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 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.

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.

This analysis of the role of fiction in the films of Christopher Nolan is “unassumingly brilliant and surgically incisive” (Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society). From Memento and Insomnia to the Batman films, The Prestige, and Inception, lies play a central role in every Christopher Nolan film. Characters in the films constantly find themselves deceived by others and are often caught up in a vast web of deceit that transcends any individual lies. The formal structure of a typical Nolan film deceives spectators about the events that occur and the motivations of the characters. While Nolan’s films do not abandon the idea of truth altogether, they show us how truth must emerge out of the lie if it is not to lead us entirely astray. The Fictional Christopher Nolan discovers in Nolan’s films an exploration of the role that fiction plays in leading to truth. Through close readings of all the films through Inception, Todd McGowan demonstrates that the fiction or the lie comes before the truth, and this priority forces us to reassess our ways of thinking about the nature of truth. Indeed, McGowan argues that Nolan’s films reveal the ethical and political importance of creating fictions and even of lying. Nolan is the first filmmaker to devote himself entirely to the fictionality of the medium, and McGowan discloses how Nolan uses its tendency to deceive as the basis for a new kind of philosophical filmmaking, aligning Nolan’s films with Hegel’s philosophy. “The most important work to date on Christopher Nolan. . . . [A] thrill to read.” —Hugh S. Manon, Associate Professor and Director of Screen Studies, Clark University

An engaging and in-depth examination of the work of Christopher Nolan, one of the most revered directors working in modern cinema. Best known for his cerebral, often nonlinear, storytelling, over the course of 15 years of filmmaking, Nolan has gone from low-budget independent films to working on some of the biggest blockbusters ever made.

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.

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject Film Science, grade: 1,3, University of Münster, language: English, abstract: In my term paper, I will examine the narrative structure in “Memento“ which switches between chronological narration and reversed temporality. With respect to this unique narrative structure, I will take a closer look at the black-and-white and colour sequences, the opening sequence and the outstanding and resolvent scene 22/A, especially regarding the cinematography used. In the further course of my work, you will learn of the essential role of the unreliable narrator regarding my thesis and finally what impact the fabula construction in “Memento” has on his viewers. „Causes and their effects are basic to narrative, but they take place in time“. This quotation from Bordwell’s and Thompson’s work Film Art, an Introduction does not only show a fundamental principle of narration but furthermore depicts a possibility to manipulate the spectator’s understanding of a story. Christopher Nolan’s “Memento” is one example of what a complex narration can be. The film shows two separate stories of Leonard, an ex-insurance investigator who suffers anterograde amnesia and attempts to find the murderer of his wife, which is the last thing he can remember. On the one hand there is a forward moving storyline, the black-and-white scenes while the other one, the colour sequences, tells the story backwards. Although the story behind the film is rather simple, the narrative structure is extremely complex and clever, which demands constant attention from its spectators. This term paper will deal with the methods used in “Memento” which mislead the audience’s understanding of the story. My thesis is therefore: Narrative complexity in Christopher Nolan’s “Memento” – Narrative structure, Narrator’s unreliability, fabula construction and cinematography as key elements for the spectator’s manipulation. Apart from the film “Memento”, the central literature I will work with is the essay by Stefano Ghislotti “Narrative Comprehension Made Difficult: Film, Form and Mnemonic Devices in ‘Memento’”, the documentary “Anatomy of a Scene” about the making of “Memento”, a text by Andy Klein named "Everything You Wanted to Know about ‘Memento’” and different filmic narrativity by Jakob Lothe, David Herman and Edward Branigan. In addition to that, there is a self-generated sequence analysis attached to the term paper in order to have an overall view of the scenes I take a closer look at.