Contemporary cinema (2): “Dunkirk”
Last week I began another of the many courses that I’ve attended over the years at the City Literary Institute in central London. It is called “Contemporary Cinema: The Best Films Of The Year” and the lecturer is the American John Wischmeyer. The plan is that most weeks we will see and discuss clips from an acclaimed recent film and then compare it to a couple of significant older movies.
This week, the chosen film was Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” [my review here]. We saw an extensive number of clips and then had a short discussion. The lecturer declared that “This is a masterpiece” but one student attacked the work as jingoistic propaganda.
We compared “Dunkirk” with two other British war films: the 2007 “Atonement” [my review here], when we viewed the famous five-minute continuous shot of the beach at Dunkirk, and the 1946 “A Matter Of Life And Death” [my review here], when we saw the famous radio exchange between the principal characters.
I was pleased that, as last week, I had seen all the films under discussion and it was interesting to compare and contrast them.