film was banned in France for eighteen years for its portrayal of the French military command. It is, by almost universal agreement, the most morally transparent film Kubrick ever made: the evil is located precisely, the victims are innocent, the system convicts itself out of its own mouth. The previous review on this blog called it “the Kubrick film made before the distance became the method — the camera pressed into the trench, moving the way a terrified body moves.” That was accurate about the camera’s energy. What it was not, quite, was accurate about whose body the camera was moving inside.
The Barry Lyndon review argued that the camera in Paths of Glory presses against its characters with an immediacy that makes the tracking shots through the trenches “feel like being inside a body under fire.” This is true of the sensation the shots produce. What the earlier review could not say — what requires the film as subject rather than as comparison to see — is that the body the camera is inside is not a soldier’s. The pre-assault tracking shot moves down the line of men as Dax walks it: the camera ahead of him or beside him, the men on either side passing into and out of frame as he passes them. The men are there. They are present, afraid, recognisably human. But the camera is tracking Dax. It is registering the trench through his movement, measuring the space through his passage, experiencing the front line at the pace and from the height of the officer walking his command. The soldiers are the walls of his passage through the space they all share. The film calls this democratic immersion. It is something more specific and more uncomfortable: the immersion of the man with options, inside the space of men who have none. The camera is not inside the trench. It is inside the officer’s experience of the trench, which is a different place entirely, with a different relationship to the morning’s assault and its probable outcomes.
This distinction matters most in the courtroom, and the distance table at the top of this review is where it becomes measurable. The trial of Paris, Ferol, and Arnaud is Paths of Glory‘s moral centre — the scene where the system’s injustice is most completely displayed, where the film’s prosecutorial argument reaches its highest pitch. Dax argues brilliantly. The generals rebuff him with contemptuous procedural ease. The three condemned men speak briefly, are overruled, are denied the most basic requirements of due process. The film is appalled by what it is showing, and the appalled energy belongs entirely to Dax. The camera watches him with the close, attentive proximity of a filmmaker who knows exactly where the moral authority in this scene is located. It watches the three condemned men from a greater distance: not callously, not without feeling, but with a remove that reflects the film’s own hierarchy of investment. Dax’s case is the film’s case. Paris and Ferol and Arnaud are the evidence on which the case rests. The film never quite reaches inside them the way it reaches inside Dax’s outrage, and the result is that the three men the film is saving never become as fully inhabited as the man saving them. They are emblems of injustice rather than the specific, irreplaceable people the film needs them to be for the injustice to carry its full weight.
The film knows precisely where the evil is. That precision is also the measure of what the film could not see: the three men it was saving were never quite as present to it as the man making their case.
The proof of this limitation is located in what the film gives each condemned man in the hours before his execution. Paris (Ralph Meeker) is given the film’s most substantial individual scene: a conversation with the cowardly officer whose behaviour led to his selection, which ends in violence. It is a good scene. It gives Paris anger, intelligence, a specific grievance. Ferol (Timothy Carey) is given a moment of breakdown, genuine and painful, that the film handles with uncomfortable brevity. Arnaud (Joe Turkel) is given almost nothing — a few lines, a presence in group shots, an injury that makes him unconscious for the execution itself, which the film perhaps intends as mercy and which functions as a removal of the person from the moment the film has been building toward. Three men are being shot at dawn for a crime they did not commit. One of them the film knows reasonably well. One of them the film registers with brief compassion. One of them the film puts to sleep before the ending arrives. The film’s moral outrage is real and total. Its attention is distributed with a hierarchy it cannot see.
Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1937), made twenty years earlier about the preceding generation’s war, is the film that illuminates Paths of Glory most sharply — and the friction it generates is not comfortable. Both films are about class and military hierarchy in a European war, about the distances between officers and men, about the institutional machinery that converts human beings into units of strategy. But Renoir’s camera does not know in advance where the evil is. It extends its formal generosity to every character including the German commandant von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim), who is given the film’s most devastating interiority — a man who understands that the class system he embodies is ending and cannot imagine surviving the end. Grand Illusion does not have villains. It has people caught inside structures that are larger than any of them, and it treats the German aristocrat with the same formal warmth it gives the French Jewish banker and the working-class mechanic. Kubrick’s film knows where the evil lives. It has located it upstairs, in the château, in the epaulettes and the brandy and the willingness to send men to die for a promotion. The location is correct. The certainty of the location is also what prevents the film from achieving what Renoir achieved: the formal generosity that makes every person in the frame, regardless of their position in the hierarchy, a subject rather than a function. Paths of Glory has subjects and it has functions, and the division between them maps almost exactly onto the division between the officers and the condemned. This is not a failure of sympathy. It is a failure of the film’s own moral architecture, which is so certain of its argument that it cannot extend its attention past the argument’s requirements.
What the film cannot see at all is located in its last scene, which is almost universally regarded as one of the most moving endings in American cinema, and which is also, on close examination, the film’s most quietly self-incriminating gesture. The assault has failed. The execution has taken place. The soldiers, drinking in a tavern, are jeering at a captured German girl (Christiane Kubrick, who would become Stanley Kubrick’s wife) who has been brought to perform for them. She is frightened. They are hostile and leering. She begins to sing a German folk song — “Der treue Husar,” the faithful hussar — in a language none of them understand. One by one the jeering stops. Something crosses the men’s faces that the film reads as the persistence of human feeling inside the dehumanising machinery of war: grief, and longing, and the memory of people they love, surfacing through the brutality. Sergeant Boulanger comes to tell them their leave has been cancelled. He gives them a moment longer. It is the film’s gesture of grace.
But she did not sing for them. She was brought there and told to perform, in a room full of men shouting at her, in a language she could not use to communicate with them. Her fear is visible in the film’s first frames of the scene, and then the singing begins and the film’s attention migrates to the soldiers’ faces — to what is happening in them as she sings — and it does not return to her. What she felt while the French soldiers wept at her voice the film does not ask. What it cost her to stand in that room and produce the grace the soldiers needed the film does not examine. She is, in the film’s final scene, structurally identical to what Paris and Ferol and Arnaud were in the generals’ courtroom: a human being deployed to produce a desired emotional outcome in an audience that is not, at the decisive moment, thinking about her experience. The film that spent eighty-eight minutes indicting an institution for treating people as means rather than ends closes with a scene that does the same thing and calls it grace. It does not know this. Its moral certainty is so complete, its outrage at the system so total, that it cannot turn that outrage on its own final image.
Paths of Glory is the film in which Kubrick’s camera was most alive, most afraid, most pressed against the human cost of institutional power. It is also the film in which that camera’s certainty about where the suffering is located prevented it from seeing all of it. The distance that would arrive fully in Barry Lyndon was not yet the method. But its precondition was already present: the film that knows where the evil is has already decided, in knowing, what it will not look at. The tracking shot moves through the trench. The men pass on either side. The camera follows the officer. The morning comes.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937): the film about the preceding generation’s war that refuses to locate the evil in any single class or rank, extending its formal generosity even to the German aristocrat who understands his world is ending — the most useful counter-argument to Kubrick’s moral certainty, because it shows what a war film looks like when it does not know in advance which side of the line the humanity is on.
Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975): our review is on this blog — the Kubrick film made eighteen years later, in which the camera that once pressed against the trench has learned to recede entirely, painting the same century’s social ambition from a distance so complete it becomes its own confession; reading the two reviews together is the closest this blog has come to watching a filmmaker change.
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