Meanings, Narratives, Passions of a Cinematic Figure

Abstract

The battle can be conceived as a quintessential cinematic figure. Like other objects that have had a
metonymic function for film art – the train, for example – the battle also seems to share many distinctive features
with the cinematic language, potentially becoming a real “theoretical object”. Through the analysis of Napoléon
(1927) by Abel Gance, Alexander Nevskij (1938) by Sergej Ejzenštejn and Dunkirk (2017) by Christopher Nolan, the
essay aims to show how the battle has been used as a specific opportunity to experiment with technical and formal
leaps in cinematic language geared to represent the significant dimension of the event with ever greater
effectiveness. Analysing the representations of the battle in films seems therefore a profitable way of reassessing the
history of cinema and rethinking its relationship with the system of arts and images of its time.