Visuality and Identity in Christopher Nolan's "Memento" PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Visuality and Identity in Christopher Nolan's "Memento" PDF full book. Access full book title Visuality and Identity in Christopher Nolan's "Memento" by Anett Koch. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Anett Koch Publisher: GRIN Verlag ISBN: 3656681252 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 33
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.
Author: Anett Koch Publisher: GRIN Verlag ISBN: 3656681252 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 33
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.
Author: Andrew Kania Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135974985 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 209
Book Description
Within a short space of time, the film Memento has already been hailed as a modern classic. Memorably narrated in reverse, from the perspective of Leonard Shelby, the film’s central character, it follows Leonard’s chaotic and visceral quest to discover the identity of his wife’s killer and avenge her murder, despite his inability to form new long-term memories. This is the first book to explore and address the myriad philosophical questions raised by the film, concerning personal identity, free will, memory, knowledge, and action. It also explores problems in aesthetics raised by the film through its narrative structure, ontology, and genre. Beginning with a helpful introduction that places the film in context and maps out its complex structure, specially commissioned chapters examine the following topics: memory, emotion, and self-consciousness agency, free will, and responsibility personal identity narrative and popular cinema the film genre of neo-noir Memento and multimedia Including annotated further reading at the end of each chapter, Memento is essential reading for students interested in philosophy and film studies.
Author: Claire Molloy Publisher: Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 0748637737 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 144
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.
Author: Christopher Nolan Publisher: Macmillan ISBN: 0571210473 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 243
Book Description
"This volume includes both screenplays, plus an interview with Christopher Nolan and Jeremy Theobald ... about the the making of Following, and a piece by Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan Nolan, author of the story on which Memento was based, in which they recall the conception of the film"--P. [4] of cover.
Author: Torben Schmidt Publisher: GRIN Verlag ISBN: 3638183882 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 28
Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Other, grade: 1 (A), University of Frankfurt (Main) (Institute for England and American Studies), course: Decadenca and Modernism in Late 20th Century Cinema, 36 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Christopher Nolan’s low budget film Memento (2000), which is based on the concept of a short story named Memento Mori written by Nolan’s brother Jonathan, was certainly one of the most successful films in the United States in 2000. In most cinemas it was shown for more than 15 weeks in the summer season – the most competitive season of the year. While the success of many modern Hollywood films is a result of “money, hype and more money”, Memento “represents a triumph of writing, directing, and performance” (Klein 2001). This film belongs to the so called neo-noir and revenge-film genre. In this paper these two genres will first of all be described in detail. Afterwards, the plot and the narrative structure of Memento – which is extremely complex, clever and demands intelligence and constant attention from its spectators – will be discussed.
Author: Jason T. Eberl Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 1498513530 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 244
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.
Author: Stuart Joy Publisher: ISBN: 9783656318415 Category : Languages : en Pages : 76
Book Description
Master's Thesis from the year 2009 in the subject Film Science, grade: none, - (Southampton Solent University), course: Film Studies, language: English, abstract: In spite of the diversity of Christopher Nolan's body of work, the director's experience of time, memory and identity has perhaps remained an integral part of his filmmaking. From Following (Christopher Nolan, 1998) to The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008) his films are debatably rooted in a cinematic experiment to interrogate the construction of time and the malleable nature of memory and identity. It is this examination of time and identity that unites the wide range of Nolan's work. Indeed, in many respects Nolan has arguably sought to develop a filmic language that concretely resembles the abstract structures of memory function and systems of identity. With this in mind, this thesis examines the representations of time, memory and identity in Nolan's films in order to attain an understanding of identity in contemporary cinema and thought. The paper will consider the reflexive strategies and implications behind Nolan's obsession with identity, not only in terms of his body of work but more importantly, in terms of what it can reveal about cinema's own relationship to issues of identity. More specifically, I contend that the insights of scientific, psychological and sociological literature on identity and memory as well as those of contemporary filmmaking are engaged in communicating the complex relationships amongst memory, identity and post-modernity. To pursue this thesis, the text will analyse a number of Nolan's films such as Memento, (Christopher Nolan, 2000) Insomnia, (Christopher Nolan, 2002) and The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006) utilising close textual analysis to inform my arguments where appropriate as well as using substantial theoretical underpinning to justify my assertions.
Author: Jacqueline Furby Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 023185076X Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 561
Book Description
Over the past fifteen years, writer, producer and director Christopher Nolan has emerged from the margins of independent British cinema to become one of the most commercially successful directors in Hollywood. From Following (1998) to Interstellar (2014), Christopher Nolan's films explore philosophical concerns by experimenting with nonlinear storytelling while also working within classical Hollywood narrative and genre frameworks. Contextualizing and closely reading each of his films, this collection examines the director's play with memory, time, trauma, masculinity, and identity, and considers the function of music and video games and the effect of IMAX on his work.
Author: Johannes Riquet Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3030217744 Category : Photography Languages : en Pages : 336
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.
Author: Mark T. Conard Publisher: University Press of Kentucky ISBN: 0813172306 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 222
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.
Author: Anett Koch
Author: Anett Koch
Author: Andrew Kania
Author: Claire Molloy
Author: Christopher Nolan
Author: Torben Schmidt
Author: Jason T. Eberl
Author: Stuart Joy
Author: Jacqueline Furby
Author: Johannes Riquet
Author: Mark T. Conard