Long shot Paths of Glory (1957) - Colonel Dax's march

• Film title: Paths of Glory

• Year : 1957

• Director / Co-writer: Stanley Kubrick (29 years old during filming, fourth feature film)

• Co-writers: Calder Willingham and Jim Thompson

• Country: United States (independent production - Kirk Douglas's Bryna Productions + Harris-Kubrick Pictures)

• DP (Director of Photography - also called cinematographer or director of photography) : Georg Krause (German cinematographer)

• Main actors: Kirk Douglas (Colonel Dax), George Macready (General Mireau), Adolphe Menjou (General Broulard)

• Editor: Eva Kroll

• Music: Gerald Fried

• Based on the novel: Paths of Glory by Humphrey Cobb (1935)

• Film: 35mm black and white

• Format: 1.66:1 (vertical aspect ratio, narrowed on the characters)

• Film duration: 84 minutes

• Notable long takes:

  • The tracking shot (the camera moves backward in front of the character who is moving forward) of General Mireau visiting the trenches

  • The forward tracking shot (the camera moves backwards ahead of the character) of Colonel Dax in the same trenches before the assault

  • Attack on the Anthill - filmed with 6 simultaneous cameras, one of which was carried by Kubrick himself

  • The long lateral tracking shots during the attack (from right to left - the opposite direction of the "progression")

• The trenches were widened from 4 feet (the actual historical size of World War I trenches) to 6 feet (1.80 m) to allow the dolly (camera dolly on rails) to pass through – a controversial decision opposed by the film's technical director.

• Cameras for the attack: 6 in total - 5 mounted on dolly tracks parallel to the soldiers' advance, 1 handheld by Kubrick

• Pyrotechnics: more than a ton of explosives were detonated during the first week of filming alone; special effects supervisor Erwin Lange had to appear before a special German government commission to obtain authorization.

• Battlefield: a pasture of ~4,180 m² rented from a German farmer

• Filming locations: Schleissheim Castle (near Munich, Germany, for the castle scenes and the court-martial); Geiselgasteig Studios (Munich for the interiors); Puchheim (west of Munich for the exterior battlefield). The entire film was shot in Germany, never in France.

• Extras: 600 Munich police officers dressed as French soldiers

• Filming duration: 64 days (March 18 - end of May 1957)

• Budget: $950,000 (including $300,000 for Douglas's salary)

• Banned in France upon its release (ban lifted in 1975)

• National Film Registry: selected in 1992 for preservation

• Main sources: Roger Ebert ("Great Movies", 2005); Military History Matters - "War on Film: Paths of Glory" (March 2021); AFI Catalog; IMDB Trivia; Deep Focus Review (June 2025); The-Solute - “Continue down your mistaken path”; Classic Movie Hub; HighDefWatch - "Kubrick's Paths of Glory gets a 4K UHD boost" (August 2022); Wikipedia - Paths of Glory

Western Front. French Headquarters. General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) offers General Mireau (George Macready) a promotion in exchange for an impossible mission: to take the "anthill," an impregnable German position. Mireau accepts. He goes down into the trenches to announce the news to Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas). The camera tracks him backward, a dolly that BACKWARDS as Mireau ADVANCES toward the target. The trench floor has been cut with a groove to accommodate the rails. The General walks, talks, ignoring the exhausted soldiers slipping into the frame behind him. Later, just before the assault, the same trench. But this time it is Colonel Dax who is walking. The camera tracks him backward in the same way, on the same rails. And behind Dax, the men wait. Haggard faces, expressionless eyes, mouths that do not speak. Dax knows they are going to die. They know it too. The camera pulls back, back, back, and above them, the sky is streaked with shrapnel. Then the whistle blows. The attack begins. And the camera doesn't stop.

Why this scene is iconic

Roger Ebert wrote in his Great Movies: "Early in the film, the camera precedes its hero, Col. Dax (Kirk Douglas), on an inspection tour of a fortified, muddy trench that goes on and on and on." The verb is repeated three times. This is the intended effect; Kubrick uses duration as a weapon. Where classical cinema would have cut after 10 seconds to show a soldier's face, Kubrick doesn't. He continues. You walk with Dax. You see every face. You understand the magnitude of what is being asked of these men, not in the abstract, but by physically following every meter of the trench where they are to die.

The innovation is twofold. First, SYMMETRY: Mireau and Dax walk in the same trench, at the same elevation, with the same camera movement, but their moral stances are diametrically opposed. Mireau ignores the soldiers ("Are you prepared to kill more Germans?"), while Dax looks them straight in the eye. Kubrick uses the LONG SHOT AS A TOOL FOR ETHICAL COMPARISON: two men, the same path, two opposing humanities. No editing could convey this so clearly. The same setting, the same movement, the same framing are all it takes for the difference to become obvious.

Next, GEOGRAPHY. The historic World War I trench was 1.20 m (4 feet) wide. Kubrick widened it to 1.80 m (6 feet) to accommodate the dolly. The film's technical director objected, citing concerns about historical accuracy. Kubrick made his decision: documentary precision comes AFTER camera movement. This fundamental aesthetic choice would define the rest of his career. Form takes precedence over reality.

The attack on the anthill directly inspired the Omaha Beach sequence in Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, 1998), and of course 1917 (Mendes/Deakins, 2019, also in this collection). Sam Mendes explicitly cited Paths of Glory as the precursor to the visual grammar of 1917. And HighDefWatch noted: "Director Sam Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins used a similar continuous shot for their powerful World War I epic, 1917." Sixty-two years between the two films. The same territory. The same method.

How they filmed it

Kubrick was 28 when filming began in March 1957. It was only his fourth feature film. And he was already obsessed with tracking shots (sweeping shots, the camera moving continuously), a legacy from his years as a photographer for LOOK magazine. The camera gliding rather than cutting would become his signature style long before it was fully established. Paths of Glory contains the first great examples of this technique.

The number one challenge was the trench itself. Real World War I trenches were 1.2 meters wide. No dolly could roll through them. Kubrick decided to widen them to 1.8 meters. The film's technical director protested; Military History Matters notes that he "opposed the widening" for reasons of authenticity. Kubrick stood by his decision. On the other hand, the wooden duckboardsonwhich the camera rolled were authentic; Kubrick wanted the camera to glide over the same wood the soldiers walked on. The compromise: a trench too wide to be historically accurate, but historically accurate duckboards for direct contact between the camera and the soldiers.

For the trench filming (Mireau then Dax), a single dolly was sufficient. The rails were hidden in the groove dug at the bottom of the trench. The operator pushed the dolly at the same speed as the actor. No cuts. A single continuous shot per trench section.

For the attack on the anthill, the setup became pharaonic. Military History Matters documented it: "Kubrick shot the assault with five cameras in tracking shots that moved at the same speed as the advancing soldiers, giving a perspective as if from someone in the assault. He himself operated a sixth handheld camera and followed Kirk Douglas."

Five parallel dollies. Five cameras moving at the speed of the soldiers. Plus Kubrick himself, at 28, running with a sixth camera on his shoulder amidst the explosives. More than a ton of explosives was unloaded during the first week of filming alone. The 4,180 m² pasture rented from a German farmer was transformed into a no man's land by Erwin Lange's pyrotechnicians, who had to appear before a special commission of the West German government to obtain permission to handle so many explosives in a civilian area.

600 extras, Munich police officers dressed as French soldiers, ran through explosions, fell on cue, and simulated their deaths in the mud. Richard Anderson, one of the actors, recalled to Classic Movie Hub: "The trench was horrible. It stank, and the weather was awful—cold, freezing, overcast, and gray. We were all sick. We'd all caught a cold since the first week. We all looked terrible, but it certainly added to the film."

The lateral tracking shot of the attack has a particularity that The-Solute noted: "The camera moves from right to left, the opposite direction of progress." Kubrick deliberately chose to advance his French soldiers from RIGHT to LEFT within the frame, whereas the convention of Western cinema dictates that movement toward happiness, victory, or resolution is from LEFT to RIGHT. By inverting this grammar, Kubrick codes the attack as a regression, a march backward, a return to death. You don't consciously notice it while watching the film. But your brain knows it.

The entire film was shot in Germany, never in France. Schleissheim Castle (north of Munich) served as the French headquarters for the castle scenes and the court-martial. Geiselgasteig Studios (in Munich) housed the interiors. And the pasture at Puchheim, west of Munich, became the battlefield. There is something tragically ironic about this choice: an anti-war film about the First World War, shot in Germany, six kilometers from the Dachau concentration camp memorial (mentioned by IMDb Trivia). Kubrick was aware of this proximity. He never spoke about it publicly.

What to observe when reviewing it

• The track in the trench (Mireau Tower and Dax Tower): Kubrick had a track cut at the bottom of the trench to accommodate the dolly tracks. You won't see it in the film; it's hidden by the wooden walkways (duckboards). But look at the perfect stability of the tracking shot: no jerkiness, no wobble. A modern Steadicam operator would take hours to achieve this fluidity. Kubrick achieved it with rails and plywood.

• The direction of the attack (the assault on the anthill): The French soldiers advance from RIGHT to LEFT within the frame. Kubrick reverses the convention of Western cinema (where progress moves from left to right). This silent grammatical violation codes the attack as a regression. Your eye doesn't consciously perceive it, but your brain senses that something is going in the wrong direction. It's one of Kubrick's most subtle visual intuitions.

• Kubrick in the frame (the assault, close-ups of Douglas): When you see the handheld close-ups of Kirk Douglas during the assault, know that it's Kubrick himself holding the camera. At 28 years old. In the middle of explosives. Not a cameraman, the director. This is one of the rare times Kubrick physically operated the camera on one of his films.

Did you know that?

Paths of Glory is Kubrick's second film in this collection, after The Shining (1980, already covered with Garrett Brown behind the Steadicam and the invention of low-mode, an accessory that lowers the camera axis to a child's eye level). Twenty-three years separate the two. And Kubrick's trajectory is revealing. In 1957, the long take was a physical, mechanical, cumbersome tracking shot on rails. In 1980, it was a Steadicam gliding 30 cm off the ground behind a child on a bicycle. Kubrick witnessed the entire evolution of the tool, from the dolly to the Steadicam, and he was at the forefront of every innovation. When he sent his famous telex to Garrett Brown in 1979 ("The Steadicam will revolutionize the way films are shot"), he spoke like a man who had spent 22 years digging trenches to slide his camera along.

This film is also the direct ancestor of 1917 (Mendes/Deakins, 2019) in this collection. Both films follow a soldier through the trenches of World War I in a single take, but with one radical difference. Kubrick uses the long take for EVERY TRENCH SCENE (and a massive lateral tracking shot for the attack). Mendes stretches Kubrick's grammar to the ENTIRE FILM, an apparent 119-minute single take. Without Paths of Glory, there would be no 1917. And more broadly: without Paths of Glory, the visual grammar of modern war films would be fundamentally different. Saving Private Ryan (1998) explicitly cites the Omaha Beach sequence as a debt to Kubrick. The entire "you're in the attack, with the soldiers, at their speed" grammar descends in a direct line from the five parallel dollies of Puchheim, Germany, March 1957.

And there's one last detail. The film was banned in France upon its release in 1957; the French state deemed its portrayal of the army defamatory. The ban wasn't lifted until 1975, 18 years later. Kubrick made the most important film about the First World War ever made, and it took nearly two decades for France, the country where the story takes place, to accept it.

Sources

• Roger Ebert - "Paths of Glory" (Great Movies, February 2005)

• Military History Matters - "War on Film: Paths of Glory" (March 2021)

• AFI Catalog - Paths of Glory (American Film Institute)

• IMDB Trivia - Paths of Glory (widened trenches, filming location, explosive tone)

• Deep Focus Review – “Paths of Glory (1957)” (June 2025)

• The-Solute - "Continue down your mistaken path: Paths of Glory (1957)"

• Classic Movie Hub - "Facts about Paths of Glory" (Richard Anderson quote about the cold)

• HighDefWatch - "Kubrick's Paths of Glory gets a 4K UHD boost from Kino Lorber" (August 2022)

• Criterion Collection - Paths of Glory (official page)

• Movie-Locations.com - "Filming Locations for Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory" (Schloss Schleissheim, Munich)

• True Myth Media – “Paths of Glory (1957)” (June 2019)

• Wikipedia - Paths of Glory

Read also

The Shining (1980) https://www.plan-sequences.com/categories-de-plans-sequences/the-shining - Twenty-three years later, Kubrick traded the dolly tracks for Garrett Brown's Steadicam

1917 (2019) https://www.plan-sequences.com/categories-de-plans-sequences/1917 - Sixty-two years later, Mendes and Deakins stretch Kubrick's grammar across an entire film