Paths of Glory · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Paths of Glory makes its argument before a word of dialogue — in the geometry of rooms. The film's governing mode is mise-en-scène as moral proposition: Kubrick stages generals in the marble immensity of the Schleissheim Palace using deep focus compositions borrowed wholesale from Gregg Toland's work in Citizen Kane (1941), keeping the gilded ceiling, the inlaid floor, and the men discussing death in the far background all simultaneously razor-sharp, so that power's physical separation from its consequences becomes a pictorial fact rather than a stated theme. Every inch of sharp focus in those rooms is an accusation. The opposing grammar appears in what remains the film's most celebrated technical achievement: a lateral long take gliding at shoulder height as Colonel Dax inspects his men in the trenches before the doomed assault on Ant Hill, the unbroken shot pressing the viewer into the same narrow corridor that offers no exit. Where the palace sequences dwarf their figures through the sheer open acreage of deep space, the trench shot imprisons through horizontal extension — the camera cannot cut away, and the duration of the take is the duration of a fate the generals have already decided in a room too well-lit for doubt. The procedural tragedy that follows — assault, failure, trial, execution, each stage sealing off the reversals the last had permitted — has nowhere to go that the architecture hasn't already announced.