Visuality and Identity in Christopher Nolan's "Memento"

Visuality and Identity in Christopher Nolan's Author: Anett Koch
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3656681252
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Communications - Movies and Television, grade: 1,3, University of Mannheim, language: English, abstract: Christopher Nolan’s film from 2000, "Memento," takes a critical look at the visually dominated world we live in and challenges traditional cinema by addressing the film’s artificiality and visuality. Memento draws attention to the sheer mass and variety of visual stimuli that surround us by playing with the use of camera, photographs, mirrors and other visual media. The focus on visuality illustrates our dependence on visual media in determining who we are, how we see the world and how we think. Memento is centered on a protagonist – Leonard Shelby – who is especially reliant on the help of visual media but does not realize how much it influences his identity. Leonard is a former insurance claims investigator who suffers from anterograde amnesia, a condition that prevents him from turning short-term memories into long-term ones. Leonard’s amnesia is the result of a head injury he received while he was trying to rescue his wife from a murderer. Thus, Leonard lives in episodes that last about 15 minutes and after each such episode he forgets everything that happened before. Being deprived of the ability to remember anything that has happened since his wife’s murder, Leonard has to come up with his own strategies to deal with everyday life. In the course of the film, the audience learns that Leonard has developed a system of visual cues to replace his memory. He even goes further and declares that his method of remembering via photographs, mind maps, tattoos and notes, is more reliable than memory itself. Leonard calls his visual cues ‘facts’ and ignores the lack of context that comes along with a memory that consists only of separate Polaroid photos, ink on his skin and a few slips of paper.

Visuality and Identity in Christopher Nolan's "Memento"

Visuality and Identity in Christopher Nolan's Author: Anett Koch
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3656681252
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Communications - Movies and Television, grade: 1,3, University of Mannheim, language: English, abstract: Christopher Nolan’s film from 2000, "Memento," takes a critical look at the visually dominated world we live in and challenges traditional cinema by addressing the film’s artificiality and visuality. Memento draws attention to the sheer mass and variety of visual stimuli that surround us by playing with the use of camera, photographs, mirrors and other visual media. The focus on visuality illustrates our dependence on visual media in determining who we are, how we see the world and how we think. Memento is centered on a protagonist – Leonard Shelby – who is especially reliant on the help of visual media but does not realize how much it influences his identity. Leonard is a former insurance claims investigator who suffers from anterograde amnesia, a condition that prevents him from turning short-term memories into long-term ones. Leonard’s amnesia is the result of a head injury he received while he was trying to rescue his wife from a murderer. Thus, Leonard lives in episodes that last about 15 minutes and after each such episode he forgets everything that happened before. Being deprived of the ability to remember anything that has happened since his wife’s murder, Leonard has to come up with his own strategies to deal with everyday life. In the course of the film, the audience learns that Leonard has developed a system of visual cues to replace his memory. He even goes further and declares that his method of remembering via photographs, mind maps, tattoos and notes, is more reliable than memory itself. Leonard calls his visual cues ‘facts’ and ignores the lack of context that comes along with a memory that consists only of separate Polaroid photos, ink on his skin and a few slips of paper.

The Philosophy of Christopher Nolan

The Philosophy of Christopher Nolan PDF Author: Jason T. Eberl
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498513530
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
As a director, writer, and producer, Christopher Nolan has substantially impacted contemporary cinema through avant garde films, such as Following and Memento, and his contribution to wider pop culture with his Dark Knight trilogy. His latest film, Interstellar, delivered the same visual qualities and complex, thought-provoking plotlines his audience anticipates. The Philosophy of Christopher Nolan collects sixteen essays, written by professional philosophers and film theorists, discussing themes such as self-identity and self-destruction, moral choice and moral doubt, the nature of truth and its value, whether we can trust our perceptions of what’s “real,” the political psychology of heroes and villains, and what it means to be a “viewer” of Nolan’s films. Whether his protagonists are squashing themselves like a bug, struggling to create an identity and moral purpose for themselves, suffering from their own duplicitous plots, donning a mask that both strikes fear and reveals their true nature, or having to weigh the lives of those they love against the greater good, there are no simple solutions to the questions Nolan’s films provoke; exploring these questions yields its own reward.

Memento

Memento PDF Author: Claire Molloy
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748637737
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
The book introduces Memento as an important independent film and uses it to explore relationships between "e;indie,"e; arthouse and commercial mainstream cinema, independent film marketing practices and online fan communities. The book also locates Memento within debates around key film studies concepts such as genre, narrative and reception.

The Philosophy of Neo-Noir

The Philosophy of Neo-Noir PDF Author: Mark T. Conard
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813172306
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Film noir is a classic genre characterized by visual elements such as tilted camera angles, skewed scene compositions, and an interplay between darkness and light. Common motifs include crime and punishment, the upheaval of traditional moral values, and a pessimistic stance on the meaning of life and on the place of humankind in the universe. Spanning the 1940s and 1950s, the classic film noir era saw the release of many of Hollywood's best-loved studies of shady characters and shadowy underworlds, including Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, Touch of Evil, and The Maltese Falcon. Neo-noir is a somewhat loosely defined genre of films produced after the classic noir era that display the visual or thematic hallmarks of the noir sensibility. The essays collected in The Philosophy of Neo-Noir explore the philosophical implications of neo-noir touchstones such as Blade Runner, Chinatown, Reservoir Dogs, Memento, and the films of the Coen brothers. Through the lens of philosophy, Mark T. Conard and the contributors examine previously obscure layers of meaning in these challenging films. The contributors also consider these neo-noir films as a means of addressing philosophical questions about guilt, redemption, the essence of human nature, and problems of knowledge, memory and identity. In the neo-noir universe, the lines between right and wrong and good and evil are blurred, and the detective and the criminal frequently mirror each other's most debilitating personality traits. The neo-noir detective—more antihero than hero—is frequently a morally compromised and spiritually shaken individual whose pursuit of a criminal masks the search for lost or unattainable aspects of the self. Conard argues that the films discussed in The Philosophy of Neo-Noir convey ambiguity, disillusionment, and disorientation more effectively than even the most iconic films of the classic noir era. Able to self-consciously draw upon noir conventions and simultaneously subvert them, neo-noir directors push beyond the earlier genre's limitations and open new paths of cinematic and philosophical exploration.

A Critical Companion to Christopher Nolan

A Critical Companion to Christopher Nolan PDF Author: Claire Parkinson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 179365252X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
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.

Imaging Identity

Imaging Identity PDF Author: Johannes Riquet
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030217744
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This volume explores the many facets and ongoing transformations of our visual identities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its chapters engage with the constitution of personal, national and cultural identities at the intersection of the verbal and the visual across a range of media. They are attentive to how the medialities and (im)materialities of modern image culture inflect our conceptions of identity, examining the cultural and political force of literature, films, online video messages, rap songs, selfies, digital algorithms, social media, computer-generated images, photojournalism and branding, among others. They also reflect on the image theories that emerged in the same time span—from early theorists such as Charles S. Peirce to twentieth-century models like those proposed by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida as well as more recent theories by Jacques Rancière, W. J. T. Mitchell and others. The contributors of Imaging Identity come from a wide range of disciplines including literary studies, media studies, art history, tourism studies and semiotics. The book will appeal to an interdisciplinary readership interested in contemporary visual culture and image theory.

The Nolan Variations

The Nolan Variations PDF Author: Tom Shone
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0525655328
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
An in-depth look at Christopher Nolan, considered to be the most profound, commercially successful director at work today, written with his full cooperation. A rare, revelatory portrait, "as close as you're ever going to get to the Escher drawing that is Christopher Nolan's remarkable brain" (Sam Mendes). In chapters structured by themes and motifs ("Time"; "Chaos"; "Dreams"), Shone offers an unprecedented intimate view of the director. Shone explores Nolan's thoughts on his influences, his vision, his enigmatic childhood past--and his movies, from plots and emotion to identity and perception, including his latest blockbuster, the action-thriller/spy-fi Tenet ("Big, brashly beautiful, grandiosely enjoyable"--Variety). Filled with the director's never-before-seen photographs, storyboards, and scene sketches, here is Nolan on the evolution of his pictures, and the writers, artists, directors, and thinkers who have inspired and informed his films. "Fabulous: intelligent, illuminating, rigorous, and highly readable. The very model of what a filmmaking study should be. Essential reading for anyone who cares about Nolan or about film for that matter."--Neal Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood and Walt Disney, The Biography

How We Use the Media

How We Use the Media PDF Author: Benjamin Krämer
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030413136
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
This volume considers strategies, modalities, and styles of media use and reception. Dynamic changes in media technology and infrastructure have spurred important changes in media use. Looking at these developments within the common conceptual framework of reception strategies, modes and styles of media use and reception, this volume is highly relevant against the background of the changing media environment. When it comes to media use and reception, communication research has mainly dealt with two much-cited questions: What do the media do with the people? What do the people do with the media? In comparison, the discipline has devoted less attention to how the media are used, the modalities, patterns or configurations of the actual practices of media use. The volume features original contributions, both empirical and theoretical, on the key concepts and approaches in the field, covering old and new media and different types of media content. Offering a comprehensive overview of existing research as well as promoting original findings and insights, the volume will be of interest to communication researchers, students, and scholars.

Under the Eye of the Clock

Under the Eye of the Clock PDF Author: Christopher Nolan
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
ISBN: 9781559705127
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Oxygen-deprived for two hours at birth, Christopher Nolan lived to write, at age twenty-one, the autobiography of his childhood, told as the story of Joseph Meehan. He wrote the book, using a "unicorn stick" attached to his head, letter by painful letter. The result is astonishingly lyrical, filled with powerful description, touching moments of triumph and humiliation, and, above all, disarming wit. It is, in the words of London's Daily Express, "a book of sheer wonder".

The Making of Memento

The Making of Memento PDF Author: James Mottram
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571279511
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
The brilliance of Christopher Nolan's ingenious thriller Memento has had moviegoers coming back for more. James Mottram now offers the fullest imaginable guide to the film's many complexities. Memento's protagonist Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) is on a mission to find the man who murdered his wife. But Leonard suffers from a rare form of amnesia, and in order to keep track of his life he must surround himself with written reminders, some etched on his own flesh . . . This invaluable guidebook steers the reader through the mysteries of the movie's making and its many possible meanings, with expert guidance from Nolan himself and his key creative collaborators.