Author search: Nolan, Christopher, 1970-, Subject search terms: Nolan, Christopher, 1970-; Keyword search: Christopher Nolan AND Memento.
The Cinema of Christopher Nolan: Imagining the Impossible by
Contextualizing and closely reading each of Christopher Nolan's films, this collection examines the director's play with memory, time, trauma, masculinity, and identity.
The Fictional Christopher Nolan by
From Memento and Insomnia to the Batman films, The Prestige, and Inception, lies play a central role in every Christopher Nolan film. Characters in the films constantly find themselves deceived by others and are often caught up in a vast web of deceit that transcends any individual lies. The formal structure of a typical Nolan film deceives spectators about the events that occur and the motivations of the characters. While Nolan's films do not abandon the idea of truth altogether, they show us how truth must emerge out of the lie if it is not to lead us entirely astray. The Fictional Christopher Nolan discovers in Nolan's films an exploration of the role that fiction plays in leading to truth. Through close readings of all the films through Inception, Todd McGowan demonstrates that the fiction or the lie comes before the truth, and this priority forces us to reassess our ways of thinking about the nature of truth. Indeed, McGowan argues that Nolan's films reveal the ethical and political importance of creating fictions and even of lying. While other filmmakers have tried to discover truth through the cinema, Nolan is the first filmmaker to devote himself entirely to the fictionality of the medium, and McGowan discloses how Nolan uses its tendency to deceive as the basis for a new kind of philosophical filmmaking. He shows how Nolan's insistence on the priority of the fiction aligns his films with Hegel's philosophy and understands Nolan as a thoroughly Hegelian filmmaker.
Memento and Following by
Christopher Nolan's Memento is an intricate, original, fascinating thriller, hailed by Philip French of the Observer as 'one of the year's most exciting pictures'. Its protagonist Leonard (Guy Pearce) is a puzzle, even to himself. He sports the trappings of an expensive lifestyle, yet he lives in seedy motels, and seems to be on a desperate mission of revenge to find the man who murdered his wife. Worse, Leonard suffers from a rare form of amnesia that plagues his short-term memory, so in order to keep track of his life, he must surround himself with written reminders, some of them etched onto his own flesh. In this state, Leonard finds that nothing is what it seems, and no one can easily be trusted. Following (1998) was Christopher Nolan's micro-budgeted debut feature. Bill (Jeremy Theobald), a lonely would-be writer, spends his considerable free time stalking strangers at random through the streets of London. This vicarious form of 'research' takes an unexpected turn when Bill is caught out by one of his quarries: a suave cat burglar who introduces him to the art of breaking and entering. Soon Bill is striking up a liaison with a girl whose flat he has turned over. But Bill discovers too late that he is out of his depth. This volume includes both screenplays, plus an interview with Christopher Nolan and Jeremy Theobald in which they talk to James Mottram about the making of Following, and a piece by Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan Nolan, author of the story on which Memento was based, in which they recall the conception of the film.
The Philosophy of Christopher Nolan by
As a director, writer, and producer, Christopher Nolan has made a substantial impact on contemporary cinema through both avant garde films, such as Following and Memento, and his contributions to major pop culture franchises with his Dark Knight trilogy and his involvement in both Man of Steel and Batman v Superman. His most recent film, Interstellar, delivered the same visual qualities and complex, thought-provoking plotlines his audience has come to expect. This volume collects sixteen essays written by professional philosophers and film theorists that discuss various philosophical themes either represented within a particular film or are characteristic of Nolan's overall thematic vision across his cinematic oeuvre. These themes include self-identity and self-destruction, moral choice and moral doubt, the nature of truth and its value, whether we can trust our perceptions of what's "real," the political psychology of heroes and villains, and what it means to be a "viewer" of Nolan's films. Whether his protagonists are squashing themselves like a bug, struggling to create an identity and moral purpose for themselves, suffering from their own duplicitous plots that cause them to doubt their own perceptions of their self and the world around them, donning a mask that both strikes fear and reveals their true nature, or having to weigh the lives of those they love against the greater good in the face of the unknown, there are no simple solutions to the questions Nolan's films provoke; yet exploring these questions yields its own reward.
Probing the Skin: Cultural Representations of Our Contact Zone by Stream on Kanopy, Hoopla, Roku and tubi (with ads), rent on Amazon.