A Critical Companion to Christopher Nolan

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.

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.

SECTION 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