DUNKIRK
Place visited: Dunkirk
Date: August 20, 2023
Participant(s): Pierre R., Olivier S.
Summer is over and many of us have been able to take vacations and travel.
As for me, I went on vacation for a week to Brittany to follow the interceltic festival in Lorient. As I had heard about an exhibition on the film Dunkirk by Christopher Nolan, I really wanted to take an excursion to Dunkirk next. And to kill two birds with one stone, I thought it would be interesting to go to the filming locations.
Dunkirk is Christopher Nolan's first historical film and Nolan's second film having been shot partly in France, plunges us into the full debacle of the British then surrounded by the Germans at Dunkirk. British who will decide to return to England. This operation will be calledOperation Dynamo.
Preparations
The film having as city Dunkirk, I did some research on Google to find out if a website existed listing the filming locations. After a while, luck turned in my favor, and I was able to discover a wealth of information listed on a specialized site.
I began to prepare my trip and locate the places. I started by using the Google tool to locate the places. Google Street View being perfect for this. Then I started the film and stopped at the moments taking place on Dunkirk.
The first scene I watched was the one located in the street of the executed in Dunkirk. We see Tommy, played by Fionn Whitehead, running to escape German fire. He was accompanied by other British soldiers, heading straight towards a gate which he crossed to take shelter. The scene takes place over a few seconds, so we have time to pause and see the exact location where it's happening.
I could spot the scene on the map.
Tommy is then in the garden of this house, and tries to arm his Karabiner 98k so he can defend himself. But the German shots being too numerous, Tommy decides to get out of there and cross a wall to find himself outside in another street.
Having jumped the wall to find himself in a neighboring street, Tommy finds himself faced with armed soldiers who shoot at him, he must then protect himself before reporting that he is English. The French let him pass so that he could reach the dike.
I could not find any trace of this street where the French are allotted, nor the street which leads to the dike.
It was once on this dike that things got a little confusing. Because if Tommy goes towards the beach of Dunkirk and sees four poles in front of him, these do not appear on Google Street View.
Would they have been moved during filming? This will be a second point to be clarified on site.
The rest of the film is largely made on the beaches, we would go and visit them when we were there because there are no photos to locate the action.
I wanted to share my discoveries with someone. Pierre R., passionate about history, responded.
Sunday August 20
We left Lille Flandres Lille station around 9:30 a.m. towards Dunkirk. The train journey from Lille to Dunkirk only took about an hour.
Wanting to enjoy the landscapes, we decided to explore the city on foot to our first place to visit, Rue des Fusillés.
Once there, we realized that the street was much smaller than in the film. This is partly due to the presence of cars, but also because Christopher Nolan had perhaps used a different focal length to film the scene. But this is less certain.
What we may notice at first are the windows which have been boarded up with wooden planks in the film. Indeed, there is a strong chance that the inhabitants have left or been mobilized to participate in the war effort.
Certain elements of the decor have also been added/modified such as the portico that Tommy crosses. The shot where Tommy turns to run to the end of the street was shot here or not very far , since we can clearly see the door and the garages opposite
Once through the gate at the end of the street, Tommy is forced to escape from the garden in which he took refuge due to the burst of bullets. He then decided to jump the wall to find himself in another street. But while we could have said to ourselves that this shot was filmed in two different locations, this is not the case.
For logistical reasons and in order not to immobilize an entire neighborhood, Christopher Nolan decided to film this shot in the same street as the gate. We can also see the house with the red roof in the distance, the same one which faces rue Belle Rade where there is the gate.
34 rue de Belle Rade was designed so that the two plans match. The exact place where Tommy is hiding to escape the guns was hard to find because the scene unfolds quickly. But it's there.
To be convinced of this, just look at the shape of the roof of the house at the end of the street.
The route to the dike seemed logical to us with the streets of Dunkirk. But just before, he crosses rue de Belle Rade which becomes narrow.
As with the boarded up windows, Christopher Nolan wanted to make everything realistic. there is a good chance that at the time restaurants were reinforced with these fortifications to avoid vandalism. But also perhaps the restaurants offered verandas which made it possible to have a place to accommodate a lot of people on the terrace. But this is only a hypothesis because I have not found any photos from the time.
Putting information on Google StreetView is misleading. Because if you walk down this street, the window located at the top right of the photos and video is not the same. The posts we see are no longer there.
It’s Pierre who will give me the answer to my question. The dike was the subject of enormous work after the filming of the film. To see this, you have to look in the Google StreetView options to select the date of August 2015 to find the same walls, windows and find the 4 posts which have since disappeared.
The rest of the film takes place mainly on the beach where Tommy ends up finding a way to get to the boat more quickly. He finds a soldier on a stretcher which he decides to transport with the help of another soldier. This is how they travel approximately 2.5 km to the dike.
This isn't really seen in the film because of the dynamic editing but it would represent about 20 minutes of walking. We were able to see this while walking to the dike.
While in the film, this dike is mainly used to repatriate the British to England, today it serves as a place of passage for tourists and many fishermen who come there for a moment of quiet relaxation.
Part of the dike is closed to the public because it was destroyed by German bombs during Operation Dynamo. It is on this part that Christopher Nolan had to rebuild a wooden projection which no longer exists today.
Marker 1 represents the limit where tourists can go and marker 2 approximately where the dike was rebuilt by Nolan's technical team.
Find the exact location on the Google map here
Apparently, according to the making of, it was not an easy task to build or film this breakthrough for the technical team, since they were faced with tides and weather changes.
Here, apart from this advance reconstructed for the film, we did not notice any notable differences with the film.
The rest of the filming having been at sea or on this advance, we had not planned to go to England for the rest of our expedition. But on the way back, we were able to visit the Operation Dynamo museum which is still open today. We were amazed by the number of objects on display and donated to the museum. We were able to speak with the people at reception who told us that the curator does a remarkable job and still brings back objects to exhibit.
You will be able to find all kinds of objects ranging from clothing, packets of cigarettes, propaganda posters as we can see at the beginning of the film, vehicles, etc....
If you are passionate about this period in the history of Dunkirk, I can only recommend that you visit this museum which is full of treasures: dynamo-dunkerque.com
But Dunkirk is not just beaches and restaurants. Dunkirk is full of magnificent, colorful and flowery places. As we saw when we returned to the station. We passed in front of the port museum where the three-masted Duchess Anne is moored, a former German merchant navy training sailboat dating from 1901.
If it were to return to the shooting locations of this film, I would complete the report by going to England.
I have not regretted this adventure, because even if the film dates from 2017, it is always a joy to go there and discover the precise places where it was filmed.
And if this article was able to be conceived, it is thanks to long-term work requiring long hours of research, watching film extracts, to Pierre who accompanied me to the scene, and also thanks to the museum mentioned above which informed us as kindly as it could.
DUNKIRK
Theatrical release: July 19, 2017
Duration: 1h47
Director: Christopher Nolan
Main actors: Fionn Whitehead, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy
Synopsis: The story of the famous evacuation of Allied troops from Dunkirk in May 1940 during Operation Dynamo.
