Running the entirety of July, London's BFI Southbank has announced a season of films which have inspired director Christopher Nolan’s new feature film, Dunkirk.

The season will include a special preview screening of Dunkirk in 70mm on Thursday 13 July, preceded by an introduction from the director himself.

With Nolan being a passionate advocate for the preservation of physical film, all the films in the season will be shown on on 35mm or 70mm.

Despite Dunkirk centring on a World War II evacuation, Nolan doesn't see it as a war film as such, and consequently the majority of his inspirations aren't from the war genre.

He explains:

“You might expect a season of films leading up to a screening of Dunkirk to be a selection of war movies. But I chose to approach Dunkirk more as survival story than war film. One look at James Jones’ essay on ‘Phony War Films’ (in which he takes down several of my old favourites) immediately shows you the perils of taking on real-life combat in a dramatic motion picture. In Jones’ estimation All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930) said it first and best: war dehumanises. Revisiting that masterpiece it is hard to disagree that the intensity and horror have never been bettered. For me, the film demonstrates the power of resisting the convention of finding meaning and logic in individual fate. Most of the other films in this series fall into two different, but overlapping categories. From established classics of tension like The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953) and Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) through to the more recent ticking-clock nail-biters Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994) and Tony Scott’s final film, the relentless Unstoppable (2010), our season explores the mechanics and uses of suspense to modulate an audience’s response to narrative.