Analysis Of The Film Dunkirk

Hollywood cinema has, for the longest time, followed their basic narrative structure. The story is never original, when boiled down to the most basic details; what has changed, though, is the way these stories are being told. There is a persistent “Hollywood syntagm” and what changes are the paradigmatic elements, which are the various story-telling techniques (Saussure). There were multiple shifts throughout the cinematic history of how Hollywood delivers its content. The Hollywood films have tried to move away from the most basic narrative structure by introducing different elements in the films or taking them away, for example, the absence of closure has been the new trend in contemporary films, such as Gone Girl, True Story, Lost in Translation,

“The reviews of Nolan’s films position him as an independent director working within the Hollywood System, bringing artistic, intellectual sensibilities to what could be basic genre films” (Furby & Joy, 17). In his film Dunkirk, he manages to bring together three different perspectives, and of course, three different time segments, to tell one event from the Second World War throughout 106 minutes. The film, can be said, is divided in three different parts which all correlate to the three different perspectives of the water, land and air. This indeed is an innovative way of showing one specific moment of the Second World War; however the film itself is not characterized by innovation due to multiple reasons. It is true that interfering with the linearity of time is not a traditional Hollywood paradigmatic film element. “One of Nolan’s strongest attributes behind the camera is his ability to effectively tell non-linear narratives. Rather than lay out his stories A-Z, Nolan prefers to hop around to different points in time and layer his films with concurrently overlapping points of view” (Katz). However, if the meddling with time was absent from this film, Dunkirk would have been a regular linear narrative film that would have been categorized within all the boundaries of Hollywood. The script and directorial decisions of this film is exactly what make it unsettling, in the sense that, Christopher Nolan’s innovative decisions regarding the film make the film difficult to simply associate it to all the customary Hollywood productions. Initially, it is not entirely clear for the audience why the film is indicating that there are three different time segments; however as soon as the events all tie up, it is quite clear that though the story was intended to be presented as non-linear, by understanding