Imagining War

Bray-Dunes during the evacuation of Dunkirk as depicted in Atonement.

In Atonement, directed by Joe Wright and adapted by Christopher Hampton from Ian McEwan's novel, we see visualized one of the low points in the Allies' war against Hitler — the British evacuation of Dunkirk between May 26 and June 4, 1940.

Robbie Turner (James McAvoy) arrives in Bray-Dunes outside of Dunkirk, France. The scene is a surreal carnival of a ruined seaside resort with British soldiers in retreat, massed on the beach, waiting for the boats to ferry them back across the Channel. Familiar yet completely unreal, the scene looks like a Hieronymus Bosch-etched war postcard, its monochromic frames harkening back to early 20th century attempts at film colorization.

Photograph of soldiers waiting to be evacuated from Bray-Dunes.

Film can play tricks with memory, create alternate histories, and provide a ticket to fantastic realms. Yet for film to do so, the technologies and techniques that are the tricks of its trade must evolve lest the increasingly sophisticated viewer catch on. The five-and-one-half-minute long Steadicam shot of Bray-Dunes in Atonement lends the scene an air of unreality since contemporary viewers are unaccustomed to such long takes. So it is with war.

The promenade at Bray-Dunes during the evacuation.

At its essence war involves people killing other people, and each new advance in weapons technology strives to put greater distance between war's reality and the war fighter's perception of it. After all, pushing a button hundreds of miles away from your target is easier than driving a bayonet up and under your enemy's sternum. As French cultural theorist Paul Virilio put it, the "field of battle" and the "field of perception" are in many ways one and the same.

By wowing its audience with spectacular effects, war — and war films — foster what the late George Mosse (a gay, Jewish German-born historian of fascism at the University of Wisconsin) termed the "myth of the war experience" whereby the culture "legitimize[s] war by displacing its reality." Or as Virilio put it in War and Cinema: Logistics of Perception (1984): "War can never break free from the magical spectacle because its very purpose is to produce that spectacle." Those of us who have never experienced war directly base our knowledge of war on cinematic recreations of that spectacle. In film, the technological innovations of the mass media and the military might are conjoined, if not always seamlessly. In the earliest days of filmmaking, this was literally so. Rapid-fire guns and rapid-fire cameras had more than a little in common.

Etienne-Jules Marey's chrono-photographic rifle.

Virilio writes:

It was in 1861, whilst traveling on a paddle-steamer and watching its wheel, that the future Colonel Gatling hit upon the idea of a cylindrical, crank-driven machine gun. In 1874 the Frenchman Jules Janssen took inspiration form the multi-chambered Colt (patented in 1831) to invent an astronomical revolving unit that could take a series of photographs. On the basis of this idea, Etienne-Jules Marey [a French scientist and early cinematographer] then perfected his chrono-photographic rifle, which allowed its user to aim at and photograph an object moving through space.