| Christopher Nolan (born in London, England,1970), is an English film director, screenwriter and producer. As an Anglo-American hybrid, Christopher Nolan grew up by the influence of the British culture and the American culture from childhood. When he was very young, Christopher Nolan has had a dream of making movie. However, the disability of innate color blindness prevents him from plastic arts of the movie. So he spent all of his effects and force on the time arts of the movie. Now Christopher Nolan has become a great master in the literature and the film arts. On the debut "Following" in1998, Nolan introduces a brand new time playing method, which plays a governing role in the film art from then on. The "Memento" in2000is Nolan’s masterpiece and he is famous for the film since then. The film’s narrative structure runs in reverse with an interlude between each pair of major flashback sequences. The two different sequences of scenes of the film attract the audience attention on the showing. Since Nolan become the person in charging of the fifth movie "Batman Begins" in2005,"Batman" series became a box office hit and the "Batman Begins" rank as the eighth highest grossing film in the United States and the ninth highest grossing worldwide. From then on Nolan begins the Journey of making Hollywood film and produces more and more competitive movies.Firstly, the reason for the success of Nolan’s film was in the given in the foreword of this paper.Then, the Christopher Nolan and his competitive masterpiece was brief introduced in chapter One. The purpose of this paper and the Nolan’s Creation context were stated by analyzing his products in the perspective of the film plays. Next, the play aesthetics of the Nolan’s film was discussed in chapter three and the polyphonic maze narrative technique was presented for the Nolan’s narrative characteristic and its style in the film. In the viewpoint of the film narrative technique, Nolan’s movies belong to the puzzle style movies. The maze narrative techniques which were used to create puzzle movies are the result of long term evolution in Hollywood movie industrialization. The maze narrative technique that Nolan used in his movies is the result of the impact of modernism and postmodernism and the influence of conservatism in English culture and pragmatism in American culture. Since the intractability is a very important feature for polyphonic maze narrative technique, Christopher Nolan’s movies belong to the scope of the puzzle film. One of the main traits of the puzzle film is its capacity in mobilized the audience’s participation and the audiences have to make efforts with his thought and wisdom to understand the content of the movie. Therefore, the puzzle movies are interactive movies and the audience is a part of the film. They are integrated units.After that, the tactics in Nolan’s films was deeply resolved in chapter three. Nolan uses a variety of narrative methods to gain the maximum audience attention in the movie and strives to achieve a breakthrough in the narrative in every movie he made. The "Following" employ a confused fragmented narrative method while the "Memento" adopts a reverse and interlude structure. The "Batman Begins" characterized on an original consciousness loop while the "The Prestige" use a dual-lead strategy and multi-threaded narrative method. The "Batman the Dark Knight" focus on HD and strong conflict of the American TV-style while the "Inception" utilizes a through style mental structure. In this paper, all of the maze narrative tricks and techniques in Nolan’s film were summarized as follow.(1) By removing the narrative actor. It results in a chaos story for the film.(2) Make use of a variety of new narrative tricks to make the audience take full advantage of their abilities to understand the film, including:hide the obvious target of each scene sequence, the reverse narrative order integrated with sequence order, reiterate global overlapping scene sequence, fill the limited duration of the movie with a large amount of information, etc.(3) Introduce the chaotic consciousness trick and the mental consciousness technique to the traditional consciousness narrative method.(4) Establish multiple characters.Finally, the achievements of Christopher Nolan’s play were briefly discussed in the last chapter. Because of his continuous innovation and excellent talent in the maze narrative method of the movie, Nolan stands as the leading director and producer in the Hollywood film industry. Nowadays the appreciation and entertainment of the traditional narrative method is gradually declining at the situation that technology come first priority in the industrialization of the Hollywood film. The showing and arisen of Nolan’s movie drive a brand new renaissance of narrative art in the Hollywood film. By adhering to consciousness of the narrative technique, Nolan places the narrative on the prominent position in the film story of his movies, so that the film play become the essential attributes and the cores in the film-making again. By integrating his personal polyphonic and maze narrative trick with the classic Hollywood narrative norms, Nolan creates a brand new style of commercial films, an intelligent interactive puzzle movie. Not only the artistic characteristic and the commercial property are unified in his film, the personal expression and the public appreciation are also perfectly integrated in the movie.Finally, in this paper some recommendations were suggested for the Chinese film bases on Christopher Nolan’s narrative techniques in the film:firstly, the narrative trick and technique should be made stand out in the film-making. Secondly, the attention should be paid on the improvement of narrative methods for the Chinese film directors. |
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