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Memory and atonement: Valerie Krips, on the cultural memory of Dunkirk.

Article Excerpt
I grew up in a town on the Thames Estuary, one of the little places that sent boats to Dunkirk to rescue the British Expeditionary Force and, of course, Frenchmen, Dutchmen and Belgians too, in May and June 1940. I didn't know that the father of one of the boys in my class at school had died in the attempt until I saw a BBC series on the Second World War when I was in England in 2006. My school friend's father didn't appear in the main footage, but was caught on camera in one of the scraps of film from the period that were aired on one of the high-definition BBC channels as 'extra' material. These proved to be an extraordinary resource. Fascinating in themselves, they also told stories that sometimes ran counter to the narrative of the main feature. It's easy to forget that documentary film is edited, too, and that its distinction from fictional film is a little less straightforward than we might think.

The few minutes of black and white film shot on the seafront that I knew as a playground show my friend's father, with a group of other men, in his fisherman's waterproofs, the buckles on his bib catching the light as he turns. He's talking to a Naval officer, smart and neat, who is there to look for...

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