Dunkirk: The History Behind the Major Motion Picture. Joshua Levine

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СКАЧАТЬ in the evening, seven days a week – but many workers stayed at their benches until midnight and slept on the factory premises. Such a state of affairs would have been unimaginable at almost any other time in the last century.

      When the Blitz – the Luftwaffe’s bombing campaign against Britain – seized the country for eight and a half months between September 1940 and May 1941, ‘Dunkirk Spirit’ and ‘Blitz Spirit’ merged into a single idealised mood, the indiscriminate bombs emphasising the need to pull together. But the essence of both was the instinctive realisation that life truly mattered.

      In the immediate post-war years, the concept of Dunkirk Spirit was sometimes called upon to decry the supposed British trait of trying hard only when something becomes necessary, but more recently, it has been used in its earliest, simplest sense. In December 2015, for example, retired picture framer Peter Clarkson pulled on a pair of swimming trunks and went for a swim in his kitchen after heavy rains flooded his Cumbria home. ‘This is how we treat these floods!’ he shouted as he breast-stroked past the cooker, explaining that he was trying to ‘gee up the neighbours with a bit of Dunkirk Spirit’. And when Hull City made a winning start to the 2016–17 Premier League season despite injuries to leading players and the lack of a permanent manager, midfielder Shaun Maloney ascribed results to ‘Dunkirk Spirit’ at the club.

      But Dunkirk Spirit reached its high water mark during the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign, when the country was almost overwhelmed by references to the period. As Peter Hargreaves, a leading donor to the ‘Leave’ campaign, urged the public to vote for Brexit, he harked back to the last time Britain left Europe. ‘It will be like Dunkirk again,’ he said. ‘We will get out there and we will become incredibly successful because we will be insecure again. And insecurity is fantastic.’ Nigel Farage, meanwhile, not satisfied with invoking Dunkirk, tried to restage it by sailing a flotilla of small ships up the Thames, bearing slogans like ‘Vote Out and be Great Britain again’.

      But these are the words and actions of people in current situations, with modern agendas. How do veterans of the evacuation describe Dunkirk Spirit? What did – and does – it mean to them?

      For the most part, they relate it to their individual experiences. Robert Halliday of the Royal Engineers arrived in France at the start of the war and was evacuated from Bray Dunes on 1 June. As far as he is concerned, the essence of Dunkirk Spirit was the units of British and French soldiers fighting fiercely on the Dunkirk perimeter. ‘The guys who were keeping them [the Germans] at bay and letting us through were as good as gold!’ he says. He recalls soldiers calling out as he passed – ‘Good luck, off you go!’ His eyes sparkle as he remembers these events. Dunkirk Spirit remains very real to him. It was, he says, ‘wonderful’. George Wagner, who was evacuated from La Panne on 1 June, relates Dunkirk Spirit to survival. ‘We wanted to survive as a country. It was about comradeship and everyone together helping.’

      Not everybody agrees. Ted Oates of the Royal Army Service Corps was rescued from the Dunkirk mole. Asked if Dunkirk Spirit means anything to him, he simply shakes his head. And far from experiencing Dunkirk Spirit, George Purton feels that the British army was effectively betrayed. ‘We were sent into something,’ he says, ‘that we couldn’t cope with.’ He remembers Dunkirk as a time of isolation. ‘There was so much happening and you were concerned about yourself only. How the hell am I going to get out of this?’

      Dunkirk holds a semi-sacred place in Britain’s collective conscience. It has spawned conflicting experiences and attitudes. It inspires strong emotions, not only among veterans but in those born years afterwards, with only a folk memory of the event and a politically convenient interpretation. How then does a modern filmmaker approach it?

      Chris Nolan, one of the most respected directors currently working, has written and directed a feature film set during the evacuation. It was a story with which he was already familiar. ‘I think every English schoolboy knows it,’ he says. ‘It’s in your bones, but I thought it was time to go back to the original source.’

      Reappraising the Dunkirk story, Chris built up questions about what had really happened. ‘I was assuming, as modern, cynical people do, that when I looked into it, what I would find would be disappointing. That the mythology of Dunkirk Spirit would fall away and there would be a more banal centre.’ But as he unpeeled the layers, he found something unexpected: ‘I realised that the simplifications actually expose a truth, because the bigger truth, the wood for the trees, is that an absolutely extraordinary thing happened at Dunkirk. I realised how utterly heroic the event was.’

      Heroic – but not straightforward. ‘When you dive into the real life of the story, what it would really have been like to be there, you find that it’s an incredibly complicated event. The sheer numbers of people involved – it was like a city on the beach. And in any city, there is cowardice, there is selfishness, there is greed, and there are instances of heroism.’ And the fact that heroism occurred alongside negative behaviours, that it flourished in spite of base human nature, makes it all the more affecting and powerful. ‘That,’ says Chris, ‘is what true heroism is.’ Yet for all the individual acts, he sees the Dunkirk evacuation as a communal effort by ordinary people acting for the greater good. This, he says, makes the heroism greater than the sum of its parts. And it is ultimately his reason for making the film.

      Another attraction is the sheer universality of the story. ‘Everybody can understand the greatness of it – it’s primal, it’s biblical. It’s the Israelites driven down to the sea by the Egyptians.’ This offers an ideal background for what he calls ‘present-tense characters’, anonymous individuals without unwieldy back stories. ‘The idea is,’ he says, ‘that they can be anonymous and neutral, and the audience can encounter them, and become wrapped up in their present-tense difficulties and challenges.’

      Chris sees himself as proxy for the audience while making the film. ‘What I’m feeling and how I choose to record what I’m feeling – the way in which I’m acquiring the shots – fires my imagination about how to put the film together.’ If he has a visceral reaction, he feels he’s on the right track. ‘I’m sitting in the cinema watching it as I shoot it,’ he says. And for him, to tell the story well it has to be shot from the point of view of the participants – on land, in the air, and at sea. Which means that on the little ships, almost all of the shots he eventually used are from the deck, while on the aircraft, cameras are carefully mounted in places where the audience can see what the pilot sees. ‘You want things to feel real, and you want them to be experienced. Pure cinema, to me, is always a subjective experience.’

      The enemy barely makes an appearance in the film. German soldiers appear only very briefly, and even then the audience barely sees their faces. But this, as Nolan points out, reflects the reality of the situation, the subjective experience of the men on the beach. ‘When you look at first-hand accounts, close contact with the enemy was extremely sporadic for most British soldiers. I wanted to put the audience in the boots of a young inexperienced soldier thrown into this situation, and from the accounts, they did not stare into the eyes of Germans. I wanted to be true to that and embrace the timeless nature of the story. The reason the story has sustained generations of interpretation and will continue to do so, is because it’s not about the Germans and the British, it’s not about the specifics of the conflict. It’s about survival. I wanted to make it as a survival story.’

      In fact, the actual enemies of most of the British soldiers (at least those not defending the Dunkirk perimeter) were aeroplanes, artillery guns, submarines, mines and gunboats. And a battle against an unseen enemy that can’t be fought, touched, or often even seen, creates an unusual war film. In fact, in Chris’s eyes, it is not a war film at all. ‘It’s more of a horror than a war film. It’s about psychological horror, about unseen threats. The guys on the beaches had very little understanding of what was happening and what would happen – and I want the audience to be in the same position.’

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