Someone Turned Dunkirk Into A Black & White Silent Movie

Dunkirk
Dunkirk

As one of the best movies of 2017, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is something that people will probably be dissecting for years to come. It’s not the war movie most people expect, focusing on an “invisible” enemy and the toil warfare takes on soldiers’ psyche rather than bloodshed.

Nolan’s back catalogue is bulging with quality in terms of screenwriting, but he also tells fantastic tales through nothing more than just visuals. If you took the Leonard dialogue out of Memento, you would still know what it was about.

To illustrate that, YouTube channel Like Stories of Old has re-edited Dunkirk to be a silent movie featuring vaudevillian music and dialogue cards. It’s a pretty interesting watch, the frenzied editing and scratched lens transporting me back to a time I was never even alive in.

Here’s the creator’s “synopsis”:

“This is a special project of mine unlike anything I’ve ever done before. What started off as a regular essay on Dunkirk’s visual storytelling and its influences from silent films, slowly turned into what is by far my most experimental video to date. It began when I re-edited a few clips from Dunkirk into a silent film style to compare it to existing silent films that Nolan mentioned as his inspirations (and also; because it was just really fun to do). I was amazed at how well it translated and how well it highlighted Nolan’s use of camera angles, body language, facial expressions and staging in Dunkirk’s storytelling; a great use of visuals both in portraying minor conflicts as well as in telling the story as a whole.

“This last point presented an interesting challenge for my video essay, because translating individual scenes into silent ones is relatively easy; I think there are many recent films that have scenes with strong visual storytelling, but I can’t think of many films that can be turned into a silent film in their entirety and still work. Dunkirk however, I believe, is one of those films. For a second I considered re-editing the entire film, but because that would obviously lead to copyright issues I decided to transform it into a short that showcases Dunkirk’s strength in visual storytelling in both the small details as well as the story as a whole. I tried as much as possible to maintain the essence of Dunkirk, but I also wanted it to stand on its own which meant I had to pay a lot of attention to its internal logic and do some creative editing.”

What did you think? A worthwhile recut? It’s a passion project done really damn well, in my opinion; would love to see more movie channels produce stuff like this.

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