Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Dunkirk
2017 · Christopher Nolan · Dunkirk on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the sky and the fence line: the Germans never appear onscreen. (staging)
Nolan gives you bullets through wood, a whistle, a shadow crossing water, an engine overhead. The threat stays noise and consequence. No enemy face arrives, not once, for the whole film.
Payoff: Without a target, fear has no location, so the soldiers can only endure what they cannot aim at. In the reading: out-of-field-absolute. An enemy heard but never placed is what the reading calls the absolute out-of-field: pressure from outside the frame's world.
Listen for the ticking under the score, and how the tone climbs. (sound)
Zimmer builds on a recording of Nolan's own watch and a tone that seems to rise forever without resolving. It bleeds into engines, hulls and bombs until you cannot separate music from noise.
Payoff: You hear time itself pressing on the men, always climbing, never arriving anywhere that lets you rest.
Notice how rarely Nolan shows you a wide view of the beach. (camera)
Van Hoytema crowds the bodies on the Mole, bobs in the water beside drowning men, sits inside the Spitfire cockpit. The orienting bird's-eye shot of the whole evacuation never comes.
Payoff: You are kept at the soldier's eye level, knowing only as much of the situation as he can see.
Watch Hardy's eyes above the oxygen mask; he barely speaks. (performance)
Farrier's whole performance runs on eyeline, a glance at the fuel gauge, the set of his shoulders. Whitehead, Barnard and Styles are cast young and unformed, and they explain nothing about themselves either.
Payoff: Presence replaces speech, so you read these men by what they look at rather than what they say.
Notice the three title cards at the start: week, day, hour. (structure)
The Mole runs a week, the sea a day, the air an hour, and all three are cut together as one continuous present. You will see the same evening from three different distances.
Payoff: You hold three speeds of time at once, which is where the suspense comes from, not from plot. In the reading: peaks of present (series of time). Three timelines coexisting rather than following each other are what the reading calls peaks of present.
Once you have seen it
Watch the light when the film cuts between strands: day, then night. (cutting)
Lee Smith holds inside each timeline longer than a conventional thriller would, then cuts across a gap that cannot match. A week does not flow into an hour, and the light admits it.
Payoff: The join itself carries the meaning, asking you to feel a rhyme between times that refuse to line up. In the reading: irrational cut / the interstice. Cuts joining incommensurate durations are what the reading calls irrational cuts: the gap between shots does the work.
Watch Tommy walk through fire early, then the burning oil later. (structure)
The image returns without anyone pointing at it. Men move toward water through flame at the beginning, and men float in flame on the water once the three timelines converge.
Payoff: The film trusts you to feel the echo, which is why survival, not victory, reads as the whole objective.
Listen for the quiet of the English countryside near the end. (sound)
After nearly two hours of rising tone, ticking and engine noise, the soundtrack finally opens into ordinary quiet. Richard King's design lets the pressure drop for the first time.
Payoff: The relief is physical, and it tells you how completely the sound had been holding you down.
Carry this in: Watch what the film refuses to show. The enemy is never onscreen, and the clock never stops ticking.