Christopher Nolan Directing — A Video Essay on Nolan and Time

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Christopher Nolan and Time — a video essay about time as the dominant motif in Christopher Nolan movies.

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Chapters
00:00 - Intro
01:03 - Nolan’s Screenplays
02:15 - Memento Timeline Breakdown
02:54 - Showing Time
03:56 - Editing Time
04:40 - Time and Music
06:01 - Dunkirk/Shepard tone
07:46 - Recap

Time is at the core of many Christopher Nolan movies. It is the dominant motif on textual and subtextual levels. But how deep does this relationship between Nolan and time really go? In our latest Christopher Nolan video essay, our goal is to identify all the various elements in Nolan’s filmmaking where time plays an important role and what these efforts all add up to. From the script, the imagery, and even the soundtrack, let’s figure out how Christopher Nolan makes us see, hear, and feel time.

You can find Nolan’s infatuation with time in his screenplays, both in the plots but also the way they are structured. Whether written individually or co-written, many of Nolan’s scripts work on both these levels. Memento is told backwards and forwards simultaneously; The Prestige uses a non-linear structure to weave together a story of past and present; Dunkirk blends three different timelines into one.

We can also find time represented in the imagery itself. Consider the extensive use of slow-motion in Inception, which gives us the audience a way to mark time in the various dream levels. Or the mind-blowing mix of forward and reverse motion in Tenet.

Finally, the soundtrack is yet another venue to showcase the relationship between Nolan and time. With Inception, Nolan and his long-time composer Hans Zimmer took Edith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” and turned it into something quite fascinating. As time slows in the various dream levels, the song itself stretches out into something almost unrecognizable. Zimmer then built much of his score around this slow-mo version. In Dunkirk, along with an ever-present ticking watch on the soundtrack, Nolan and Zimmer utilized the Shepard Tone. The Shepard Tone is an audio illusion where an ascending or descending scale appears to endlessly rise or fall.

Christopher Nolan and time will go down in history as one of the most consistent and elaborate pairings of artist and motif. This doesn’t mean that all filmmakers should focus on time but the lesson is to find a motif that speaks for the film and inject it into as many layers as possible.


#FilmTheory #VideoEssay #Filmmaking

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VIDEO EDITOR: BRANDON SCULLION
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Songs used:
Penumbra - Hannah Parrott
Time - Inception Original Soundtrack
Combust - Luke Atencio
Edith Piaf - Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien
Destabilization - Hans Zimmer Inception Soundtrack
The Mole - Dunkirk Soundtrack
Cyndi Lauper - Time After Time

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