This movie provides a good segue to Barry Lyndon because it is the first film of Kubrick's to make visual use of eighteenth century lines of art, architecture and rationality. Paths of Glory relies for much of its impact on the contrast between the officer world of the chateau--filled with busy baroque and classical paintings and furniture and an appropriately airy visual style to match--with the soldiers' world of the trenches, cowed by a claustrophobic lack of vertical lines and a camera that can only track, never dance Ophuls-like as the chateau camera often does. The heart of the movie is the court martial scene, wherein the soldiers chosen by lot to stand trial for cowardice are arranged as pawns on the chessboard of the chateau's marble floors. The lines of the chateau world reach out as empty rules and codes of conduct, materially inscribed in the maze of the trenches. The trench-maze, like the hedge-maze of the Overlook, is seen by the officers from above, and yet they do not understand it, any more than Jack Torrence can either catch Danny within the hedge-maze or escape its frozen grasp despite having arrogated himself to a position above it (recall the shot of him staring out the window above the model of the maze nearby his writing table). In Kubrick's visual imagination, the maze is associated with empty convention, with the pure artifice of eighteenth century aesthetics. The soldiers in Paths of Glory know they are hopelessly bound by it, while the officers, excluding Dax, think themselves above it all and in control, even as they grind away, pawns themselves, in a futile and meaningless struggle for nonexistent honor.
This new Criterion Blu-ray is the first release of this film in the cropped aspect ratio Kubrick disliked, but knew theaters would likely impose on his movies beginning in the mid 50s. The change from 3:4 helps the scenes in the trenches, but hurts the airy look of the chateau.
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