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.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch what the film refuses to show. The enemy is never onscreen, and the clock never stops ticking.