Description
Book SynopsisA 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.
Trade ReviewParkinson and Labrouillère’s collection successfully brings incisive analyses of Nolan’s auteur status and trademarks into dialogue with productive examinations of his collaborations, influences, politics, and shifting industry positions. With chapters ranging in focus from documentary and experimental shorts, to landmark indies, and Hollywood blockbusters, A Critical Companion to Christopher Nolan is a welcome addition to contemporary film scholarship.
-- Kim Wilkins, University of Oslo
Table of ContentsSECTION 1: NARRATIVE AND TIME
Chapter 1. Precursor to the Puzzle: Narrational Strategies in Following
Warren Buckland
Chapter 2. ‘We Need Mirrors to Remind Ourselves of Who We Are’: Anamorphosis and the Singularity of Mirror Motifs in Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000)
Isabelle Labrouillère
Chapter 3. The Prestige, From Text to Screen: Transformation, Manipulation, Reflexivity
Gilles Menegaldo
Chapter 4. The Trauma Chronotype in Nolan’s Dunkirk and Inception: Time, Space and Trauma
Fran Pheasant-Kelly
Chapter 5. Back From the Future: Tenet and the Politics of Nachträglichkeit
Todd McGowan
SECTION 2: COLLABORATIONS AND RELATIONSHIPS
Chapter 6. “There’s a Point Where We Just Let the Music Take Over Everything”: The Collaboration of Christopher Nolan and Hans Zimmer”
Bernadette Pace
Chapter 7. A “Virtual Carte Blanche”: Christopher Nolan, Warner. Bros., and Authorial Power in Contemporary Hollywood
Kimberly A. Owczarski
Chapter 8. Transnational Filmmaker, Fanboy-Auteur: Screening Nolan’s Inception in China
Lara Herring
Chapter 9. Fractured Men and Cockney Boy: Michael Caine as Star Persona in the films of Christopher Nolan
Stella Hockenhull
Chapter 10. Christopher Nolan and the Quays: Curation, Fandom and the Filmmaker
Claire Parkinson
SECTION 3: POLITICS, IDEOLOGY AND GENRE
Chapter 11. Situating Christopher Nolan’s Ideological Use of Technology: Between Romanticism and Posthumanism
Ben Lamb
Chapter 12. Dark Vision, Global Impact: Christopher Nolan, Box Office Hit Patterns, and Interstellar
Peter Krämer
Chapter 13. Mementos of the Afternoon: Christopher Nolan’s Ambiguous Debt to Maya Deren
Will Brooker
Chapter 14. “Some Men Just Want to Watch the World Burn”: The Politics of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy
Gregory Frame
Chapter 15. The Experimental Short Films of Christopher Nolan
Stuart Joy
Chapter 16. Catwoman in All But Name: Gender and Adaptation in Christopher Nolan’s Selina Kyle
Miriam Kent
