silver nitrate notes

Kubrick's Paths of Glory and the Tracking Shot as Argument

18 nov 2017

Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) was twenty-eight when Paths of Glory (1957) went into production. He had made two features already, The Killing (1956) and Killer's Kiss (1955), and he had the nervous confidence of a young American director who has studied the old Europeans. For Paths of Glory, he got Kirk Douglas as producer-star. Douglas would later say the film was the one he was proudest of making, out of a career of eighty-plus titles.

The cinematographer was Georg Krause (1901-1997), a German-trained DP whose credits included work with G.W. Pabst. Krause's European background matters because what Kubrick asked him to do, and what he delivered, is explicitly European: tracking shots of a length and discipline that American studio cinema in 1957 did not routinely attempt.

The film is set in the French trenches during the First World War. General Mireau (George Macready) orders a suicidal attack on a German position called the Anthill. The attack fails. Mireau blames the failure on the cowardice of his men and orders three of them chosen at random to be court-martialled and executed as an example. Colonel Dax (Douglas) defends them. The court-martial goes ahead. The men are shot.

What Kubrick and Krause do is photograph the trenches as long lateral travelling shots. The camera moves parallel to the trench walls, at walking pace, following whichever officer is moving through. The men lean against the walls as the officer passes. The camera sees one face, then the next, then the next. By the time the shot ends the viewer has seen a dozen men who will be dead in ten minutes. The argument of the film is made by the shot before any dialogue makes it.

The actual attack scene uses a different technique: a single long forward track from inside no-man's-land, the camera moving with the advancing troops, shells exploding around them, the camera not cutting. The audience is made to cross no-man's-land. This was, in 1957, unusual enough that Kubrick's camera operator had to be harnessed into a custom rig.

The execution scene at the end is photographed in reverse. The men being marched to the firing posts, photographed from in front of them, walking into the camera. We see their faces at full length. We see what each of the three does with his face as he understands that he is about to be shot. The composition is simple. The control is total. The effect, on first viewing, is the worst thing to happen in a war film made in the 1950s.

Kubrick would return to the tracking shot, not to war, for the rest of his career. Paths of Glory is where he proved he could do it.

[ « prev: Ordet · next: Drunken Angel » ]

» leave a comment in the guestbook

sources
[1] LoBrutto, Vincent. Stanley Kubrick: A Biography. Da Capo, 1997.
[2] Ciment, Michel. Kubrick: The Definitive Edition. Faber, 2001.
[3] Naremore, James. On Kubrick. BFI, 2007.
[4] Douglas, Kirk. The Ragman's Son: An Autobiography. Simon & Schuster, 1988.