Atonement: That Tracking Shot Does More For the Theme Then Just Show Us the Intensity of Dunkirk7/21/2017 As Dunkirk is prepared to be released, film critics have started calling attention to the spectacular five minute Dunkirk tracking shot from Joe Wright’s Atonement. There’s been praise of the suspense and the harrowing images of the scene, but the Dunkirk sequence means much more in the scheme of the film beyond the initial setting and the events of the scene (1). Atonement, based off of the book by Ian McEwan, is often about interpretation. The pivotal moment of the film that changes everything for its characters is specifically focussed on the interpretation of one character, Briony, a 13 year old girl, that on top of being jealous, ignorantly accuses the housekeeper’s son, Robbie of raping and hurting both her sister Cecilia (whom Robbie loves) and her cousin. He did not, of course, the cousin was hurt by a family friend and Cecilia and Robbie are in love, but because of the interpretation of the events by young Briony, the whole affair goes up in flames and Robbie is sent to a prison and then a war. This sets the stage for the tracking shot to come, but before we actually discuss the tracking shot itself and how it fits into the thematic core of the film, we need to discuss how said tracking shot came to be because it almost wasn’t part of the movie. Director Joe Wright told David Gritten of The Telegraph, that the sequence was originally going to “...[include] air attacks from Stukas…” (2) , but that he needed four million dollars that his producer wasn’t going to give him. So after that, they decided to make it a scene of just the beach, with 40 individual montage shots, but eventually, due to time, the filmmakers changed their minds and decided to turn it into one take, a decision which would transform the meaning of the scene (2). To repeat, Atonement is often about interpretation and interpretation is often built into the thematic center of the film and the performances. Examples of this come in two fold, with Briony interpreting the love of her sister and Robbie as possibly harmful, but also tinged with jealousy, and there are also aspects of interpretation in the performances. Many of the conversations in the film are had with hidden intentions, whether it’s Benedict Cumberbatch talking to Juno Temple about her parents and his factory in the attempt to seduce her or Robbie and Cecilia’s own banter regarding their love. These subsequent layers of subtext, even working their way into the typewriter clicks of the score, always have us on the defensive looking for things to interpret and extrapolate on. This brings us to the Dunkirk sequence, which without a heavy bout of intensity brings us to that beach, just by showing us all of the pieces. As Robbie passes by men partying, thinking, shooting horses, and cooling car engines, and even a beached ship, we the audience are forced to put together the horrors that these men faced in our own heads. Wright, in lacking the ability to show direct action, shows us things that only suggest the wider action of the war. We can only imagine the events that transpired with what we’re given, matching Briony’s ability to only form the shape of her interpretation by looking at a few small pictures in the whole. The long one shot format seems to only emphasize the view of someone looking in with the tracking shot, this shot being one that tends to call attention to itself, breaking the sense that the camera is a diegetic player in the scene, meaning that the audience isn’t actually experiencing the scene, they’re watching it, detached from the events, only left to interpret the horror and the loss hanging over the moment from what little sections we are shown. (1) To those who know how the film ends this becomes especially important because, *spoilers* what we’re seeing isn’t necessarily an accurate account of the Dunkirk evacuation, as honest as the film may be in that regard, because the second half of the film exists vaulting between reality and the written material that an elderly Briony writes in her last book, which is attempting to, within an art form, give Robbie and Cecilia (who both died in the war), the happiness that Briony denied them by telling a lie based on her interpretation. This would suggest that we are in fact watching what is simply an interpretation by another party emphasizing the reality that the scene can only be shaped by our interpretation of a few visual and audio elements, a few details, hoping to give us the whole, layering our own experience of the film into the theme of interpretation. Atonement is about interpretation by both the characters and the audience and the Dunkirk sequence is an excellent example its integration into the film. Bibliography
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AuthorStephen Tronicek. Archives
July 2017
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