Announcer: 'Out from the hell that is Dunkirk -
back from the steel thrust of the German war machine, comes the B.E.F.
For weeks they have been shelled and bombed from three sides.
They had to stagger back to the sea to survive.'
In approaching the historical event of the
evacuation of the beaches at Dunkirk,
Christopher Nolan had a very specific vision of how to tell this story.
Nolan: 'The way I wanted to tell this film - the tension I wanted from this story -
was that of suspense.
Because Dunkirk is a great ticking clock story'
And it was one that stripped away the usual crutches of his style.
Nolan: 'It changes your creative process,
I think - but in an exciting way'
Gone are the usual convoluted plots and weighty themes.
Brand: 'Love isn't something we invented...'
And with it the over-reliance of expository
dialogue.
Cobb: 'Can they make that route in under an hour?'
Ariadne: 'They still have to climb down to the middle terrace'
Cobb: 'Well then they need a new route,
a more direct route'
Which is replaced instead with dialogue that is mostly functional, and often inconsequential.
Alex: 'Talkative sod, aren't you?'
And not only that, but character backstories are gone as well.
Nolan: 'I felt like I wanted to create a film
where you didn't care about the characters on screen
'cos they were telling you who they were, and why you should care about them -
making the case for why you care about them'
'I wanted to just care about them using that
wonderful thing about cinema - it's very unique to cinema -
which Hitchcock understood better
than anybody -
which is you'll care about a character on
screen because of their physical dilemma
because of the task they're trying to accomplish
because you fear for their physical safety
because you wouldn't want to be in their position -
and so I really wanted to - very deliberately
- put the audience in the shoes of the characters on screen
and create empathy that way, in what I call
the 'present tense' -
not worrying about who they are or whether
they've got a girlfriend back home or whatever,
you know, the usual cinematic devices
I wanted to strip all that away and make a
very lean, suspense driven story.'
And this focus on immediacy and creating suspense means that is really only one way to tell this story.
Nolan: 'Suspense is primarily a visual language.'
'... and suspense is a primarily visual
language'
'Well, I wanted to address the story
very much in the language of suspense.
That's the most visual language of film there is.'
However, this approach highlights a significant flaw in Nolan's filmmaking,
One often overlooked, but which can no longer
be ignored,
and that is: he can't direct action with the
clarity needed to create suspense.
In other words:
But first things first, what is suspense?
François Truffaut, in the introduction to
his seminal book of interviews with Hitchcock, says:
And that aligns with the literal definition.
So in narrative terms, a suspense situation
doesn't have to be life threatening.
it is just a situation wherein the audience
is made to anticipate the outcome of an uncertain dramatic event or situation.
Priest: 'Therefore is any man can show any
just cause why they may not be lawfully be joined together -
let him speak now, or else
hereafter forever hold his peace'
So in Dunkirk, the dramatic situation is simple.
Nolan: 'It's about getting from A to B - can
they find a way off this beach'
But it is extended and complicated with a
number of obstacles,
so that the anticipation and uncertainty are drawn out.
*Soldiers cheers*
By foreground suspense in this way, Nolan
was taking his cue from some very specific sources.
Nolan: 'Clouzot.
Wages of Fear in particular,
the French film from the '50s, was a big influence'
'Clouzot.
Wages of Fear'
Nolan: 'Clouzot'
Nolan: 'Clouzot'
Nolan: 'I was looking at the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock'
'Alfred Hitchcock'
'Hitchcock and his great mastery of
visual suspense'
'Hitchcock, obviously.'
However, he invokes these names at his own risk.
During the interviews with Truffaut, Hitchcock laid out in no uncertain terms the keys to suspense, saying that:
What is so frustrating then, is that given
Nolan's acknowledged debt to Hitchcock,
is how little he seems to have heeded this key lesson.
Even in the opening scene, we can see many
of the problems we're going to discuss later
appear in embryonic form.
We have this establishing shot -
a wide view of deserted village street,
with a row six soldiers with their backs to us.
At this point, they're an unindividuated mass,
in line with Nolan stated aim:
Nolan: '... and ultimately the idea was 'the
random nature of violence'
and so the idea that we would see a group
of soldiers from behind and not see their faces
and just them killed, one by one, other than
one, who then becomes the protagonist.
But the idea behind it is, you don't know
which one of them it could be, it could be any of them,
it's irrelevant.
And then you pick up the guy who happens to survive.'
This is a fairly strong, well set-up establishing shot.
However, only a few shots later we start to
run into problems.
This is an awkward shot.
The soldiers enters from frame left facing
the camera,
but in the previous shots, everyone had their backs to it.
So the discontinuity of screen direction would
imply that this new shot is a reverse angle.
However, its positioning matches the direction
of the establishing shot.
We can clearly see the tap and the hose, and
the white door to its right,
and a soldier moving towards it.
And so when we cut closer, the position of
the camera matches that set-up.
We could intuit that the soldier has just
turned around,
though why would he do that?
So the geography of this scene has already
been ruptured and we don't know where we are physically.
And it may seem pedantic to focus on this,
but it speaks to a problem that will become more significant as the film progresses:
a willful disregard of spatial integrity.
And this scene only gets worse at it goes
on.
For example, this shot.
Though it may seem an interesting frame,
shooting from inside the house is counterproductive,
because it hides information.
We don't know which house this is
or where it is in relation to the street as we've been shown it,
so we don't know where this soldier is in
relation to all the others.
Sure, there's one in the background,
but is it the same one who's the focus of this next shot?
The lack of continuity in his taking his helmet
off would have us think not.
The out-of-focus soldier clearly doesn't have
a helmet on.
But I do think its intended to be the same
soldier,
so this lack of clarity is really confusing.
All of these shots just seem to float - detached
from one another -
the spatial relationship between them never properly established.
And all this is confounded by the contrasting screen direction of these two.
We have no way of knowing which of them is correctly oriented to the establishing shot.
So any sense of bearing the audience might have had is throw out of the window when they flee and change direction.
Yes, we get a well-defined goal in the gate,
but as we've not seen it before it doesn't really help us.
We don't know where it is in relation to the
rest of the street,
and so we don't know where they're going.
But if you actually put these two shots side-by-side,
this wall gives us the answer.
They've turned around, they're going back.
But this is not made clear,
and the audience shouldn't be expected to orient themselves
around a un-emphasised set dressing.
So all of this raises the question:
why show us an establishing shot in the first place,
if you're not going to use the information
it provides?
The skeptics response would be, well, why
does it matter?
What is the relevance of pointing this out?
We can still understand the primary action
of the scene, so isn't that enough?
And to answer that, I'd like to direct your
attention to scene, from The Dark Knight.
Nolan has always had problems with screen direction and maintaining spatial integrity,
and this is one particularly onerous example.
There's a lot to say about this sequence,
and the film critic Jim Emerson has already
said a lot of it in his series 'In The Cut',
which I highly recommend.
However, I'd like to draw you attention to
one particular beat in this sequence.
Expendable Nobody: 'Lock and load!'
Watch that again.
How does this truck change direction,
mid-crash?
Well, we overlook such glaring problems for two reasons.
Firstly, the shots are edited so quickly that
they hardly leave an impression.
And we're not able to process in real-time
how they're meant to be connected.
And the filmmakers can get away this for the second reason:
this story beat is completely superfluous.
This truck going into the water makes no difference
to the narrative.
It doesn't change anything and the scene just carries on as if nothing happened.
There is no consequence to it,
and so it's empty spectacle.
And it's a similar situation here.
Ultimately, this sequence over serves to do
two things:
establish the omnipresent, off-screen threat and the randomness of it,
and to train the audience's focus onto the
lone survivor who becomes the protagonist.
Thus the logic here seems to be that because the characters are not important,
the space is not important.
Therefore there's no real narrative imperative that it be set-up properly.
Especially as we're just going to move away
from it soon anyway.
What is important, however,
is that there are passages later in the film where this is not the case.
Where is absolutely essential that the audience have a clear and concrete understanding of
the space in which in the sequences are taking place.
Yet the film follows the precedent set by
its opening,
and plays fast and loose with how it orients us spatially.
As Hitchcock said:
