Christopher Nolan Studies

An image from Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)

Film Studies For Free knows only too well that there's a time and a place for everything. Given that Christopher Nolan's Inception has just premiered to mostly great online acclaim, it is probably the right time and place for a bumper FSFF "Christopher Nolan Studies" entry (despite the fact that FSFF's author won't actually see his new film till the weekend... No spoilers, people!).

Much more than all you need to know about the online discussion of Nolan's latest film is linked to with customary wit and brevity by David Hudson. The below links, then, restrict themselves to online, openly accessible, and (pure-dead-brilliant) scholarly takes on Nolan's film work, and related matters, to date.

• Robert Avery, 'Violence as (Masculinist) Epistemic Rhetoric: the case of Memento', Masters Thesis, University of Maine, August 2004

• Christopher Bodnar, 'The Database, Logic, and Suffering: Memento and Random-Access Information Aesthetics', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7 No. 10, May 2003

• Holly Lynn Baumgartner, 'Visualizing Levinas: Existence and Existents through Mulholland Drive, Memento, and Vanilla Sky', PhD Thesis, Graduate College of Bowling Green State University, May 2005

• Jay David Bolter, 'Transference and Transparency: Digital Technology and the Remediation of Cinema', Intermédialités, n 6 automne 2005

• David Bordwell, 'Niceties: how classical filmmaking can be at once simple and precise', Observations on Film Art, March 22, 2009

• Matthew Campora, ''Review of Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema, by Allan Cameron, Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2008', Senses of Cinema, Issue 55, 2010

• Melissa Clark, 'The Space-Time Image: the Case of Bergson, Deleuze, and Memento', The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2002

• Michael Duffy, 'Batman Begins', Scope, Issue 3, November 2005

• Thomas Elsaesser, 'The Mind-Game Film' in Warren Buckland (ed), Puzzle Films (Oxford: Blackwell 2009)  

• Raoul Eshelman, 'Performatism in the Movies (1997-2003)', Anthropoetics 8, no. 2 (Fall 2002 / Winter 2003)

• Mark Fisher, 'Gothic Oedipus: subjectivity and capitalism in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins', ImageTexT, Vol. 2.2, 2006

• Domènec Font, 'In the Fabric of Time', Formats, No. 5, 2009

• Juan González Etxeberria, "Metamorphosing Words in the Cinema of the Fantastic", Comparative Literature and Culture 10.4 (2008)

• Adrian Gargett, 'Nolan's Memento, Memory, and Recognition', CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 4.3 (2002)

• Matt George, 'On Forgetting Memento', h2so4, 16, 2001

• Richard Grusin, 'Dvds, video games, and the cinema of interactions', Ilha do Desterro A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, Vol. 0, No 51 (2006)

• Davin Heckman, 'Unraveling Identity: Watching the Posthuman Bildungsroman', CTHeory.net, 2008

• Ann Heilmann, 'Doing It With Mirrors: Neo-Victorian Metatextual Magic in Affinity, The Prestige and The Illusionist', Neo-Victorian Studies, 2:2 (Winter 2009/2010) pp. 18-42

• John Ip, 'The Dark Knight's War on Terrorism', Social Science Research Network, May 2010Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Forthcoming) 

• Kathryn Muriel Kang, 'Patch and reboot in Memento', in Agnostic democracy : the decentred "I" of the 1990s, PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 2006 (for full thesis click here)

• Vicki Karaminas, 'Ubermen: Masculinity, Costume, and Meaning in Comic Book Superheroes' in Peter McNeil and Vicki Karaminas (eds), The Men's Fashion Reader, Berg, Oxford and New York, pp. 179-186 

• Vicki Karaminas, “No Capes!” Über Fashion and How “Luck Favours the Prepared”: Constructing Contemporary Superhero Identities in American Popular Culture', International Journal of Comic Art (IJOCA), vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 478-508

• Zelda G Knight, 'Monsters and Monstrous Acts: Exploring the Shadow Archetype in Batman: The Dark Knight', Inter-Disciplinary.Net, 7th Global Conference, Oxford 2009

• Lutz Koepnick , 'Photographs and Memories', South Central Review 21.1 (Spring 2004): 94–129

• Jung-In Kwon, 'Memory Simulated', Journal of Moving Image Studies, Vol. 3, 2004

• Randolph Lewis, 'The Dark Knight of American Empire', Jump Cut, No. 51, 2009

• Patrick McEntaggart, 'Once Upon a Paradigm Shift: Interactive Storytelling in a New Media Context', Inter-Disciplinary.Net, 5th Global Conference, Salzburg, March 14, 2010

• Todd McGowan, 'The Exceptional darkness of The Dark Knight', Jump Cut, 51, 2009

• Todd McGowan, 'The Violence of Creation in The Prestige', International Journal of Žižek Studies, Vol 1, No 3 (2007)

• Walter Benn Michaels, 'The Death of a Beautiful Woman: Christopher Nolan's Idea of Form', Electronic Book Review, October 2007

• John S. Nelson, 'Realism as a Political Style: Noir Insights', Poroi, 5, 2, November, 2008

• Stanley Orr, 'Connected Guys: The Reconstructed Subject of 1990s Film Noir', in Darkly perfect world : colonial adventure, postmodernism, and American noir (Ohio State University, 2010) scroll down in PDF to p. 198 

• Kimberly Ann Owczarski, 'Batman, Time Warner, and Franchise Filmmaking in the Conglomerate Era', PhD Thesis, University of Texas at Austin, May 2008

• Chris Pallant , 'Review: Mark T. Conrad, ed. (2007) The Philosophy of Neo-Noir. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010

• Brock Poulin, 'Dark time (s): non-linear narratives in the postmodern film noir', Masters Thesis, University of British Columbia, April 2005 

• Karen Renner, 'Repeat Viewings Revisited: Emotions, Memory, and Memento', Film Studies, Issue 8, Summer 2006

• Thomas Riegler, 'The “Mastermind”: Personifications of Evil in the Cinema', Inter-Disciplinary.Net, 10th Global Conference, Salzburg, March 2009

• Torben Schmidt, 'Christopher Nolan’s Memento – Analysis of the narrative structure of a noirish revenge film', Seminar: “Decadence and Modernism in Late 20th Century American Cinema, 2003

• Ilana Shiloh, 'Adaptation, Intertextuality, and the Endless Deferral of Meaning: Memento', M/C Journal, Vol. 10, Issue 2, May 2007

• Giovanni Tiso, 'Impossible Recollections: the Troubled Imaginary of Mediated Memory', PhD Thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2006

• Gary Westfahl, 'Magnificent Obsessions: A Review of The Dark Knight', Locus Online, July 28, 2008

• Gary Westfahl, 'Nolan’s Labyrinth: A Review of Inception', Locus Online, July 18, 2010

Study of a Single Film: On Robert Enrico's La rivière du hibou/An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1962)

La rivière du hibou/An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge Pt 1 (Robert Enrico, 1962)

La rivière du hibou/An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge Pt 2 (Robert Enrico, 1962)

La rivière du hibou/An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge Pt 3 (Robert Enrico, 1962)

Film Studies For Free presents one of its regular features today - a little study of a (favourite) single film: La rivière du hibou, an adaptation of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", a short story by Ambrose Bierce. This short film version of Bierce's tale was directed by Robert Enrico, produced by Marcel Ichac with Paul de Roubaix, and was released in 1963. It won the award for best short subject at the 1962 Cannes film festival and 1963 Academy Awards.

In 1964 La rivière du hibou aired on U.S. television as an episode of the anthology series The Twilight Zone (hence the framing, and opening and closing narrations in the slightly shortened version -- widely available online -- embedded above).

Partly because of its brilliance and partly because its adaptation of Bierce's classic story was so widely seen, Enrico's film has been cited as an important influence on many other cinematic experiments with subjective storytelling and "twist endings",  including recent ones by U.S. based directors such as Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, and David Lynch.

FSFF loves the sheer cinematographic inventiveness of this film and sincerely believes that all students of audiovisual storytelling could learn a lot from studying precisely how it works. To assist with this task (always best achieved by closely watching the film and analysing its techniques first), it has concocted a small but reasonably well-formed list of links to online and openly accessible studies of La rivière du hibou and related moving image texts.

• Ambrose Bierce, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", Free e-Text at Project Gutenberg, 1995

• David Auerbach, 'Occurrences at Owl Creek Bridge', Waggish, June 16, 2007
• David Auerbach, 'Occurrences at Owl Creek Bridge: Beyond the Zeroes', Waggish, August 12, 2007
• Aviva Briefel, 'What Some Ghosts Don’t Know: Spectral Incognizance and the Horror Film', Narrative, Volume 17, Number 1, January 2009, pp. 95-108
• Jonathan Eig, 'A beautiful mind(fuck): Hollywood structures of identity', from Jump Cut, Issue 46, 2003
• Don A. Habibi, 'The Magic Moment: the Liminal, Distended Time Flashforward of Ambrose Bierce',  The Ambrose Bierce Project Journal, Vol. 1, Issue 1, Fall 2005
• Don Asher Habibi, 'The experience of a lifetime: philosophical reflections on a narrative device of Ambrose Bierce', Studies in the Humanities; 12/1/2002
• Richard J. Hand, 'Reanimating Peyton Farquhar: the adaptations of Ambrose Bierce's 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" in American Radio and Television', The Ambrose Bierce Project Journal, Vol. 1, Issue 1, Fall 2005
• Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff, 'Lost Finale and the Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge Parallel', Wordsushi, May 25, 2010
• Justine Smith, 'Robert Enrico’s Civil War Trilogy based on stories by Ambrose Bierce', House of Mirth and Movies, May 11, 2010
• Alanna Thain, 'Funny How Secrets Travel: David Lynch's Lost Highway', Invisible Culture, Issue 8, 2004
• Peter Wilshire, 'Dead in the Water? Dream and Reality in Carnival of Souls: the Eternal Circle of Life and Death', Offscreen Journal, April 30, 2007

With a twist: on puzzle films, mind games, unreliable narrators, & spoilers

Latest update May 10, 2010

Image from The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999)

Film Studies For Free is a sucker for films and television dramas with a twist, and also a big fan of reading about audiovisual narrative complexity and narrational unreliability. Never one to keep its enthusiasms to itself, here's a little list of some excellent, and openly accessible, online reading of the scholarly kind on those very tricksy topics, and a lovely little short film that FSFF came across on its e-travels, too...

• Gary Bettinson, 'Effects of the dominant in Secret Window', New Review of Film and Television Studies 6:2 (August 2008)
• Robert Bird, 'Andrei Tarkovsky and Contemporary Art: Medium and Mediation', Tate Papers, Autumn 2008
  
• Lesley Brill, 'M. Night Shyamalan: A Preliminary Report', Senses of Cinema, Issue 46, 2008
• Ture Bural, 'Endland Umpire: A placement of David Lynch's Inland Empire', Perforations, 29, 2007
• Leah A.Cheyne, 'The Sixth Sense: Humanizing Horror', Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2003
• Michel Ciment, 'Kubrick and the Fantastic', (1982) The Kubrick Site, (date unknown)
• T.J. Demos, 'Moving Images of Globalization', Grey Room 37, Fall 2009, pp. 6–29 
• Jonathan Eig, 'A beautiful mind(fuck): Hollywood structures of identity', from Jump Cut, Issue 46, 2003
• Thomas Elsaesser, 'The Mind-Game Film' in Warren Buckland (ed), Puzzle Films (Oxford: Blackwell 2009)
• Thomas Elsaesser, "Performative Self-Contradictions Michael Haneke's Mind Games," in Roy Grundmann (ed), A Companion to Michael Haneke (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)
• Jim Emerson, 'Head Trips: Movies Inside the Skull', RogerEbert.com, January 1, 2005 
• Jim Emerson, 'Donnie Darko in his mind's eye (One little boy, one little man)', RogerEbert.com, November 2, 2004
  
• Jim Emerson, ''Birth' of a Buñuelian Notion', Scanners, June 15, 2006
• Jim Emerson, 'Fight Club: Punching in the Dark', RogerEbert.com, October 25, 1999
• Jim Emerson, 'Fight Club: I Am Jack's Manic-Depression', Scanners, July 22, 2008
• Domènec Font, 'In the fabric of time', Formats, No. 5, 2009 
• Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell, “Speculation on Spoilers: Lost Fandom, Narrative Consumption and Rethinking Textuality” Particip@tions Volume 4, Issue 1 (May 2007)
• Coral Houtman, 'Questions of Unreliable Narration in The Sixth Sense', Scope, November 2004
• New Kathryn Muriel Kang, 'Patch and reboot in Memento', in Agnostic democracy : the decentred "I" of the 1990s, PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 2006 (for full thesis click here)
• Jung-In Kwon, 'Memory Simulated', Journal of Moving Image Studies, Fall 2003 
• Erlend Lavik , "Changing Narratives: Five Essays on Hollywood History", PhD Thesis, University of Bergen, 2007
• Kia Lindroos, 'Non-Linear Narrative As a Form of Political Action: Viewing Chris Marker’s Film Sans Soleil', ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops, Mannheim Workshop: 'THE POLITICAL USES OF NARRATIVE' With Maureen Whitebrook and Fabrice Larat (date unknown)
• Todd McGowan, "The Violence of Creation in The Prestige", Žižek and Cinema - IJŽS Vol 1.3, 2007
• Jason Mittell, Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television", The Velvet Light Trap #58, Fall 2006 
• Laura Rascaroli, 'Scopic Drive, Time Travel and Film Spectatorship in Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys and Bigelow's Strange Days', Kinema, 15 (Spring 2001)
• Laurence A. Rickels, 'Recognition Values: Seeing The Sixth Sense Again for the First Time', Other Voices, v.2, n.2 (March 2002)
• Laura Schuster, “What does a scanner see?” Techno-fascination and unreliability in the mind-game film", Conference paper: Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberpunk and Science Fiction, Oxford, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, July 1-3, 2008
• Laura Schuster , "The Trouble with Memory: Reco(r)ding the Mind in Code 46", Conference paper: Digital Memories, Salzburg, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, March 17-19, 2009
• Aaron Smuts, 'Haunting the House from Within: Disbelief Mitigation and Spatial Experience', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 6 No. 7, April 2002
• New Aaron Smuts, 'Sympathetic spectators: Roman Polanski's Le Locataire (The Tenant, 1976)',  Kinoeye, Vol. 2, Issue 3, 2002
• Donato Totaro, 'Visual Style in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Fantastic” Trilogy, Part 1: The Long Take., Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2003
• Donato Totaro, Visual Style in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Fantastic” Trilogy, Part 2: Mise en Scène', Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2003
• Donato Totaro, 'Tokyo Sonata: Flirting with the Fantastic: Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008', Offscreen Journal,Vol . 13, Issue 5, 2009
• Dennis Tredy, 'Shadows of Shadows - Techniques of Ambiguity in Three Film Adaptations of “The Turn of the Screw”: J. Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), D. Curtis’s The Turn of the Screw (1974), and A. Aloy’s Presence of Mind (1999)', E-rea, 2.1, 2004
• Andrew V. Uroskie, 'La Jetée en Spirale: Robert Smithson’s Stratigraphic Cinema', Grey Room 19, Spring 2005, pp. 54–79

Quiet Work by Sean Martin, 2007 (also see here)

"A short film about gardens and gardening, as narrated by my Mother (an unreliable narrator!). Inspired a little by the home movie sequence in Tarkovsky's Solaris, and also the Scottish filmmaker Margaret Tait. It's in stereo. The title is from the poem by Matthew Arnold".