Dunkirk, the latest mind-bender from Christopher Nolan, is unique but also contains many of the signature characteristics of Nolan’s impressive filmography.
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Transcript provided by Youtube:
00:00
[You can practically see it from here.]
00:02
[What?]
00:03
[Home.]
00:05
You know you’re watching a
00:06
Christopher Nolan film if there’s a non-linear story. From the mind-bending
00:11
Memento, to the more subtly cryptic Interstellar, Nolan disorients his
00:15
audiences with puzzles that build suspense and reward multiple viewings.
00:19
[Wait whose subconscious are we going into exactly?]
00:22
Subjective point of view.
00:23
We’re immersed in the characters perspective through everything from the
00:27
camera as participant, to a subjective story structure.
00:30
We’re often given only as much information as the characters get
00:33
entering into their limited perspective of the world. And with this information
00:36
concealed from us we’re engaged and we’re made into detectives. The underlying
00:41
puzzle or mind teaser we’re piecing together demonstrates Nolan’s clear
00:44
interest in philosophy and deeper questions of the nature of human
00:48
existence. We get ambiguous endings; our questions intentionally unanswered.
00:52
The purposeful lack of clarity comes from Nolan’s desire to place us in his
00:56
character’s shoes, piecing together the truth with them.
00:59
At the same time Nolan
01:00
himself claims to know the answer to each of his open-ended plots.
01:04
He says that even if a film ends with ambiguity for the audience the creator must be
01:09
sure of his true interpretation to avoid contradiction or lack of substance.
01:14
Many characters have a split identity, divided or multiple selves, or some deep
01:18
psychological problem or identity conflict. There’s moral ambiguity.
01:22
[You either die a hero or you live long enough
01:24
to see yourself become the villain.]
01:25
The concept of a hero villain divided is complex and unclear.
01:30
Heroic characters with good intentions often turn into antagonists, and sometimes the
01:34
archetypal villain is given depth and made sympathetic. Nolan often gives us
01:38
a cruel world, and questions how morality is to be maintained or measured
01:42
in these muddy situations.
01:43
Light, darkness, and contrast convey
01:46
character growth, decay, and exploration.
01:48
In Batman Begins, light represents truth.
01:51
When Bruce Wayne uses a flashlight as he ventures
01:53
into the dark Batcave to face his fears.
01:56
We see conventions of film noir including a lonely protagonist
02:00
themes of betrayal and duplicity, and a moody dark dramatic atmosphere.
02:04
Nolan favors a realistic style, film over digital, and practical effects over CGI
02:09
The opening scene from The Dark Knight Rises where Bane and his crew hijack a
02:13
plane that’s then dropped from the sky, was a
02:16
practical effect shot in Scotland over the course of two days.
02:19
The procedures natural light and real locations prevent it from feeling too much like a distant
02:24
period piece, and Nolan achieved impressive effects like the spinning
02:28
hallway in Inception and the ship in Interstellar through building sets
02:32
rather than a green screen to give the movies a realistic feel.
02:35
We can read many
02:35
of his films as self-referential analogies for the creative process.
02:39
[You create the world of the dream we bring the subject into that dream and they
02:45
fill it with their subconscious.]
02:46
Common themes that show up include revenge
02:49
anger, guilt, sacrifice, solitude, memory and obsession. And he worked time and
02:54
again with cinematographer Wally Pfister, composer Hans Zimmer, writer Jonathan
02:57
Nolan (his brother), co-producer Emma Thomas (his wife), and a number of familiar
03:01
faces in front of the camera.
03:04
Taking all these things together we can gather that
03:06
Nolan’s worldview is always inquiring — looking deeper at the human condition
03:11
trusting in our deeper intuitions and subconscious, and challenging the
03:14
knowledge we take for granted.
03:16
[Did you mean to shoot Hap?]
03:20
[I don’t know anymore.]
03:21
Starting from a
03:21
simple seeming premise and traditional action-adventure cinema entertainment,
03:26
he draws us into asking larger daunting questions like, can we trust our own
03:30
minds? Is there an objective truth out there? And do we even want to accept that
03:34
truth if we have the chance?
03:36
[You keep telling yourself what you know,
03:40
but what do you believe? What do you feel?]
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This post was previously published on Youtube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video