Christopher Nolan is one of the defining directors of the 21st century. Few of his contemporaries can compete in terms of critical and commercial success, let alone cultural impact. His films have a rare ability to transcend audience expectations, appealing to both casual moviegoers and dyed-in-the-wool cineastes. Nolan's work ranges from gritty crime thrillers (Memento, Insomnia) to spectacular blockbusters (the Dark Knight trilogy, Inception). They have taken audiences from the depths of space (Interstellar) to the harsh realities of war (Dunkirk). And they have pushed the boundaries of the possible in modern movie making. This critical history covers his complete filmography, tracing his career from film student to indie darling to Oscar-nominated auteur.

This comprehensive and in-depth study delves into the life and works of one of modern films most celebrated, successful and intriguing auteurs, Christopher Nolan. ‘What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient…highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate.’ - Cobb, Inception How has Nolan become this leading director? Is he the new Kubrick? What do audiences get out of his games? Visually, he offers a steely science-fiction noir with the highlights of big stars and a magician’s flourishes, whether he is tackling Victorian London or the far reaches of outer space. In narrative terms, his films twist and turn, provoking as many questions as they answer. This book cracks open the magic box of Nolan’s twisting universe. As a character, he eludes easy answers. Veteran film author Ian Nathan’s research will lean into deciphering his cryptic pronouncements and motivations alongside the history and making of his films. Examining both the making of and the inspiration behind his many, many hit films, from The Prestige (2006) to the hugely successful Batman films, through to his mind-bending science fiction works such as Inception (2014) and Tenet (2020). Filled with fascinating insights and illustrated throughout with cinematography from his visually stunning ouvre, this book offers a unique, important and unmissable insight into the mind of this most brilliant of directors.

A Critical Companion to Christopher Nolan provides a wide-ranging exploration of Christopher Nolan's films, practices, and collaborations. From a range of critical perspectives, this volume examines Nolan's body of work, explores its industrial and economic contexts, and interrogates the director's auteur status. This volume contributes to the scholarly debates on Nolan and includes original essays that examine all his films including his short films. It is structured into three sections that deal broadly with themes of narrative and time; collaborations and relationships; and ideology, politics, and genre. The authors of the sixteen chapters include established Nolan scholars as well as academics with expertise in approaches and perspectives germane to the study of Nolan's body of work. To these ends, the chapters employ intersectional, feminist, political, ideological, narrative, economic, aesthetic, genre, and auteur analysis in addition to perspectives from star theory, short film theory, performance studies, fan studies, adaptation studies, musicology, and media industry studies.

Christopher Nolan is the writer and director of Hollywood blockbusters like The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, and also of arthouse films like Memento and Inception. Underlying his staggering commercial success however, is a darker sensibility that questions the veracity of human knowledge, the allure of appearance over reality and the latent disorder in contemporary society. This appreciation of the sinister owes a huge debt to philosophy and especially modern thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida. Taking a thematic approach to Nolan's oeuvre, Robbie Goh examines how the director's postmodern inclinations manifest themselves in non-linearity, causal agnosticism, the threat of social anarchy and the frequent use of the mise en abyme, while running counter to these are narratives of heroism, moral responsibility and the dignity of human choice. For Goh, Nolan is a 'reluctant postmodernist'. His films reflect the cynicism of the modern world, but with their representation of heroic moral triumphs, they also resist it.

Throughout his films, Christopher Nolan champions the Anglo-American Neo-Liberal world order. Nestled within this order, his characters are free to undergo their ludic creation of little worlds of selfhood.

Over the past fifteen years, writer, producer and director Christopher Nolan has emerged from the margins of independent British cinema to become one of the most commercially successful directors in Hollywood. From Following (1998) to Interstellar (2014), Christopher Nolan's films explore philosophical concerns by experimenting with nonlinear storytelling while also working within classical Hollywood narrative and genre frameworks. Contextualizing and closely reading each of his films, this collection examines the director's play with memory, time, trauma, masculinity, and identity, and considers the function of music and video games and the effect of IMAX on his work.

Christopher Nolan's life and works are comprehensively inherited from the rich heritages of Stanley Kubrick's experimentation, Steven Spielberg's creativity, Martin Scorsese's cinematic hangover, Hitchcock's psychological tussle, Kurosawa's moral and spiritual insights, Andrei Tarkovsky's artistic framing, David Lean's grandeur, Satyajit Ray's auteur persona, yet colored with indie panache. This multidimensional book is an effort to offer a tribute and also to interpret&correlate Mr. Nolan's work to the will of sages who lived in India two millennia's ago. This novel endeavor attempts to elucidate how the authentic ancient Indian wisdom Vedanta is reiterated in the works of Nolan knowingly or unknowingly. As Bruce Wayne says, 'Batman's just a symbol', in the same way 'Yogi in Suits' is just a symbol, anybody can be a yogi, to lead a most beautiful and ecstatic life filled with timeless bliss. The book reveals a yogic approach employed by Nolan to succeed in all the aspects of life and appreciates the striking similarity between the works of Christopher Nolan and Vedanta philosophy. It proposes an idea of Yogic life to the modern world. It concludes on how the modern man could lead a blissful life with the yogic method. The most unique and beautifully designed book, a must read for those who like Chris Nolan. The book falls under the trinity of films, philosophy and self help sections.

As a director, writer, and producer, Christopher Nolan has substantially impacted contemporary cinema through avant garde films, such as Following and Memento, and his contribution to wider pop culture with his Dark Knight trilogy. His latest film, Interstellar, delivered the same visual qualities and complex, thought-provoking plotlines his audience anticipates. The Philosophy of Christopher Nolan collects sixteen essays, written by professional philosophers and film theorists, discussing themes such as self-identity and self-destruction, moral choice and moral doubt, the nature of truth and its value, whether we can trust our perceptions of what’s “real,” the political psychology of heroes and villains, and what it means to be a “viewer” of Nolan’s films. Whether his protagonists are squashing themselves like a bug, struggling to create an identity and moral purpose for themselves, suffering from their own duplicitous plots, donning a mask that both strikes fear and reveals their true nature, or having to weigh the lives of those they love against the greater good, there are no simple solutions to the questions Nolan’s films provoke; exploring these questions yields its own reward.

Essay from the year 2017 in the subject Film Science, grade: 72, University of Greenwich, course: Film Studies, language: English, abstract: Throughout this essay I explore the ways in which the memory loss of Trevor Reznik and Leonard Shelby can be seen as a symptom of guilt. Whilst it may be drawn that Trevor’s mental health is impacted by his insomnia, and Leonard’s condition is explained by the accident, the complex narratives allow various readings, through which it can be speculated that the tormented mental states of both men results in a process of self deception, of which memory loss is a key element. Throughout the films there are various “clues” in the form of flashbacks, formative techniques, and the doubling of personality which suggests their guilty conscience plays a prominent role in their amnesia. Whilst the protagonists’ lives are controlled by their inability to remember, their memory loss can be seen as a coping mechanism to shield traumatic events of their personal history from their current selves. In all, I discuss how the abnormal mental states of the protagonists can be seen as a result of psychological trauma and a guilty conscience, through which their subsequent memory loss is used in a process of deception.