When I was a kid I saw 2001: A Space Odyessy, at a drive-in, with my parents, in a massive thunderstorm. The power kept going out. But I was hooked, and after that I never missed an opening night of a Kubrick film, wherever I happened to live. (I had to wait till college to see the older ones.) When I saw on whatweekly.com that the Maryland Film Festival was presenting a special screening of Paths of Glory last Saturday night, I called immediately for tickets. I’ve seen the movie twenty times, but this is a real 35 film print (thanks to the UCLA Film and Television Archive) projected on a real screen. You can’t stream that on your iPhone.
A lovely moon posed atop the Brown Center at MICA, making me feel like a pre-human ape staring up at the sun peeking over the top of the mysterious monolith in 2001. The lovely Melina Giorgi, Maryland Film Fest Ops Manager, gave me the low-down, and the lovely Jed Dietz, Director of the Maryland Film Festival, made introductions.
Incidentally, to me, David Simon (Homicide, The Wire, Generation Kill, Treme) chose the film and hosted the screening. He did a Q&A afterward. Turns out Paths of Glory is a sort of touchstone film for Simon. The movie is thematically relevant to his experience wrestling with, and depicting, institutional power structures on all levels of human endeavor and folly. Honestly, I didn’t know that much about Simon, but the guy’s a genius. I can say that because today he won the 2010 MacArthur “genius” award. After the Q&A, Simon stayed for a book signing, and you could also pick up a reissue of Humphrey Cobb’s 1935 novel, with a new introduction written by Simon.
I felt kindred with Simon, because he really wanted to talk about the film, yet, somehow, the discussion kept returning to human behavior as embodied in politics, capitalism, and institutions. Simon speaks clear-headedly and brilliantly on those topics. He proposed that at some point we stopped regarding capitalism as a necessary tool of society and began to regard it as an end in itself. He suggested this moment occurred when Ronald Reagan said, “My friends, some years ago the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won.”
The discussion turned to how institutions and capitalism are necessary and good, but the avariciousness of humans in power is stubbornly focused on short-term profit, leaving public wellbeing out of the equation. Simon denounced the Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission Supreme Court decision as being the Dred Scott decision of today (in Scott vs. Sanford the court said slaves are not people, and in the Citizens United decision, the court said corporations are people).
In the movie, Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) makes a righteous jab at his superior officer when he quotes Samuel Johnson: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” This is in keeping with the film’s subtext as a meditation on institutions, self-preservation, power, and hypocrisy—all themes explored in Simon’s awesome body of work. But I think Simon wanted to talk about how cool Paths of Glory is. Released in 1957 (before the anti-establishment era really kicked in), shot on a low budget, using Germany for France, with an insane cast including the inimitable Tim Carey in his second Kubrick film (I especially appreciated the nod Simon gave to Carey’s 1962 directorial effort, The World’s Greatest Sinner), Paths is, well, it’s Kubrick.
With riveting stylistic assuredness, all the elements we now think of as “Kubrickian” are present in Paths of Glory: hypnotic camera moves, sentient pictorial symmetry, and jaw-dropping visual juxtapositions. And all this delivered by a 28-year old. Think about it: Kubrick’s in Germany shooting a WWI movie, while now we feel relieved that health care reform allows kids to stay on their parent’s insurance till they are 26! Genius.
— David Warfield
