Nominated for eight Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director

Directed by Christopher Nolan

Here is the list of Academy Awards for which Dunkirk has been nominated. Read it carefully. Be prepared to answer a few questions when you’re done.

Best Cinematography, Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Picture, Best Production Design, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing

Now here’s your quiz:

• What do these categories have in common?
• What categories are most obviously missing?
• What do you make of this?

Here’s the answer key. (You may grade your own paper.)

• These nominations all draw attention to the sensory aspects of the film—how it is that we see and hear what we see and hear. Cinematography is the key to what we see, what the camera is doing, where the lens goes and how it focuses our attention. Nothing on any screen is accidental. A good cinematographer/director team has a plan and successfully executes that plan in every, single frame. Film Editing is how the shots are attached to one another—the sequence, the pace, the transitions, the continuity. It puts the finishing touches on what we see and how we perceive the story. Rumor has it that the best films are born not on the set but in the editing room. The Production Designer is in charge of the elements within the frame—props, set pieces, backgrounds, historical accuracy, etc. This, combined with the cinematic elements, is how a film gets its “look.” A good Score manipulates our emotions in ways we are probably not even aware of. Sound Mixing gets the tones just right and Sound Editing puts them all together—again: sequence, pace, transitions, continuity. Audio elements underscore and reinforce the feel of a film. Sometimes they are wholly responsible for it.

• Dunkirk received no nominations for its actors or its scriptwriters.
• What do I make of this?

I’m glad you asked.

While plot and character are obviously present, while we get attached to characters, root for them and want them to win, Dunkirk is not dependent on them in the way films usually are. Instead, this film uses its sensory elements in a very literary way.

It reminds me of the old adage that we hear on the first day of every creative writing class we’ve ever taken (or taught)—show, don’t tell. Don’t tell me that John is an idiot. Instead let John reveal his idiocy by saying and doing idiotic things. That way, readers can see and hear it for themselves—they can be a part of it. They don’t have to take your word for it.

Dunkirk is like that. Its narrative approach tries to let us in on the event as it unfolds on several fronts without telling us much of anything. Instead we see it and hear it. Then we can decide for ourselves what it might have felt like to be a part of it all. Nolan shows us Dunkirk—he doesn’t tell us about it.

It’s a story built in images and sounds—like a poem. It’s a risky way to make a movie. Risky like the image-building in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 silent classic The Battleship Potemkin. Risky like the sound design (and everything else) in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey. Risky because these films all require some effort on the part of the viewer to put the pieces together—sort of like real life. Or poetry.

If you want the details about what happened at Dunkirk with maps and strategies and arguments and generals and political criticism, see Darkest Hour. If you want to experience what it might have been like to be at Dunkirk, to be one of the soldiers, one of the civilian boat captains, one of the officers, one of the unsung heroes—then see Dunkirk.

Better yet, see them both.

(Psst! Hey! Whadja get on the quiz?)