The Techniques and Themes of the Films Directed by Nolan - Essay Example

s The Techniques and Themes of the Films Directed By Nolan Christopher Jonathan Nolan is a British-American film director, screen writer and producer born in July 30th, 1970 (Itzkoff 1). Nolan makes highly conceptual and unconventional narratives. His father was a British advertising copywriter, and his mother was a flight attendant. He spent most of his childhood in both London and Chicago. His film making started while he was as young as seven and he made films using his father’s super 8 camera (Itzkoff 1). Nolan pursued English literature at the university college of London and due to the college’s film-making facilities. He was president of the college film society for two years, and it was at this time that his relentless talent and interest in film making was evident. Nolan began his film-making career with a series of short films. According to critics, Nolan makes films, which are crime dramas and psychological thrillers. He has also made films which conflicted antiheroes like Shelby in Memento, Cobb in Inception and Batman in Batman Begins. Most of his films such as Memento, Inception, and Batman Begins among others have nonlinear plots. Nolan is known to use film and photography techniques to make good films that reflect life realistically. This essay evaluates the film and photography techniques that Nolan uses to bring out the themes of reality, dreams and self-deception in Memento (2000), Batman Begins (2005), and Inception (2010). The paper starts by giving a detailed discussion of the three films, the film techniques used in the three movies and the photography technique, as well. It will conclude with a wrap up conclusion on the film techniques and photography comparison in the three selected films by Nolan. For one to produce an excellent film, he must know how to reflect life realistically so as to have his audience look deep down inside their lives. Christopher Nolan is wont of telling intriguing stories with themes that provoke thought in a brilliant way (Bill 137). With his successive films, he may be the most significant filmmaker in North America because of his virtually unprecedented meteoric ascent in the film industry. In his films such as Memento, Batman Begins, and Inception, Nolan has experimented with a style and sensibility that challenges, moves and entertains in a way that is moribund in the world of cinema. For example, in Inception, Nolan uses his film technique to produce leading box office hits that have dazzled its audiences with its mind bobbling premises; an action based on the latest technology (Bill 175). Nolan, as a film maker, has a predilection for stories that contain puzzles, and that captures the imagination of a generation of movie-mongers. Memento is adopted from his Brother Jonathan Nolan’s short story Memento Mori. Memento is presented in two different sequence of black-and-white that follow a chronological series and a series of color that are shown in reverse order (Barsam & Monahan 195). These two contrasting series meet at the end of the film to produce one story. In the initial opening, the film shows the end where Leonard murders Tendy and soon Natalie, another character reveals that Leonard is avenging for the rape and murder of his wife. This creates a nonlinear narrative plot that produces themes of memory with implicit reality, dream and explicit self-deception (Stanley 180). In Memento, the main character is Leonard Shelby; who has anterograde amnesia that impairs his ability to remember life occurrences explicitly. The catalyst for all the actions in Memento is the tragic loss of the main character’s wife, and the film amnesia leads Leonard to reduce all his life occupation to vengeance. Batman Begins is a superhero crime film that traces the main characters fear of bats, the death of his parents, his becoming a batman and his plot to destroy Gotham city. This film is a culmination of Nolan’s trilogy where its narrative arc is continued in The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012). Unlike in Inception and Memento, Nolan decided to prefer traditional stuntwork over computer-generated imagery in Batman Begins. In Inception, there are a number of protagonists led by Dom Cobb; a thief harms his targets by infiltrating into their subconscious. Cobb is at last offered a chance to revive his life as a return for his impossible task of implanting into another person’s subconscious. In this case, Nolan creates a character whose self-deception threatens to overwhelm his mission when the memories of the dead drives him and threatens to annihilate him. Nolan uses a number of flashbacks that slowly reveal Cobb’s past and his culpability for the events that have reduced him to an ever escaping man. Nolan captures this in a straight forward fashion but the momentum is split into four different dreaming states that reveal simultaneously alongside one another as the time elapses and the events unfolds. Comparing this film with Inception is interesting because both climaxes of Inception and Memento takes different points of departure in the protagonists’ last choice in confronting their own crimes. In Inception, Cobb chooses to forgive himself while in Memento; Leonard decides not to forgive his person’s crimes and goes on to destroy himself. Therefore, in Inception Cobb chooses to forgive himself in a dream and he is saved, but Leonard cannot cope with the realisation that he played a part in his wife’s overdose and he continues pursuing his thought prey. In the Batman Begins, Wayne is initially denied the choice of transformation into batman, but as he decides to base his action on justice and righteousness. At the end, Batman Begins reconciles a sense of peace with himself in his new identity as a bat and a human being. Nolan’s filming techniques in the three films also takes the form of neo-noir. This is where the themes and visual updates of the traditional noir are the main determinants of Hollywood crime dramas. Therefore, Nolan in Memento, Batman Begins and Inception uses similar visuals that are combined with other varying elements like comic-books, superheroes, fantasy dream and reality, as well as self-deception. In Inception, Nolan uses dream strategies where a dreamer is either awakened by a sudden kick or by dying in the dream. If the dreamer dies, the dream collapses and each extractor has a personalized object that identifies a dream state or reality. Nolan uses Penrose stairs in the film to show that impossible objects can be created in the lucid dream worlds. He explores the idea of sharing dream space so that one is able to access another person’s unconscious mind and how people can misuse this ability. This way, Nolan creates a dream and real world where the two worlds ripple one another and the dream is always shifting as the characters navigate. Inception is completely original film that is not based on other source material. It is based on Cobb, a metaphysical heist who infiltrates into other peoples subconscious but is at last challenges with planting than extracting and idea and the success or failure of this task will determine his fate. Nolan uses voiceover to preserve his clean audio, and as in his other films he gives his story a priority (Stanley 251). Memento and Inception are common in that they embody Nolan’s themes of unstable psychologies playing between realities that imbue the characters and settings. This makes Cobb seek redemption and together with his teammates, they resort to dreamscape (Bill 139) that Nolan designs perfectly in his film techniques. In Memento, Nolan uses a paranoid photograph of a dead man, and as the sequence plays backward, the camera gives a shot of a man being shot at the head. Nolan follows this event by black-and-white and color sequences. Nolan makes the black-and-white sequences to be chronological before the color sequences, which follow in reverse chronological order. In the storyline, Leonard is attacked by two men where he killed the attacker who raped and strangled his wife although a second one clubbed him and escaped. Although the investigative police did not accept that there was a second attacker, Leonard strongly believes that there was a second attacker called John with the last name starting with G. Leonard starts his own investigation by the help of a system of notes, Polaroid photographs and tattoos. Nolan employed his photography style where several establishing CG shots were used to compose multiple images (Barsam & Monahan 208). For example, the one used for Gotham skyline, the exterior shots of Wayne tower among other shots. He also combined a sequence of mixed live action footage, CGI and model work as his stylistic photography work. In this film, the bats were digital with an exception where one or two bats appeared. The major theme in this film is fear, but this fear is triggered by self-deception and reality dream. In Batman Begins, self-deception is noted in Bruce Wayne’s psychological investigation that split personality in the bat suit. The main character is constantly in pursuit of the right thing instead of incessant reexamination. The nonlinear plot approach, black and white photography, for example, the partially shot monochrome in Memento marks the stylistic of Nolan films (Barsam & Monahan 210). This is also coupled with a story where a motivated but vulnerable novice is betrayed by a manipulator. The theme of reality is evident in Nolan films. In Memento, Leonard is always reminding himself that his wife deserves vengeance regardless of his state of mind. The only source of truth in Leonard’s case is the photographs he has and tattooed messages. In Inception, the characters have made totems that are used to remind them when they are in a dream or in reality. Cobb used this technique to choose to live in both world of reality and dream where he could stay with his wife or go back to reality and meet his children. Nolan managed to use his film technique to fill the gap, which could have existed if the possibility of swapping the two worlds were not possible. In the Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne uses the reality, in fact, self deception to attain his identity. This way, he deceives himself that he is seeking justice but ends up in a vengeance mission for his parents. He was later to come out of this self-deceiving dream and realized that in reality, other people are suffering because of his actions and changes his ways. In Memento, Leonard discovers that he was liable for his wife’s death but decides to deceive himself that this was not true and continued to avenge his wife. He chooses to lie to himself that his life had no motivation without vengeance. This happens also in Inception where Mal deceives herself from the truth by forgetting that her world was not real. Works Cited Barsam, Richard & Monahan, Dave. Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film. 3rd ed. W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. Print. Bill, Nichols. Engaging Cinema: An Introduction to Film Studies. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. Print. Itzkoff, Dave. “The Man Behind the Dreamscape.” The New York Times. June 30, 2010. viewed from . Stanley, Robert. The Movie Idiom: Film as a Popular Art Form. 1st ed. Waveland Press, Inc., 2010. Print. Read More