Text/Liu Qi (Iris public account for the first time, "Dunkirk" is superficial on September 2? Nolan is a superficial director)
1. Farewell to Puzzle Movies Thank goodness, Nolan finally said goodbye to puzzle movies. Although "Dunkirk" still makes a fuss about the narrative structure-three narrative lines of "a week on land, a day at sea, and an hour in the air" are cross-cut together. But this is completely different from the previous fragmented structure in terms of narrative goals and effects. The word "brain-burning movie" that Nolan fans talk about most is a feature of most of Nolan's previous movies. From the early "Follow" and "Memento" to the later "Inception", "Deadly Magic" and "Interstellar", they are all puzzle movies. The goal of puzzle films is to confuse the audience with complex narratives that include non-linear narrative structures, fragmented plots, and shuffling of story sequences. Audiences solve puzzles in these types of films, falling into the trap of their hearts and their eyes. Therefore, when everyone saw this "week, day, hour", they were very excited and continued to spare no effort to worship Nolan's narrative structure. In fact, the cross editing of these three narrative lines is very clear and direct. The three spaces of sea, land and air and three groups of characters are simple and clear. Nolan does not intend to use narrative structure to create puzzles that lead the audience to solve them. "Dunkirk" abandons a dramatic story that begins and ends, abandons the plot arc, and does not create an intellectual labyrinth through narrative structure. I think this is a big improvement for Nolan. Puzzle movies, in the final analysis, are just a narrative trick. Although they bring the complexity and interest of the narrative to mainstream Hollywood commercial movies, in the final analysis, this kind of mind game movie is not clever, or it is not advanced, it is only popular Narrative techniques used in narrative works. This kind of movie is really wonderful and beautiful, but it is a bit like the mystery novel of Shimada Shoji, and it is the attraction brought by the narrative tricks. Therefore, although each of O. Henry's novels is full of interest, it is always classified as a second- or third-rate novelist. Some truly meaningful and complex narratives with formal aesthetics are not constructed through narrative puzzles, but through cinematic techniques such as audio-visual language and narrators. Such as Resnais' montage, Godard's sound-picture counterpoint and Rivette's reflexivity. What's more, in a narrative film, it takes more courage to reduce the story and abandon the plot arc than to increase the complexity of the narrative and create narrative puzzles. So, I want to praise Dunkirk. Some critics believe that "Dunkirk"'s performance of war and history is too superficial, and its reflection on human nature is not deep enough, and the entire film is a mere formality. But is there a problem with "de-deepening" history and war in one movie? Narrative films have always been It's hard to resist a temptation: the quest for thematic depth and storytelling. For movies, this is actually bound by literature. A 90-120 minute film can never surpass literature in terms of the complexity of the story and the depth of the theme - what war movie can compare to Tolstoy's War and Peace ? Film has its own unique way of expression, and the ultimate goal and effect in the audience's mind are also very different from literature. Individuals in the Dunkirk retreat have no time to think about the nature of war or reflect on human nature. All that is left is fear, only the loneliness, despair and survival instinct that they do not know the next moment, and what Nolan wants to show, It is the truest state of man in war, not the depth of history, war, and humanity. Although superficial, this is the most direct way to restore the essence of war - the most current state of people in war. Here, I would like to quote a quote from the film theorist Kracauer in The Nature of Cinema: "A movie becomes a real movie when it seems to be obsessed with the surface of things." 2. Return to the origin and reach the movie itself "Dunkirk" Although the narrative structure of "Dunkirk" is no longer "brain-burning", but bid farewell to narrative tricks, Nolan has instead gained a purer and more precise control over the time of the film. This time, "Dunkirk" uses some of the most basic film narrative techniques - cross editing, off-screen space, sound and picture combination, these seemingly simple and primitive techniques, but in "Dunkirk", there are different changes. First, look at the cross-cut of Dunkirk. Although it is a cross-cut of three narrative lines, time becomes more real in Dunkirk, not the time that confuses and confuses the audience in a puzzle movie. The three narrative lines are all real actions in progress, and time stretches in the actions. It's not difficult to edit three lines in parallel, as Griffith cross-cuts together four separate events from different eras in 1917. But the innovation and difficulty of "Dunkirk" is how to make these three lines converge? Some mind game movies (like Pulp Fiction) also deal with the merging of several narrative lines, but using a way of fate and coincidence to fuse them is somewhat deliberate. In "Dunkirk," it's not that the three lines come together like fate at a decisive moment. Instead, let the three lines meet continuously as the narrative progresses, although the first few times are not so obvious. This makes the story difficult. The three lines have different time lengths, one week, one day, one hour, and it is very difficult to cross-cut together . When they are placed together, their respective time densities must be different, and they only converge at a certain point in time, which is relatively simple, and the continuous intersection will inevitably bring about confusion in time. For example, in about 45 minutes, the father and son of the yacht rescued a soldier in the sea in the narrative line at sea, but the next second we switched back to the narrative line on land, and we saw the soldier commanding everyone to row on a small boat. This moment actually happened a day or two before saving people at sea. This will inevitably bring some confusion in the understanding of time, which is also the difficulty of converging the three timelines. Around 50 minutes, the pilot in the sky narrative line saw a soldier who had emerged from a capsized ship on the sea jump into the oily sea to escape (flashes in one or two shots), but in the land narrative line, this escape action did not last until 80 minutes. appeared. The way to avoid this temporal confusion is to focus only on the individual progression of each narrative line, and don't make the mistake of thinking that the three timelines of the cross-editing are a simultaneous process. In "Dunkirk", one of the simplest ways is to speed up the editing speed to create a sense of speed and rhythm of time. This is the "last minute rescue" that Griffith invented in The Birth of a Nation. You want to create tension in cross-cutting, not by fast cuts that stay the same, but by speeding up cuts, shortening takes—frequency, length—to create psychological tension. There are also some very primitive methods. For example, shortly after the start of the sky narrative line, the plot of the plane's fuel gauge being broken is set, which is equivalent to winding a clockwork in the internal time of the story. This is actually Hitchcock's classic suspense-making method - the unknown bomb under the table. At the same time, the use of Hans Zimmer's atonal music combined with the sound of a stopwatch creates a sense of time urgency and excitement, like the film's endlessly climaxing "Shepard Tonal Illusion" ”—Three narrative lines have been continuously generating continuous intensity, and the intensity is constantly increasing. Secondly, the control of space - the space inside the painting and the space outside the painting. Dunkirk also uses an almost experimental approach to space. Land, sea, and air are three different types of spaces, but they have the same goal to create three unique and essentially closed spaces—land beaches, sea boats, and air planes. The beaches of Dunkirk had no way to escape because they were surrounded by German troops on three sides, and one side faced the sea, forming a closed space. Small boats at sea and planes in the air are also enclosed spaces. "Dunkirk" transforms both the closed space (in the cabin, the ship) and the open space (the beach) into a closed space for the purpose of In order to use the space to create a sense of suspense and tension. In the interview, Nolan mentioned that drawing lessons from "Death Escape" may be a more effective way to understand the space of "Dunkirk". In "Dead Man Escape," Bresson experimented to the maximum with the narrative potential of off-screen space. Bresson made many events happen outside the painting, such as the scene in which the hero kills the sentinel. We see the hero in the picture come out of the painting from the right side of the picture, and then turn back and re-enter the painting after a while, implying that the sentinel is outside the painting. Space was killed. The space inside the painting is real and visible, while the space outside the painting is unknown and invisible. In Dunkirk, the threats are all in the off-painting space of the enclosed space. This threat is abstract, so it feels omnipresent. If the representation is a specific enemy (German soldier), the sense of fear created will be greatly reduced. (The only visible threats in the film are German aircraft in the air) Such as external threats in confined spaces. Three people on land and a team of soldiers hid in a closed cabin, and were suddenly attacked by a dark gun from nowhere; the hero at sea encountered a torpedo from nowhere in the rescue cabin, and was locked in the cabin and could not escape. The water from the outside was about to pour into the cabin; the ditch-landing pilot was trapped in the cabin and could not escape. Another example is the external threats encountered in open spaces. The hero in the opening scene is attacked by German guns on the street (land); soldiers waiting to be evacuated are attacked by German planes (on the beach); the father and son on board are attacked by planes (sea). "Dunkirk" systematically uses off-screen space to create a threat from an invisible and uncertain source, forming a strong sense of tension and fear. Also, I especially like the immersive point of view employed in Dunkirk, which brings the film into a purely audiovisual situation. It also makes Dunkirk one of Nolan's most sensual films. The plot arc is abandoned in the narrative, and only pure audio-visual situations are used to create attraction and tension and suspense, which is completely different from Nolan's previous method of creating suspense with narrative. When watching "Dunkirk", the realism of some shots in the air and in the sea made me think of an experimental documentary "Leviathan" more than once. After all the possibilities of audio-visual language have been tried, the experiment of audio-visual language in 2012's "Leviathan" can be described as very bold and creative - to capture the perspective shots of birds and fish. Although there were such perspectives in very early films, they were only imaginary and could not be reproduced realistically due to technical limitations. For example, in Hitchcock's "Birds", there are viewpoint shots of birds, but they lose the sense of speed and disorder of birds. Until "Leviathan", shot in high-definition The camera was tied to the animal, and it produced a frantic, restless, and extremely realistic animal perspective. The perspective of a fish swimming nimbly and fast in the sea, the perspective of struggling after being caught by a fishing boat, and the perspective of the fast-flying birds in the sky. In The Theory of Imitation, Auerbach has a profound statement on the technique of modernist novels: "The purpose of narrating this event is not to arrange the whole plot in a planned way, but to describe the action itself; the extraordinary and the extraordinary, all the truth and the depth of life in any one moment that the writer has inadvertently captured.” This is also what Nolan wants to try in Dunkirk—abandoning dramatic constructs , focusing only on the performance of the action itself and the momentary situation. Finally, let's take a look at some of Nolan's other audiovisual techniques. Nolan's scenography in "Dunkirk" is more realistic, simpler, but also more impactful than the flamboyantly sporty long shot of Dunkirk Beach in "Atonement." Because of a long shot that is too gorgeous, smooth and complex spatial scheduling, its formal sense will somewhat weaken the sense of reality. But the audio-visual language in Dunkirk still has some problems, as it has not been Nolan's strong suit (compare Villeneuve's superb mise-en-scene in "Border Slayer" and "Arrival"). In addition, the parallel editing method of "Dunkirk" is too conservative and routine. For example, the pilots at sea were trapped in the cabin and a group of soldiers were shot by the Germans in the cabin on land. The repeated switching of these two tense scenes is actually a bit blunt and repetitive. , and therefore some craftsmanship. There is also the making of suspense. In the interview, Nolan mentioned some classic movies that the film draws on, such as "Parties", "Greed", "Sunrise", "The Price of Fear" and "Death Rider Escape", but Nolan seems to have deliberately avoided a name—— Hitchcock. Now that Nolan says "Dunkirk" is a suspense movie, not a war movie, that evasion makes sense. As the pioneer and inventor of all suspense, Hitchcock, who is also a British director, is a master who cannot be bypassed. I guess it's because Dunkirk's imitation of Hitchcock is so obvious that Nolan keeps his mouth shut. For example, when the soldiers on the breakwater were attacked by the air, everyone else kept their heads down, and only one soldier looked up to the sky. This shot is exactly the same as Hitchcock's shot in the famous tennis court in "The Stranger on the Train". . The reaction of the people on the land when the plane swoops and throws the bomb is also in the same line as the scene of being attacked by a bird in "Bird" and the scene of the plane suddenly appearing in "North by Northwest" in the way of creating suspense. In "Dunkirk" In the film, Nolan showed his maturity and bravery in film language. In such a large-scale war-themed film, it is admirable to dare to make such a bold attempt within the framework of mainstream commercial narrative films. But at the end, Nolan still pulls the previous narrative experiment back into the narrative context of mainstream commercial movies. At the end, a sound and picture technique commonly used by Nolan is used-in the sound of reading Churchill's famous speech in the newspaper, repeated interspersed with the newspaper newspaper, Tom Hardy walking towards the enemy after the plane crashed two scenes, three lines It also wraps up and elevates emotionally, ending the film on a patriotic note. Although the relationship between sound and picture here is sensational, it is also effective enough for the audience of commercial movies. After boasting so much about "Dunkirk", I still have to say that in terms of film language, Nolan is far from those who are truly groundbreaking and subversive masters (he mentioned Murnau, Bresson, and the unmentioned ones). Hitchcock), there is still a long way to go. But Nolan's bold experiments in this film have once again confirmed the interaction between mainstream commercial films and classic art films, with one side responding to the other's approach, creativity and competitiveness. "Dunkirk" is bound to be a new starting point for Nolan's director.
View more about Dunkirk reviews
