![]() ![]() ![]() His confidence and competence in this regard is crucial to ensuring that the audience is free to follow what might be a very complicated concept and concentrate instead on the ever more complex plot machinations. With Inception Nolan spends the first hour setting up the premise of having the characters simultaneously occupy multiple levels of dream space which then allows him to play out all of these together using this technique. ![]() The Prestige sits somewhat outside of this theme but also shares similarities with Inception in its playing with the dichotomy between perception and reality.Ĭhristopher Nolan does a few things very well in terms of his deployment of certain aspects of film grammar and technique, particularly cross cutting. Even Nolan’s Batman films are, at their core, concerned with creating a representation of the psychological state of someone who we can believe would turn himself into a vigilante and dress up as a bat. Insomnia explores the affects of extreme sleep deprivation as its lead character struggles to function in a state in which he is never fully awake or asleep, throwing into question his ability to interpret events accurately or remember them fully. Memento’s narrative structure is built around the short term memory limitations of its protagonist. It is filmmaking on a huge scale with the very best production values of modern Hollywood which takes as its subject matter the interrogation of dreams and whose emotional narrative (as opposed to the functional narrative about corporate espionage) is essentially the working through of the psychoanalytic process.įor a filmmaker within the Hollywood system, Christopher Nolan is unusually pre-occupied with psychological human states to the degree that they often act as the primary theme of his films. This then creates an interesting three way relationship between film, dreams and psychoanalysis with the latter having been among the most dominant forces in film theory and criticism for the past few decades.Ĭhristopher Nolan’s Inception manifests and coalesces these three things. Freud famously described them as being “the royal road to the unconscious”. What is A Clockwork Orange but an audacious dream adventure insidiously combining nightmare and wish fulfilment? ĭreams are also of particular importance in psychoanalytic thought. To be sure, the dream component of the movie experience is augmented by the special qualities of the medium, but the primary emotional hook originates in the evocation of the dream… The best directors – Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, and others – seem to me to recognize the essentially dreamlike character of the movie world, and they trade upon it in their films. The impact of movies stems, then, at least in part, from the primal power of the dream. It is a rare individual who is not fascinated by his own dreams, with their raw ability to reveal, their magical expressiveness, movies partake in this fascination. Moreover, they improve upon our dream life. Movies thus tap into the dreaming aspect of human nature. In the cinema we relive the life of the dreaming self. Movies delve into our dreaming self, that submerged and seething alter ego that emerges when the sun goes down. By Leon Saunders Calvert Volume 15, Issue 5 / May 2011 13 minutes (3038 words)Ĭolin McGinn has written extensively and compellingly about the similarities between film watching and dreaming (192-3, 202-3): ![]()
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