Christopher Nolan Auteur Theory

Michael Bergonzi
Mr. Shafer Film as Literature
18 December 2008
Christopher Nolan: Director or Something More Director Christopher Nolan has made a total of six feature films, including the ever popular Memento (2000) and The Dark Knight (2008). People who are merely fans say that he is an auteur. Film majors, however, disagree and believe that he doesn’t have enough movies out and that he is just good in relation to box office results and should not be considered an auteur. I have to disagree with the people who say Nolan is not an auteur. The Auteur theory states that when a director has reached a level where he, or she, has a “stamp” on all his films, he is considered an auteur. The road a director must take is to have his, or
her, personal vision, style and thematic obsession imprinted in all their films. Christopher Nolan fits the bill in all these realms of auteurship. Another definition of the auteur theory is “whoever controls the mise en scene is an auteur. This person is also known as the “metteur en scene” which means person who controls the mise en scene. I can see why people think he is not an auteur, only because he was the screenwriter and producer for a lot of films he directed. Citizen Kane, one of the greatest masterpieces in the realm of cinema ever, you probably heard that it was directed, written and starred Orson Welles. Mr. Welles is, without a doubt, an auteur. So why do people assume that Nolan is not an auteur? In order to see his auteurship you have to, like a lot of his movies, think outside of the box, because almost everything great in the world isn’t that easy to find in the first place. Memento, The Prestige and The Dark Knight are all great films, not just because of the box office results, but because of the direction that Nolan took in the cinematic, dramatic and literary realms of those films. The unique qualities that make Nolan an auteur are that, for most of his movies: the stories are told in reverse. With the exception of Insomnia which he didn’t write, his ability to put you into a perplexing and mysterious characters head, his opening shots are almost always showing a person’s hand holding an item of importance, his use of very little to no Computer generated images (CGI) The Film Memento isn’t the type of film that has a definite answer. The movie is actual one big interpretive question. The basic question on everyone’s mind is what goes on in the movie? Since the story is told backwards and is about a man, Leonard Shelby (played by Guy Pearce) who suffers from a memory disorder. Nolan and Guy’s character state, “It’s not amnesia.” This makes the movie even more questionable than it is because the audience is given another factor of confusion that is: can this character be trusted. The reason Memento is considered one of the best films of 2000 is not only because of the plot, but do to the way each character was portrayed, by the use of camera shots and angles. The Film has 42 scenes total, which can be broken down into 22 color scenes and 22 black and white scenes (Timms). The color scenes are, plot wise, shown backwards and the black and white scenes move the plot forward. They eventually meet at the end of the film when the black and white dissolves into color. Other cinematic aspects of the film are how the camera always has Leonard Shelby in the center of the frame. The audience can then decipher that he is the protagonist, even if there was no sound. Tying in this movie to Christopher Nolan’s auteurship, many of his fans believe that this movie, along with Following (1998) were some of the Films that gave a rebirth to the film noir genre. The Prestige is a movie, like Memento, that is told through flashback (Though not as confusing as Memento in the way it tells the story). The theme of the story, to most people, is the concept of rivalry and how there is never a clear-cut winner because someone always dies. One could tell you the ending of the movie, but most of the time people are just confused. This is one of those movies that has to be seen from start to finish in order understanding and even then it’s no guarantee that you will. The ending of The Prestige is unique, in that it is a deus ex machina ending. The last line of dialogue between Alfred and Danton is used discussing the “Transported man” illusion and how it was performed. Each person had a different method on performing the trick. Alfred’s method was that he had a twin. Danton’s method was through the use of science and cloning himself. They both claim that they made sacrifices to get where they were today. There are a lot of metaphors of deception in this movie. Such a metaphor is the reoccurring imagery of a red rubber ball, which Alfred always has in his possession. The ball can be seen a motif of Alfred’s playful nature. “He is a great magician, but a terrible showman. He doesn’t know how to dress it up” (Nolan). The last line of Alfred before he dies is “are you watching closely” which he had said to a jail guard previously in the film. In its original context Alfred said he would say that line, “a magic word or two” (Christian Bale). Right as Alfred Borden is hanged the red rubber ball is dropped and the scene changes to Danton and the cloning machine made by Nikola Tesla. Danton gets shot and they have a long discussion about the sacrifices they made. “Every magic trick consists of three parts, the pledge, the turn and the prestige” (Nolan). That line is repeated throughout the film in order to inform the viewer of the importance of the third act, The Prestige, The blockbuster hit of 2008 would have to be The Dark Knight.
The Dark Knight isn’t just your average super hero film. It’s a crime drama where batman actually has to solve a crime and stop the bad guy. “Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is a haunting film that leaps beyond it’s origins becomes an engrossing tragedy… because of he direction, because of the writing… this film, and to a lesser degree, Iron Man redefine the possibilities of the comic book movie” (Roger Ebert). Roger Ebert gave The Dark Knight a four star rating. The story of this movie, and the comic book in a sense, has a lot of origins from film noir. In this movie batman is on the borderline between hero and vigilante. The Joker (played by the late Heath Ledger) is a “Mephistopheles whose actions are fiendishly designed to pose moral dilemmas for his enemies” (Ebert). In a sense the world of Gotham City is grey rather then black and white. There is one particular scene that, in my opinion has more mise en scene then other parts of the movie. The scene is early in the film and makes sense if you have seen the end, or read the comics. The scene where Jim Gordon (played by Gary Oldman) is talking to Harvey Dent (played by Aaron Eckhart) about meeting Batman (played by Christian Bale) the camera shots of the two in the district attorney’s office give a foreshadowing essence, when you add actual dialogue. When Jim enters the office of Harvey dent the camera tracks Gordon and dent revealing dent’s office. Dent’s office is, in my opinion, somewhat cluttered. There are papers all over his desk and over flowing paper files on the shelf. Seeing the end of the movie a person might think of this scene as cinematic foreshadowing because it shows just how “disorganized” Harvey Dent is early on in the movie. Another mise en scene moment is the background behind Dent’s head. Behind his head there is a glass window that, in most cases, symbolizes an open mind that is open to interpretation. Combining
this element with the office of dent and the viewer gets a suspicious feeling, though not completely believable to them, about Dent’s true nature and how he can stay on the line between good and evil. One of Harvey’s last lines of the movie is when he talking to batman after becoming the infamous two face and says “you thought we could be decent men, in an indecent time. You were wrong. The only morality in a cruel world is chance, unbiased, unprejudiced, fair.” (Christopher and Jonathan Nolan) The background used for Jim Gordon, in the scene set at Dent’s office, is a bookshelf full of books representing knowledge. This movie is a great example of what a director can do when using cinematic techniques to portray a literary world. “I think people's capacity to absorb a fractured mise-en-scene is extraordinary now compared to forty years ago” (Nolan). That quote by Christopher Nolan is what makes him a unique auteur. The rationalism behind this idea of a “fractured mise-en-scene” tells us how the mise en scene doesn’t have to be out in the open and easy to spot. That idea can be used to sum up most, if not all, films directed by Nolan.