flamboyant Anglo-American filmmaker Christopher Nolan, offers an intelligent cinema, which is fully consistent with the Deleuzian idea of the necessary participation of the spectator for a cinematographic work to be complete.
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Christopher Nolan is this filmmaker known for making blockbusters on a large budget, yet film buffs of all stripes come to see by the thousands. He crushes the popular genres to make something different (SF, Thriller, war film, etc.); he clumps them, distorts them, and in fine, the genre disappears and the Nolan style remains, often leaving the spectator panting. Even if his early works, such as Memento, dance on a small financial foot (a budget of USD 4.5 million, no more), his brands are already there, never to leave him again. A crafter of a very aesthetic cinema, some would say clinical and cold, with a limited and very neutral colorimetric choices, always gives his films a melancholic, almost vintage tone.
Self-taught, Christopher Nolan nevertheless has a very acute sense of direction, whether by his technical choices (the formats of 70mm or IMAX chosen for example at very good value for Dunkirk), or artistic (a casting that is always timely, an incredibly effective music of the great Hans Zimmer who breathes to the rhythm of films since Batman Begins).
His films are also recognized by their end, often mysterious, even mystico-philosophical, which has the gift of irritating some, and which in any case feeds whole days of discussions on specialized forums, A token of the public’s impatience to see their next film. But far from being a marketing scammer, his objective is really to rely on the viewer’s intelligence, to let him take ownership of the story, and, as he himself says, to “let [the viewer] have the pleasure of not knowing, of being fooled”.
But what truly sets Christopher Nolan's signature is his subject. Whatever the vector, genre, history, it will always revolve around this diptych: memory and time.
The material of Nolan’s cinema are memory and remembrance: their fragility, their impact on the lives of the protagonists. In Inception, for example, Nolan plays with the subconscious, dreams and memories. In Interstellar, the teacher of Cooper’s daughter’s school makes her believe that the Apollo missions never existed, and this in a spirit of manipulation. The Dark Knight trilogy is underpinned by the memory of Bruce Wayne’s parents, more precisely by the memory of their death, which haunts the protagonist. In Memento, where Lenny (Guy Pearce) is struck by a loss of immediate memory, the plot is entirely directed by this fragile memory that is at the very source of suspense. In Dunkirk, it is the whole film that is a memory, that of a war known to all but that the filmmaker has made unrecognizable, anachronistic.
This is obviously no coincidence. It is a work that tirelessly explores the different facets of the same theme, with method and without bragging. Christopher Nolan obviously wants to offer something more to his audience, the blockbusters which, by definition, are only action, become a subject of reflection in his hands, but also a source of emotions.
In doing so, Nolan juggles with spatiotemporal. In particular, his representation of time in his films is multiple, and unconventional. Once again, his idea here is to shake our minds accustomed to the comforting tick-tock of chronological progression. In Christopher Nolan’s cinema, he controls time. Thus, in Memento, the film is cut in two portions that are mixed in an elaborate montage that relies in particular on color and black and white. Half of the sequences take place in chronological order. The other half in an anti-chronological order, so that the middle of the film somehow becomes its climax. So much so that the spectator feels as confused as Lenny, the main character played by Guy Pearce. A brilliant idea and a beautiful scenario from his long-time collaborator, his brother and screenwriter Jonathan, which has earned the pair numerous awards.
In the same vein, Dunkirk is divided into three time series of sequences: 1 hour for air actions, 1 day for land actions, and 1 week for naval operations. However, all converge on the same second, towards the same goal of avoiding the greatest catastrophe of all time, that of the death of hundred thousand Allied soldiers, trapped in the German trap. Once again, the idea is brilliant, the execution masterful.
In Interstellar finally, the case becomes more complicated since in addition to a different space-time like the famous wormhole, we also have a new spatial dimension, the fifth dimension, which moreover, with Nolan, is more source of philosophical reflections than a simple technical feat.
Again the magic of Nolan in action which shows his obsession with the mechanics of time…
film after film, Christopher Nolan has a special place. He offers an intelligent cinema, which is fully consistent with the Deleuzian idea of the necessary participation of the spectator for a cinematographic work to be complete.
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