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"Nolan, Christopher, 1970- Criticism and interpretation."
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The Nolan variations : the movies, mysteries, and marvels of Christopher Nolan
\"An in-depth look at the life and work of filmmaker Christopher Nolan\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Fictional Christopher Nolan
No detailed description available for \"The Fictional Christopher Nolan\".
eBook
The cinema of christopher nolan
Contextualizing and closely reading each of Christopher Nolan's films, this collection examines the director's play with memory, time, trauma, masculinity, and identity.
eBook
“It’s Like Waking”: Making Meaning in and of Christopher Nolan’s Memento
\"Are you watching closely?\" This line, delivered in voice-over, accompanies the enigmatic opening image—a collection of identical top hats lying scattered incongruously on the ground in an unidentified wood—of Christopher Nolan's The Prestige (2006). The status of the comment, as well as that of the image, within the diegesis is uncertain, since the image relates to nothing that immediately follows, and the comment, though voiced by a character, is addressed to no one in the film. The line does connect in ways to the narrative content, which concerns magic and magicians, and it does bear on the dialogue that closely follows this quick opening scene and that begins the narrative proper: an explanation of the structure of magic tricks being offered by a secondary character, played by Michael Caine, to the daughter (sort of) of the character who asked the initial question. Really, though, that question is addressed to the film's audience, and situated as a kind of epigraph, it serves as a warning. The admonition—to pay attention—functions most immediately as preparation for the particular plot twists that conclude The Prestige, of course, but the advice might well serve as a setup for Nolan's work generally: with their convoluted plots, their false leads, and their scrambled chronologies, Nolan's movies not only invite but frequently require close attention.
Journal Article
Science-Fiction Films and “Love”: Toward a Critique of Regressive Social Relations
In the narrative structure of many science fiction films, “love” is an element whose importance frequently goes unrecognized, especially as far as the intended “message” of particular films as a form of social commentary is concerned. Typically, such messages pertain to troublesome trends in modern societies that have been shaping constellations of business, labor, and government, and which have resulted in the formation of peculiar systems of social relations. While the stability of any society depends on the existence of a specific system of social relations, in modern societies, such systems often are in conflict with the norms and values according to which individuals are expected to live their lives, and are thus, inherently regressive. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016) provide excellent foils for highlighting the workings of regressive social relations, and for the kind of price humans and humankind pay in the process.
Journal Article
Of Time Loops and Derivatives: Christopher Nolan's Interstellar and the Logic of the Futures Market
Klotz focuses on Christopher Nolan's science fiction \"Interstellar\" and the logic of the futures market. The author argues that if the contemporary popularity of apocalyptic narratives is linked to the rise of finance markets, then the solutions to contemporary crises imagined in these time-travel narratives might also have a counterpart in the logic of contemporary finance capital. She maintains that the time-traveling plot device that relies on knowledge of the future to stave off a present catastrophe follows the same logical structure as a financial instrument that has taken on supreme importance in today's trading world: the derivative.
Journal Article
Historioplastic Metafiction: Tarantino, Nolan, and the “Return to Hegel”
Typically viewed as postmodern, the films of Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan ultimately renew the possibility of aesthetic responsibility by employing the very devices that seem wholly antithetical to such responsibility. Rather than fixating on the primacy of the signifier, on exposing the graphic or symbolic production of reality, these metafictional films shift our attention (in a specifically Hegelian manner) to a “plastic” Real that is effaced even as it effects the form of its representation. If Linda Hutcheon's playful coinage—“historiographic metafiction”—best defines the dominant aesthetic form of the postmodern episteme, then these films represent the possibility of a historioplastic metafiction. They return us to the burden of mimetic responsibility by exposing the infinite mutability of a paradoxically finite truth. They thus exemplify an efficacious move out of postmodernism.
Journal Article
The Outlaw-Knight: Law's Violence in The Faerie Queene, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and The Dark Knight Rises
This article identifies and defines the figure of the “outlaw knight” through Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1596) and two modern American films, John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises (2012). It argues that this recurring, allegorical figure reifies both the indeterminacy of the state's law and violence and the cost of state formation to older visions of aristocratic individualism. Through the outlaw-knight, this paper examines how the modern state legitimates itself by means of a contest between rival systems of law and violence played out through competing interpretations of symbols. By examining modern instantiations alongside a late sixteenth-century case, it argues that the outlaw-knight figure is rooted in nostalgia for premodern chivalric feudalism, through which it questions centralized state authority from the outlaw's perspective, and uncovers the arbitrary, fictional means by which the state legitimates its justice above the older laws it seeks to overwrite.
Journal Article
The Tale Parfit Tells: Analytic Metaphysics of Personal Identity vs. Wittgensteinian Film and Literature
At the center of Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons is nestled a famous short story about a person who uses a teletransporter. Parfit argues that his “thought experiment” shows that “personal identity”—as (analytic) philosophy understands it—doesn’t matter. As long as I know that my “self” on Mars is unharmed by the teletransporter, it shouldn’t matter to me that I remain on Earth, soon to die. I use Christopher Priest’s novel The Prestige and the Nolan brothers’ film of it to challenge the method and alleged moral of this “branch-line” teletransportation thought experiment, treating it as a work of literature in miniature.
Journal Article