Conflagration, Catastrophe and Christopher Nolan (work in progress)

Conflagration, Catastrophe and Christopher Nolan

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
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30 June

Conflagration, Catastrophe and Christopher Nolan (work in progress)

Prescient conflagrations and the possibility of Earth-shattering catastrophe were foregrounded preoccupations of TENET (2020), so it seems likely that Christopher Nolan's preserved them in #Oppenheimer... pic.twitter.com/9h2LA7ElWo

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 30, 2023

Having soon recognized that Nolan's (ahem !) central conceit is part of, well, revolving his usual interest in cause and effect, the impetus to consider 'but for' (or 'what if') and how guilt arises, the idea of constructing a square of one's own became inviting.#UCFF offers... pic.twitter.com/Ek8f3CWoCQ

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 1, 2023

² From Wiki :

The word AREPO is a 'hapax legomenon' (i.e. it appears nowhere else in Latin literature).

Some academics believe it is likely a proper name or potentially a theophoric name, that was adapted from a non-Latin word or was invented specifically for the Sator square.

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 1, 2023

All 'the best' word-squares, so #UCFF is told, rely on using trade-names and the like... pic.twitter.com/rSR4ffv4bA

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 26, 2023

More to come...




















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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

TENET (2020) Reloaded : Is Nolan's film a full-on Blakeian prophecy - so impenetrable that we miss the light between the trees ?

TENET (2020) Reloaded : Is Nolan's film a full-on, so impenetrable, Blakeian prophecy... ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
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2 November

TENET (2020) Reloaded : Is Nolan's film a full-on Blakeian prophecy - so impenetrable that we miss the light between the trees ?

'For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction'

- head on meets -

'Do not say

'"I will do to him as he has done to me ; I will pay the man back for what he has done"' pic.twitter.com/wmW7H8fPCg

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 1, 2022

It's 'intriguing' that The Telegraph appears, um, to be making literal capital from alleging - in the shock-tactic mode of 'revealing' stuff *and* a nick-name ! - summat to do with flights by the European Commission's President :https://t.co/VEQS56oFDr#KatharinaBlumWasNoLie !

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 3, 2021

It's intriguing, because *this* - which anyone could have said, any time [as it didn't really need a Werner Tötges on the case] - is apparently 'revealed' hypocrisy, but cute little #Shove, etc. or even banker Mirage are fine ? :https://t.co/LDLMatExbIhttps://t.co/osT5G0cs1T

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 3, 2021

Yes - we saw Biden with eyes closed. But we only saw Johnson animated.

— Dominic Minghella (@DMinghella) November 2, 2021

Other way around ?

His interests are only their interests, as that rag-doll of a puppy-idiot suits them as well as it suits him, and make him 'happy' and 'fun' :

If we mistake cause for effect, we miss that it's pretty Nietzschean [Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ ?].

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 3, 2021

Musing, as I am now (a year on frm Tenet (2020)), and finally seeing much that Nolan submerged in it (a good film ?) - with his use of the palindrome in the Sator / Rotas word-square, and with Sator (played by Branagh), pressing a button à la Strangelove to end all Strangeloves : https://t.co/RBPk3JPree

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 3, 2021

As with Brecht's Arturo Ui, or Frisch in Biedermann und die Brandstifter (and the latter's chilling Epilogue, from the 1960 revision), it's working that saying about history as a reversal of time (and referencing Cher's song in writing my response) :

* https://t.co/5eTfbZMhq1. pic.twitter.com/5sdNgKnQJL

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 3, 2021

yeah, but back then it was THE ONLY FILM

— Anton Bitel (@AntBit) September 11, 2022

I really meant 'Sator / Rotas word-square', as - looking into it* - it seems that it had 'started its life' / had predecessor versions in which 'Rotas' was the first line (and 'Sator' the last), not vice versa.

Of interest to 'Paul is dead' theorists ?

* Albeit not minutely... pic.twitter.com/mHhCPZqIrx

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 11, 2022

I don't think that Schrader means it that way anyway / either way ?

Kill Bill Vol. 1 would be far, far worse for patients' sense of well-being, etc. !#ComaScene

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 11, 2022

Ah, but Schrader was in hospital, and Tenet's run-time is c. 2½h ?

I have :

(a) Re-thought it loads since my review in 2020,

(b) Read the screenplay [first spotted at NFT shop¹], and

(c) Re-watched it.

¹ I didn't need or want to pay a x2½ uplift on cover-price (= £25²) !

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 11, 2022

² No least as, where one would expect to find cast, crew and technical info (which IMDb often does so poorly), there's none - instead, it's bulked out with storyboards, fitted two per page in a portrait page-format, when, if included at all, they need landscape and one per page.

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 11, 2022

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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

I'd give them all to you : #UCFF on Christopher Nolan in TENET (2020) (work in progress)

I'd give them all to you : #UCFF on Christopher Nolan in TENET (2020) (work in progress)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October) (Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

21 September

I'd give them all to you : #UCFF on Christopher Nolan in TENET (2020) (work in progress)

Tenet. n. A belief by which one lives, or which guides one's thinking

Prelude :

If I can't have x, no one else will

Whether expressed in the proverbial form of Dog in the manger, or, from military tactics, Burning one's bridges [behind one], or even - back to proverbial language, if more colourfully - Cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, none of it is far removed from the stuff of legend, literature, or works for the opera-house or cinema, because it is, or can be, a human impulse.

Darren Aronofsky might thinly disguise rooting a film in such soil, whereas Christopher Nolan constructs yet another maze around it, so that we do not immediately perceive what is at its centre, and does so with enough brash stage-business of spectacle built around it (detonation, collision or combustion) that he broadly keeps our attention from wandering back to it.

The main event :

Christopher Nolan's Tenet could be seen as a mass of red herrings - or, if one prefers, a couple of diamonds (maybe more ?) in the dust :

What we least need to know, or to follow the ins and outs of it (as the general direction suffices), he gives us by darting around, from country to country, in the style of (early) Bond films (except that there is no (rigged) game of Vingt-et-un, poker or Baccarat in sight).

Lacking any other name than in the credits, The Protagonist (John David Washington) is principled, but he is not answerable to an M, or armed by a Q, etc., etc., and so has only the crudest notion overall what he is trying to do - such that he makes errors. [In this, he resembles a less humorous take on Frank Capra's earnest Clarence (Henry Travers)]. However, whether it be a Connery or a Moore, Washington has and employs the charm and bluff of a Bond, and also has the resourceful Neil (Robert Pattinson) as his running-mate* (as well as a few other assistants).

A centuries-old 20-sided die might have been used for divination—or ancient tabletop games.https://t.co/7qRtvCk2BT

— History In Pictures (@HistoryInPics) September 24, 2020

Even if Tenet were to feel as if it needs to re-watched for something that one missed, one is as likely to gain very little new (and only benefit the film's box-office figures) - or not to be able to concentrate sufficiently to glean whatever was thought important. Whether it is what happens here, or Cobb (Leonardo Di Caprio), trying to change Fischer's (Cillian Murphy's) mind undetected in Inception (2010), the basic thrust can be easily enough perceived, although doing so is despite all the elements of distraction.

For example, neither Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), nor Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), narrates an incident in their past without our being fed visual snippets, which, by being intermittent**, only serve to stop us weighing the truth of what they say. (Except that, although it is not obviously going to be so, we prove to have no reason to doubt what is said, and it seems that Nolan just wanted to embed the images ?)

* Which Monzón co-adapted with Jorge Guerricaechevarría from a novel by Francisco Pérez Gandul.

[Seen at, and because of, @camfilmfest]

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 22, 2020

You're so right, yes. :)

My belief is that an exec or three reeled it back to 150 mins, thereby saving us from the Wagnerian grandiosity for which Nolan had contended :

Pre-show

100 mins

Interval 1 - Tenet-themed drinks

130 mins

Interval 2 - Tenet-themed merch

115 mins

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 20, 2021

'It would be fair to say that Kenneth Branagh makes a decent villain - he seems to enjoy hamming it up as a Russian crime lord who despises everyone'

Seconded, @everyfilmneil ! :)

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 21, 2020

Christoper Nolan learnt many of his tricks from this film - seriously ! https://t.co/GFm1CxXM1h

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 8, 2020

My usual one for this: Interstellar is nonsense. Nolan’s worst tendencies dialled up to 11, obfuscated by one or two great moments. https://t.co/nm9gBy16x9

— Jim Ross 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🎞️ (@JimGR) September 27, 2020

Can't get away from Caine, Jim - he's in Tenet* (2020), as he was in Inception (2010)...

But God knows, in the former, what he's meant to have ordered for lunch in his London club ! ;)

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 27, 2020

[...]


By the end of the film proper [not the coda that deals with a couple of loose ends], we will have no more idea why (if we were to stop to think and ask) :

* Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), any more than any mother would (Aronofsky's entrée), obsesses about her son to the extent of enquiring, somewhat idiotically in context, Not even my son ?

* The Protagonist (John David Washington) cares about her and her son's freedom and survival, to an extent that is, very often, beyond the point of what we can judge reason dictates

* He is, for so long, so much on his own, and, with only some information, skills in bluffing and fight, he is out on a limb, albeit with trusted personnel, given what he is trying to do


Only on the level of the similar anonymity and agency of a Pertwee, where a Nicholas Courtney (Lethbridge-Stewart) provides the (usually meagre, but sufficient) fire-power towards the end, or of Baker, realizing, with clues from conveniently available allies, what is at stake, and, with their assistance, defeating The Master (or some other nemesis), does Tenet pretend to cohere : the answers to what, as set out, we do not know, and will only know extrinsically, may and should matter, but they have been subjugated to the overall arc, whose matters of import (hidden in all the pseudo-technical 'huff and puff') are themselves a tiny fraction of what we see in 150 minutes.

For a headlong dash into the stuff of an unseen world, the comparison of G. K. Chesterton's 'Nightmare' The Man who was Thursday (1908) is worth making.

Obsessed with the guitar-playing on 'Queen Jane' by @msimpsonian at the momenthttps://t.co/lSVLg9ZVAW
hard to believe it's one person playing

As with many folk songs it's a horrible story, but a beautiful song...

— Ian Ross (LSHTM) (@IanRossUK) September 22, 2020

Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady (1996), also ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 22, 2020

Postlude (NB Spoiler alert) :

And, there was love in Interstellar... another form that can transcend time.

— Dr Hiu Man Chan (@H_onfilm) October 3, 2020

It's the central element in a film (which elsewhere doesn't make sense), on or to which much is pinned, but lesser things are far more spelt out :

At face value, The Protagonist, after Crosby (Michael Caine) tells him about Kat's husband (Andrei Sator), contrives meeting her...

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 3, 2020

It's really ludicrous (as Tweeted) - unless this Kat, saving whom seems inexplicably at the forefront of The Protagonist's mind, is meant to be some sort of Madonna figure ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 3, 2021

Yes, FP was brilliant in Little Women (2019), but had a difficult role to work with in Nolan's film, which (not uniquely for his canon*) is heavy with male actors.

* Might TENET be an exception that proves the rule ?

Mal and Ariadne are pivotal in Inception, yet how central ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 4, 2024

End-notes :

* Much as Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Arthur) is to Leonardo DiCaprio (Cobb) in Inception (2010).

** Versus pure narration, or PoV that takes us through the whole of what is told.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Plotting to have Christopher Nolan make a rom-com next...

Plotting to have Christopher Nolan make a rom-com next... But who plants the seed ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
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26 August

Plotting to have Christopher Nolan make a rom-com next... But who plants the seed ?

Which is Christopher Nolan going to be riffing on more :

Sliding Doors (1998) - or the Lynch of The Lost Highway (1997) or Mulholland Drive (2001) ?

Meanwhile, #UCFF is using considerable stealth to implant the idea that Nolan should make 'a rom-com' :https://t.co/LZbUQBk5Wn https://t.co/lirgX9vpkc

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 28, 2020

Nolan heard it from Lilly first* : Chris, are you really writing a rom-com ?

Signed, as long as it's not in the vein of Richard Curtis in About Time (2013) ! ;)

But maybe making Nikolai Leskov's 'Lady Macbeth' into a comedy, told from the PoV of the cat (dreamt of in chapters 6 and 7) - and channelling Zinovy Ismailov's much-overlooked witticisms ?

->

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 26, 2020

This is a far more detailed script treatment than I expected, so you've basically just been greenlit.

— Sarah Parkin (@SarahParkin1) August 26, 2020

Signed, sealed and delivered* :)

'Uncork the champagne, Violet !'

* In accordance with s. 1 Law of Property (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1989. pic.twitter.com/CcXMB1yoNT

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 26, 2020

Cypher : It means fasten your seat-belt, Dorothy, cos Kansas is going bye-bye !

End-notes :

* Or was it Lana... ?


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My tenet is... : #UCFF's Predictions about Tenet (2020)

My tenet is... : #UCFF's Predictions about Tenet (2020)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
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26 August

My tenet is... : #UCFF's Predictions about Tenet (2020)

Surely, all indications are that you should first have undertaken a theatrical ('tenth-anniversary') re-watch of Inception (2010) ? :

Meanwhile, David Lynch almost certainly did, both in The Lost Highway (1997), and then in Mulholland Drive (2001), what Nolan's aiming at here...

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 26, 2020

I know :)

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 26, 2020

I don't think I got any more "story" from it than from the trailer I've now seen about 14 times in the last 3 weeks.

— Fenchurch S Goldfish (@Fenny_Goldfish) August 26, 2020

And, as the three others in the screening may also may not have been told to expect it (but the couple seemed intent on talking through it anyway), I believe that I went off to get a drink and walked in on it partway through (thinking that the film had started early).

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 26, 2020

Especially interesting, having re-watched Bound (1997) last night (on account of @cheshellen's talk 'How to be a femme fatale' on Monday evening), and the 'idea-seeding' of The Wachowskis

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 26, 2020

Which is Christopher Nolan going to be riffing on more :

Sliding Doors (1998) - or the Lynch of The Lost Highway (1997) or Mulholland Drive (2001) ?

Meanwhile, #UCFF is using considerable stealth to implant the idea that Nolan should make 'a rom-com' :https://t.co/LZbUQBk5Wn https://t.co/lirgX9vpkc

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 28, 2020

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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Christopher Nolan and the non-poetics of Inception (2010)

Christopher Nolan and the non-poetics of Inception (2010)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
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12 August

Christopher Nolan and the non-poetics of Inception (2010)

We need look no farther than Andrei Tarkovsky - in Solaris (1972), Mirror (Зеркало [Zerkalo]) (1975), Stalker (1979) - to be shown dazzling profundity in simplicity.

NB Spoilers in the Tweets immediately below !

Absent - even according to what *Cobb* says happened - sabotaging one's wife's happiness for one's own ?

Here, and in Interstellar (2014), there is (somewhat laboured) rumination on being a father who is no longer present to his child(ren)*.

* Boyhood (2014) does it better...

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 4, 2020

But we were ever here before, with the Bernard Williams of 'The Makropulos Case : Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality'*, Leoš Janáček, and all their avators, reflected in and by Borges (https://t.co/H0mizrm3H6) :)

* Problems of the Self (CUP [https://t.co/pLwZJBgHMj]). pic.twitter.com/rLaxTeehOX

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 4, 2020

Dædalus proper :

In Inception (2010), dreams - and their putatively calculably different rates of passing (as premise) - are only ever a proxy for the effluxion of time, and, with it, the effacement or extinction of 'memory' [sc. memories] ~ Philip French

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 10, 2020

By contrast with Tarkovsky (whose films are alluded to under the title), one of the premises of Inception (2010) - stated when Cobb is telling Ariadne* why he needs her to design a certain type of maze (and, rather obviously, Cobb / Nolan is all along really referring as much to cinema) - is that its complexity serves to conceal the fact that a dream-world has been fabricated, not dreamt per se.

Nolan only ever means cinema when Cobb tells Ariadne that designing a maze can hide a dream :

A chance to see a tenth-anniversary screening of Inception (2010), which few took up (I was one in an audience of four), might not suggest that seeing the trailer will draw people in ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 22, 2020

Angel Song from 2011 Xmas Show https://t.co/CXixpTjNO6 via @YouTube

— ezio lunedei (@eziolunedei) November 20, 2020

[...]

Set-up : Contact (1997) ?

Planet 1 (Miller's) : Waves / surf

Planet 2 (Mann's) : Frozen / ice

Black hole (Gargantua) : Tesseract / bookcase

Planet 3 (Edmunds') : Habitable

+ Plans A and B

'Computer, map onto Inception (2010) and spot significant differences !' pic.twitter.com/CnC0nFvCGq

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 31, 2020

End-notes :

* Of all people, given the signification of her name !



Nota bene - Level -8
Appendix of spoilery stuff ! :

Wild how many thinkpieces still go over Inception, in particular the ending. It doesn’t matter if Cobb is in a dream at the end. What matters is that he walks away from the spinning top towards his kids - *he* doesn’t care whether he is or not. If there is a point, that’s it.

— Jim Ross 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🎞️ (@JimGR) February 17, 2021

Wild how many thinkpieces still go over Inception, in particular the ending. It doesn’t matter if Cobb is in a dream at the end. What matters is that he walks away from the spinning top towards his kids - *he* doesn’t care whether he is or not. If there is a point, that’s it.

— Jim Ross 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🎞️ (@JimGR) February 17, 2021

We don't even *know* where 'this spinner' came from, except that Cobb** - in explication to Ariadne (i.e. to us) of what it's for - baldly contradicts his own advice and tells her it was Mal's.

** And Cobb, as in cobweb, is a spinner of webs (probably rooted in Le Guin's Cob).

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 17, 2021

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