Dunkirk: The avant-garde that tore down the silver screen between the human realm and the cinematic realm.

Siva S. Banda
Jul 23, 2017 · 7 min read
Hope. Fear. Survival.

“All we did was survive’’, lamented an ashamed war hero on his return to home. “Survival is good enough’’, he’s reassured, by a blind civilian handing out blankets.

There are story-tellers

Some use the best practices of lyrical words to convey their message to the reader and make them imagine: Novels. Others want to make it more immersive and personal through a silver screen: Cinemas. Both kinds make you empathise with the story and its characters, leading us to the message they want to convey. But story-telling, even in the cinemas has its limitation: that screen between the viewers and the actors which still makes you feel like a mere spectator to the world in front of you.

Enter Christopher Nolan

This isn’t good enough! Let me drown the viewers into this inspiring historical event and make them experience the quest of survival in an evacuation mission orchestrated by individuals from all walks of life.

People are throwing their POVs on the absence of the emotional depth in this movie. But IMO, people are missing this unprecedented style of showing emotions through visuals. We are so habituated to conveying and receiving such emotions through dialogue, especially for a war film. Nolan wanted to experiment on this aspect of story-telling. He wants to put you in the story itself with as little a dialogue as required. There goes this over-used, old saying:

“A picture is worth a thousand words’’

Then why do we still rely so much on the script to convey the message and stop there? There is a need to experiment the art of story-telling. To fill those unaddressed ‘’gaps’’ in the current story-telling. Those gaps, in any art, are the real gold-mines for the evolution of the art itself.

Experimenting with various genres. That is the only way you learn & grow in life.

First, you explore the ‘self’

This is not the story about a magician’s sacrifice to outdo his competitor and help his twin brother get back home to his daughter. This is not the story about a father’s wager to get back home to his kids — a reality he accepts while taking a nosedive through infinite limbo of dreamscape. This is not the story of an Engineer dad who pushes his way through space and time to get back home to his 80-year-old daughter — a promise made to the 10-year-old when he left Earth. This is all fanatical, something that you weave out of your mind and project it onto the screen. But war is in the human realm. War is madness. War offers no reason behind who lives and who dies. Nolan did not want to show a war movie. Nolan chose this particular moment in the war history, an evacuation of heroes who could not get back home, a home that they can see right in front of their eyes across the sea. He wanted to convey that we, the real world, are better than all the fictional characters he has created before. This time, the home came for the heroes.

“ Son, we have to go to Dunkirk first.”

Student becomes the master, with his unique style of cinematic expression

This is a cinema made for viewing in IMAX. There is a reason he shot it on 70mm with an IMAX camera.

This is not your usual view of war movies on the screen. This is not a war movie! War is not just about whizzing bullets, bloody deaths and inspirational words to freedom. Only being in a war can do justice to understanding the intensity of the realities. And this is where Nolan does his magic. He puts you right in the heart of the chaos of the Operation Dynamo and asks you to run. To survive! This is a story of survival from the eyes of the actor Fionn Whitehead who defied the odds at every single death grip in the movie. Nolan is making you run beside the allied forces on ground to escape the claws of death behind them. Making you board the last ship to freedom while being hunted down by the enemy airstrikes and narrowly escape getting caught up in its eventual destruction. Making you battle the enemy in air sitting in that Spitfire’s cockpit with Farrier (Tom Hardy) by your side. The complete view of 3 timelines over 3 channels of war: land, sea and air. Nolan is playing Syrio Forel (Game of Thrones) in this movie and asking you to defy death, to live to battle another day.

There is only one god and his name is Death, and there is only one thing we say to Death: “Not today”.

And then you have this guy, who put his heart & soul into defying death.

Making a run for his life, right from the first shot fired at him behind the defence perimeter to holding a hand extending from an escaping boat, just in time to escape the oil spill fire.

You never see the Germans.

Talk about building a war movie where you don’t get a single screen-shot of the enemy. The enemies portrayed here are the highest order of evil. They are demons you can’t afford to take a look at lest you be sucked into eternal darkness. You can only feel their wrath through bullets being fired from behind on the ground, torpedoes being launched at ships under water and bombs being hurled on the beach filled with 400,000 soldiers.

You can see the enemies in their fear

Are you listening closely? [Tick-tock] Time is running out!

Tom Hardy. Always the man behind the mask.

Nolan’s obsession with clockwork in his movies continues with a perfect contrast of intensity of the evacuation across land — over a week’s timeline, sea — over a day and the most intense part, which is across air — over an hour. Most intense for the reason that the air fighter’s life weighs against the many lives on the ships/boats he has to protect from the enemy’s plane. The battle over the air has one of the major impacts on the evacuation and Tom Hardy is irreplaceable for the role of Farrier, who’s got the utmost respect for his Rolls-Royce V-12-engined (Merlin) Spitfire and lands it with care rather than letting it crash to the ground while he chutes off the plane.

“ The sound of Spitfires’ Rolls-Royce V-12 engines. Sweetest sounds you are ever gonna hear “

New-age war symphony

While Nolan is projecting his view-point of the Dunkirk evacuation to us with the visuals, Zimmer is waving his baton to orchestrate the symphony for the evacuation. It takes a very unique understanding of music composition to create Supermarine OST for this movie. This piece has that perfect haunting feel to accompany the intensity you see on the screen with a mix of Nolanesque tick-tocks of a timepiece to get that Amrit, an elixir guaranteed to induce love for Nolan’s cinemas. Just like the one a mad scientist works away on creating in his lab. And this mad scientist has won our hearts with his elixir. Every. Single. Time.

Nolan is the Hans Zimmer of cinema. Zimmer is the Christopher Nolan of music.

They are the new-age symphony maestros. The Mozarts, whose war symphony Dunkirk, does not need an Oscar affirmation.

When was the last time you heard one of Van Gogh’s painting winning an ‘award’? Some works of art are beyond the bounds of any award.

You cannot grade them. All you can do is sit back and enjoy the magic on the stage. And don’t forget to clap after the Prestige is delivered! But the question is…

A r e — y o u — w a t c h i n g — c l o s e l y ?

‘‘ Wars are not won by evacuations. But there was a victory inside this deliverance, which should be noted. We must expect another blow to be struck, almost immediately. We shall go on till the end. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old ’’

Edit: For those who have done their homework on Dunkirk before or after the movie, you can check this. Sums it up pretty well:

Siva S. Banda

Written by

Day dreams a lot with music in the backdrop of his thoughts. Lost for words for most of what he feels; WIP on finding a way to express.

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