INTRODUCTION

Art is a broad term, that through the centuries has meant many different things to
different people and is interpreted differently by the individuals whom it was created to
impress. Art transcends cultures, time, and language (Proffitt, 2017).

This makes art universally subjective; it comes across different individuals and
entice them according to factors affecting their choices such as, ethnicity, moral
upbringing, taste, style, and trend. It makes art dynamic; that continues to transcend our
choices as individuals. As we are interactive persons, we tend to come to a common
understanding of Art, thus, creating a unified criteria for different forms of Art – such as,
poetry, music composition, paintings, and photography.

Movies are also a form of art; that incorporates photography, story writing, music,
and acting. It takes several years and multiple people to make a good movie that generally
suits a lot of people. Most art forms require just the artist’s skill and what he or she can
accomplish. However, movies are not a one-man-band; they require teams of people with
one unified goal to come together in the creation of one finished masterpiece.

Movies are much like a jigsaw puzzle, an incredible number of small pieces and
details have to come together in order to make a final feature. The production team have
to come together in order to create a beautiful art piece that incorporates the most form
of arts. For this reason, making movies utilizes skills unique to each form of craft.
Although, most of the time, it mixes those uniqueness to each craft that are
complementary to each other in order to create a movie.

BACKGROUND

Surrealism was an early twentieth century European art movement that ‐ alongside
similar progressive art movements like Cubism and Dadaism ‐ aimed to not only
deconstruct and alter our perceived reality, but the social and ideological structures which
define that reality. André Breton, credited as the principal founder of the movement,
defined surrealism as such in his “Surrealist Manifesto” (1924):

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 “[Surrealism is] psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one
proposes to express ‐ verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other
manner ‐ the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the
absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or
moral concern.”

One way in which Surrealists sought to achieve the “absence of control exercised
by reason” was through their preoccupation ‐ articulated in their literature, paintings,
cinema, etc. ‐ with the dream state. Breton continues: “Surrealism is based on the belief
in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the
omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought.” Their fascination with the
dream state provided the Surrealists a means to examine behavior free from social and
cultural restraint, and in turn manifest images resulting an unmediated subconscious ‐
think, for example, of the melting clocks and uncanny landscapes of Salvador Dalí.

While there has been a long history of surreal imagery in film, arguably only two
films can be said to be explicitly surrealist in the classical and contemporaneous sense
of the art movement (in other words: many films are surreal, but not all are surrealist),
those films being Luis Buñuel’s short Un Chien andalou (1928) and his feature L’Âge d’Or
(1930), both in collaboration with Dalí. These films not only manifested the dreamscape
of images, mood, and logic that Surrealism concerned itself with across an array of art
forms, but also did so by toying with cinematic convention and its traditional expectation
of delivering something comparable to a coherent, lived reality (after all, the moving
images of cinema allowed a spatiotemporal access to the dream state that another
medium simply couldn’t). In doing so, these films revealed the entire enterprise of cinema
as deceptively operating on a pseudo-logic comparable to the dream state. These films
were as much about cinema as they were about dreams, and it is in this respect that
Inception can be read as following this tradition (Palmer, 2010).

ABOUT THE WRITER-DIRECTOR

Christopher Edward Nolan, born 30 July 1970, is an English-American film director,

screenwriter, and producer, who is known for making personal, distinctive films within the

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Hollywood mainstream. Having made his directorial debut with Following (1998), Nolan
gained considerable attention for his second feature Memento (2000). He made the
transition from independent to studio filmmaking with Insomnia (2002), and found further
critical and commercial success with The Dark Knight Trilogy (2005–2012), The Prestige
(2006), Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), and Dunkirk (2017). In addition to his
filmmaking, he is an advocate for film preservation and the analog medium.

Nolan's films are typically rooted in epistemological and metaphysical themes,

exploring human morality, the construction of time, and the malleable nature of memory
and personal identity. His body of work is permeated by materialistic perspectives,
unconventional narrative structures, cross-cutting, practical special effects, experimental
soundscapes, large-format film photography, and analogous relationships between visual
language and narrative elements.

Throughout his career, Nolan has received many awards and honours. His ten films
have grossed over US$4.7 billion worldwide and garnered a total of 34 Oscar nominations
and ten wins. Time magazine named Nolan one of the 100 most influential people in the
world in 2015, and in 2019, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British
Empire for his services to film.

Nolan attended University College London, and used its Flaxman Gallery for a scene
in Inception (2010).

Nolan was born in Westminster, London, and grew up in Highgate. His English
father, Brendan James Nolan, was an advertising executive, and his American mother,
Christina (née Jensen), worked as a flight attendant and an English teacher. His
childhood was split between London and Evanston, Illinois, and he has both British and
US citizenship. He has an older brother, Matthew Francis Nolan, a convicted criminal,
and a younger brother, Jonathan. He began making films at age seven, borrowing his
father's Super 8 camera and shooting short films with his action figures. Growing up,
Nolan was particularly influenced by the work of Ridley Scott, and the science fiction films
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Star Wars (1977). Around the age of eight, he made
a stop motion animation homage to the latter called Space Wars. His uncle, who worked
at NASA building guidance systems for the Apollo rockets, sent him some launch footage:

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"I re-filmed them off the screen and cut them in, thinking no-one would notice," Nolan later
remarked. From the age of eleven, he aspired to be a professional filmmaker.

1989–1997: Career Beginnings

When Nolan's family relocated to Chicago during his formative years, he started
making films with Adrien and Roko Belic. He has continued his collaboration with the
brothers, receiving a credit for his editorial assistance on their Oscar-nominated
documentary Genghis Blues (1999). Nolan also worked alongside Belic on documenting
a safari across four African countries, organised by the late photojournalist Dan Eldon in
the early 1990s. Nolan was educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College, an
independent school in Hertford Heath, Hertfordshire, and later read English literature at
University College London (UCL). He chose UCL specifically for its filmmaking facilities,
which comprised a Steenbeck editing suite and 16 mm film cameras. Nolan was president
of the Union's Film Society, and with Emma Thomas (his girlfriend and future wife) he
screened 35 mm feature films during the school year and used the money earned to
produce 16 mm films over the summers. During his college years, Nolan made two short
films. The first was the surreal 8 mm Tarantella (1989), which was shown on Image Union
(an independent film and video showcase on the Public Broadcasting Service). The
second was Larceny (1996), filmed over a weekend in black and white with limited
equipment and a small cast and crew. Funded by Nolan and shot with the society's
equipment, it appeared at the Cambridge Film Festival in 1996 and is considered one of
UCL's best shorts.

After earning his bachelor's degree in English literature in 1993, Nolan worked as a
script reader, camera operator, and director of corporate videos and industrial films. He
also filmed a third short, Doodlebug (1997), about a man chasing an insect around a flat
with a shoe, only to discover when killing it that it is a miniature of himself. Nolan had
written the script while a student at UCL. During this period in his career, Nolan had little
or no success getting his projects off the ground; he later recalled the "stack of rejection
letters" that greeted his early forays into making films, adding "there's a very limited pool
of finance in the UK. To be honest, it's a very clubby kind of place ... Never had any
support whatsoever from the British film industry."

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1998–2004: Breakthrough

In 1998 Nolan directed his first feature, Following, which he personally funded and
filmed with friends. It depicts an unemployed young writer (Jeremy Theobald) who trails
strangers through London, hoping they will provide material for his first novel, but is drawn
into a criminal underworld when he fails to keep his distance. The film was inspired by
Nolan's experience of living in London and having his flat burgled: "There is an interesting
connection between a stranger going through your possessions and the concept of
following people at random through a crowd – both take you beyond the boundaries of
ordinary social relations". Co-produced with Emma Thomas and Jeremy Theobald, Nolan
wrote, photographed, and edited the film himself. Following won several awards during
its festival run and was well received by critics.

“The difference between shooting Following with a group of friends wearing

our own clothes and my mum making sandwiches to spending $4 million of
somebody else's money on Memento and having a crew of a hundred people
is, to this day, by far the biggest leap I've ever made.”

—Nolan (in 2012) on the jump from his first film to his second.

As a result of Following's success, Nolan was afforded the opportunity to make his
breakthrough hit Memento (2000). During a road trip from Chicago to Los Angeles, his
brother Jonathan pitched the idea for "Memento Mori", about a man with anterograde
amnesia who uses notes and tattoos to hunt for his wife's murderer. Nolan developed a
screenplay that told the story in reverse; Aaron Ryder, an executive for Newmarket Films,
said it was "perhaps the most innovative script I had ever seen". The film was optioned
and given a budget of $4.5 million. Memento, starring Guy Pearce and Carrie-Anne Moss,
premiered in September 2000 at the Venice International Film Festival to critical acclaim.
Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal wrote in his review, "I can't remember when
a movie has seemed so clever, strangely affecting and slyly funny at the very same time."
The film was a box-office success and received a number of accolades, including
Academy Award and Golden Globe Award nominations for its screenplay, Independent
Spirit Awards for Best Director and Best Screenplay, and a Directors Guild of America

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(DGA) Award nomination. Memento was considered by numerous critics to be one of the
best films of the 2000s.

Oscar-winning film director Steven Soderbergh supported Nolan in his transition to

studio filmmaking.

Impressed by his work on Memento, Steven Soderbergh recruited Nolan to direct

the psychological thriller Insomnia (2002), starring Academy Award winners Al Pacino,
Robin Williams, and Hilary Swank. With a $46 million budget, it was described as "a much
more conventional Hollywood film than anything the director has done before".

2005–2012: Mainstream and Critical Success

In early 2003 Nolan approached Warner Bros. with the idea of making a new Batman
film. Fascinated by the character and story, he wanted to make a film grounded in a
"relatable" world more reminiscent of a classical drama than a comic-book fantasy.
Batman Begins, the biggest project Nolan had undertaken to that point, premiered in June
2005 to critical acclaim and commercial success. Starring Christian Bale in the title role,
along with Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, and Liam Neeson, the film
revived the franchise, heralding a trend towards darker films that rebooted (or retold)
backstories. Praised for its psychological depth and contemporary relevance, Kyle Smith
of The New York Post called it "a wake-up call to the people who keep giving us cute
capers about men in tights. It wipes the smirk off the face of the superhero movie." Batman
Begins was the eighth-highest-grossing film of 2005 in the United States and the year's
ninth-highest-grossing film worldwide.

Before returning to the Batman franchise, Nolan directed, co-wrote, and produced
The Prestige (2006), an adaptation of the Christopher Priest novel about two rival 19th-
century magicians. In 2001, when Nolan was in post-production for Insomnia, he asked
his brother Jonathan to help write the script for the film. The screenplay was an
intermittent, five-year collaboration between the brothers.

In July 2006 Nolan announced that the follow-up to Batman Begins would be called
The Dark Knight. Approaching the sequel, Nolan wanted to expand on the noirish quality
of the first film by broadening the canvas and taking on "the dynamic of a story of the city,

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a large crime story ... where you're looking at the police, the justice system, the vigilante,
the poor people, the rich people, the criminals". Released in 2008 to great critical acclaim,
The Dark Knight has been cited as one of the best films of the 2000s and one of the best
superhero films ever made.

After The Dark Knight's success, Warner Bros. signed Nolan to direct Inception.
Nolan also wrote and co-produced the film, described as "a contemporary sci-fi actioner
set within the architecture of the mind". Starring a large ensemble cast led by Leonardo
DiCaprio, the film was released on 16 July 2010, and was a critical and commercial
success. Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film a perfect score of
"A+" and called it "one of the best movies of the 21st century". Mark Kermode named it
the best film of 2010, stating "Inception is proof that people are not stupid, that cinema is
not trash, and that it is possible for blockbusters and art to be the same thing." The film
ended up grossing over $820 million worldwide and was nominated for eight Oscars,
including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay; it won the award for Best
Cinematography, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing and Best Visual Effects. Nolan
also received BAFTA, Golden Globe, DGA, and PGA Award nominations, as well as a
WGA Award for his work on the film.

In 2012 Nolan directed his third and final Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises.
Although he was initially hesitant about returning to the series, he agreed to come back
after developing a story with his brother and David S. Goyer that he felt would end the
series on a high note. The film was released on 20 July 2012 to positive reviews.

2013–2017: Large-scale Epics

Nolan at the 2013 premiere of Man of Steel in London.

During story discussions for The Dark Knight Rises in 2010, Goyer told Nolan of his
idea to present Superman in a modern context. Impressed with Goyer's first contact
concept, Nolan pitched the idea for Man of Steel (2013) to Warner Bros, who hired Nolan
to produce and Zack Snyder to direct. Starring Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Kevin Costner,
Russell Crowe, and Michael Shannon, Man of Steel grossed more than $660 million at
the worldwide box office, but received a divided critical reaction. However, Nolan was

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thoroughly impressed by Snyder's work, saying that the director "knocked it out of the
park", and believed the film would have the same potential to excite audiences as when
he himself saw the Christopher Reeve version in 1978.

Nolan's younger brother, Jonathan, co-wrote the screenplay for Interstellar.

In 2014 Nolan directed, wrote, and produced the science-fiction film Interstellar. The
first drafts of the script were written by Jonathan Nolan, and it was originally to be directed
by Steven Spielberg. Based on the scientific theories of theoretical physicist Kip Thorne,
the film follows a group of astronauts who travel through a wormhole in search of a new
home for humanity. Interstellar was notably Nolan's first collaboration with
cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema. Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. co-financed
and co-distributed the project, released on 5 November 2014 to largely positive reviews
and strong box office results, grossing over $670 million worldwide.

Nolan and Emma Thomas also served as executive producers on Transcendence

(2014), the directorial debut of Nolan's longtime cinematographer Wally Pfister. The film
was released to mostly unfavorable reviews and disappointing box office results. A. A.
Dowd of The A.V. Club gave it a C- rating, pointing out that "[Pfister] lacks Nolan's talent
for weaving grand pop spectacle out of cultural anxieties."

In 2017, Nolan directed and produced Dunkirk, based on his own original
screenplay. The story is set amid World War II and the evacuation of Allied soldiers from
the beaches of Dunkirk, France, in 1940. Describing the film as a survival tale with a
triptych structure, he wanted to make a "sensory, almost experimental movie" with
minimal dialogue. Nolan said he waited to make Dunkirk until he had earned the trust of
a major studio to let him make it as a British film, but with an American budget. Before
filming, Nolan sought advice from Spielberg, who later said in an interview with Variety,
"Knowing and respecting that Chris [Nolan] is one of the world's most imaginative
filmmakers, my advice to him was to leave his imagination, as I did on Ryan, in second
position to the research he was doing to authentically acquit this historical drama.”
Dunkirk was released in theatres on 21 July 2017 to widespread critical acclaim and
strong box office results, grossing over $525 million worldwide, making it the highest-
grossing World War II film of all time. In his review, Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco

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Chronicle wrote: "It's one of the best war films ever made, distinct in its look, in its
approach and in the effect it has on viewers. There are movies—they are rare—that lift
you out of your present circumstances and immerse you so fully in another experience
that you watch in a state of jaw-dropped awe. Dunkirk is that kind of movie.”

2018–Present: Recent Work

In the months following the 2017–18 Oscar season, Nolan began supervising a new
70mm print of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), made from the original
camera negative. He presented the film at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. While in
Cannes, the director also held a two-hour masterclass at the Palais des Festivals. USA
Today observed that he was greeted "like a rock star", and with a prolonged standing
ovation. After the premiere, Warner Bros. released the "unrestored" prints in a select few
locations to both critical and commercial success. Nolan served as executive producer
on The Doll's Breath (2019), an animated short directed by the Quay brothers. The film
was inspired by Felisberto Hernández's Las Hortensias, and was commissioned by Nolan
"on the condition that it was shot on 35mm film."

Nolan's eleventh feature, Tenet, is scheduled to be released by Warner Bros. on 17

July 2020. Nolan wrote the screenplay and is producing with Emma Thomas. It stars John
David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Dimple
Kapadia, Clémence Poésy, Kenneth Branagh and Michael Caine.

Cinematic Style of Christopher Nolan

Nolan's films are often grounded in existential and epistemological themes,

exploring the concepts of time, memory, and identity. His work is characterised by
unconventional narrative structures, richly textured imagery, and evocative use of music
and sound. Film theorist David Bordwell opined that the director has been able to blend
his "experimental impulses" with the demands of mainstream entertainment, further
describing Nolan oeuvre as, "experiments with cinematic time by means of techniques of
subjective viewpoint and crosscutting."

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Recognition

Having made some of the most influential and popular films of his time, Nolan's work
has been as "intensely embraced, analyzed and debated by ordinary film fans as by critics
and film academics”. According to The Wall Street Journal, his "ability to combine box-
office success with artistic ambition has given him an extraordinary amount of clout in the
industry." Geoff Andrew of the British Film Institute (BFI) and regular contributor to the
Sight & Sound magazine, called Nolan "a persuasively inventive storyteller", singling him
out as one of the few contemporary filmmakers producing highly personal films within the
Hollywood mainstream. He also pointed out that Nolan's films are as notable for their
"considerable technical virtuosity and visual flair" as for their "brilliant narrative ingenuity
and their unusually adult interest in complex philosophical questions".

In 2008, film critic Philip French deemed Nolan "The first major talent to emerge this
21st century.", while Forbes called him "one of the most successful and acclaimed
filmmakers of our time" in 2015. The Observer described Nolan as a "skillful, stylish
storyteller, capable of combining the spectacle of Spielberg with the intellectual intricacy
of Nicolas Roeg or Alain Resnais". Mark Cousins applauded the director for embracing
big ideas, "Hollywood filmmakers generally shy away from ideas — but not Christopher
Nolan". Scott Foundas of Variety declared Nolan "the premier big-canvas storyteller of
his generation", while Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times called him "the great
proceduralist of 21st century blockbuster filmmaking, a lover of nuts-and-bolts minutiae."

The filmmaker has been praised by many of his contemporaries, and some have
cited his work as influencing their own. Rupert Wyatt said in an interview that he thinks of
Nolan as a "trailblazer ... he is to be hugely admired as a master filmmaker, but also
someone who has given others behind him a stick to beat back the naysayers who never
thought a modern mass audience would be willing to embrace story and character as
much as spectacle". Kenneth Branagh called Nolan's approach to large-scale filmmaking
"unique in modern cinema", adding "regardless of how popular his movies become, he
remains an artist and an auteur. I think for that reason he has become a heroic figure for
both the audience and the people working behind the camera." Michael Mann
complimented Nolan for his "singular vision" and called him "a complete auteur". Nicolas

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Roeg said of Nolan, "[His] films have a magic to them ... People talk about 'commercial
art' and the term is usually self-negating; Nolan works in the commercial arena and yet
there's something very poetic about his work." Martin Scorsese identified Nolan as a
filmmaker creating "beautifully made films on a big scale", and Luca Guadagnino called
him "one of the ultimate auteurs." Damien Chazelle said of Nolan, "This is a filmmaker
who has managed, time and again, to make the most seemingly impersonal projects —
superhero epics, deep-space mind-benders — feel deeply personal".

Olivier Assayas said he admired Nolan for "making movies that are really unlike
anything else. The way I see it, he has a really authentic voice." Discussing the difference
between art films and big studio blockbusters, Steven Spielberg referred to Nolan's Dark
Knight series as an example of both; he has described Memento and Inception as
"masterworks". Denis Villeneuve said of Nolan, "[He] is a very impressive filmmaker,
because he is able to keep his identity and create his own universe in that large scope ...
To bring intellectual concepts and to bring them in that scope to the screen right now —
it's very rare. Every movie that he comes out with, I have more admiration for his work."
Film critic Mark Kermode complimented the director for bringing "the discipline and ethics
of art-house independent moviemaking" to Hollywood blockbusters, calling him "living
proof that you don't have to appeal to the lowest common denominator to be profitable".

In 2013 a survey of seventeen film academics showed that Nolan was among the
most studied directors in Britain. His work has also been recognised as an influence on
video games. Video game designer Hideo Kojima compared Dunkirk to his own work,
saying "Its approach to technology in movie making and refusal to rely on defeating one's
enemies as a portrayal of war, reminds me in many ways of my work on Metal Gear and
where I hope to see my next game go". Nolan appeared in Time's 100 most influential
people in the world in 2015 and in the Forbes Celebrity 100 in 2011 and 2013.

ART PIECE

Inception is a 2010 action-thriller film directed by Christopher Nolan and starring

Leonardo DiCaprio. Nolan developed the film over a 10-year period, initially pitching the
script to Warner Bros. in 2001 as a horror vehicle. The studio passed and told Nolan that

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he needed more experience helming big-budget productions. In the following years,
Nolan directed Insomnia (2002), Batman Begins (2005), and The Dark Knight (2008) for
Warner Bros., during which time he reworked the idea for Inception into a heist film. After
the tremendous success of The Dark Knight, Warner Bros. purchased Nolan’s
Inception script in 2009, and allocated $160,000,000 for the film's production, along with
Legendary Pictures.

Nolan drew inspiration for Inception from the period in American cinema in the late
1990s when action films like The Wachowskis' The Matrix (199) and Alex Proyas's Dark
City (1998) combined thriller and film noir aesthetics with heady philosophical
explorations of dreaming and virtual reality. Nolan was particularly interested in
cinematically rendering the idea that dreams seem like reality for as long as they are
occurring in the mind. The central sci-fi conceit of the film—the existence of "dream-
sharing" technology—allowed Nolan to craft a script where characters are able to move
fluidly and seamlessly through both real and imagined landscapes, the division between
which is often blurred.

For the film's casting, Nolan recruited actors he had worked with on Batman
Begins, such as Michael Caine and Cillian Murphy, as well as Ellen Page, Tom Hardy,
Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, and Leonardo DiCaprio. As
Nolan met with DiCaprio and continued to work on the script in the late 2000s, he strove
to make the emotional development of Dom Cobb—a tortured widower who participates
in the scheme as a way to reunite with his children—the driving arc of the film.

Despite its difficult and non-linear storytelling, which it has in common with Nolan's
previous work Memento (2000), Inception was a phenomenal success, grossing over
$800,000,000 worldwide. Roger Ebert called the film "breathtaking" and "wholly original,"
and many critics praised Nolan's singular ability to integrate complex thematic and
narratological techniques into an accessible piece of blockbuster entertainment. The film
was nominated for seven Academy Awards, and won three: Best Sound Editing, Best
Sound Mixing, and Best Visual Effects (GradeSaver, 2019).

In the context of the film, ‘inception’ means an idea being planted in someone’s mind
without their knowledge of this happening. Cobb explains that this is only possible if the

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subject is in a deep enough sleep. Then the person can truly believe it was their own
thought, created by themselves while they were dreaming. Thus, while in a dream-state,
things can be suggested to us by people who have invaded our dreams, which is the
premise of the movie. If the dream-world in which the idea was suggested seems
plausible to us, we may even remember the dream incident at a later point, believing it
was our own thought (Rivera, 2012).

Summary
Dom Cobb is a skilled thief, the absolute best in the dangerous art of extraction,
stealing valuable secrets from deep within the subconscious during the dream state, when
the mind is at its most vulnerable. Cobb's rare ability has made him a coveted player in
this treacherous new world of corporate espionage, but it has also made him an
international fugitive and cost him everything he has ever loved. Now Cobb is being
offered a chance at redemption. One last job could give him his life back but only if he
can accomplish the impossible—inception. Instead of the perfect heist, Cobb and his
team of specialists have to pull off the reverse: their task is not to steal an idea but to
plant one. If they succeed, it could be the perfect crime. But no amount of careful planning
or expertise can prepare the team for the dangerous enemy that seems to predict their
every move. An enemy that only Cobb could have seen coming. This summer, your mind
is the scene of the crime. (Warner Bros. Pictures, 2010)

Critic Reviews

“Inception is the kind of information-packed movie that creates the painful/pleasurable

sensation that there's no time to think.”
Charlotte O'Sullivan
London Evening Standard

“A mind-bending thriller that is a complete original, cementing Nolan's status as one of

this generation's brightest filmmakers.”
Micheal Compton
Bowling Green Daily News

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“Imagine watching a bank heist in someone's brain, with layers upon layers upon layers
(repeat) of deep meaning, suspense, action, mystery and ohmyf*ckinggod-what-the-
HELL-is-happening moments, and you can imagine what it's like to watch Inception.”
Amie Simon
Three Imaginary Girls

ANALYSIS

What medium were used in the creation of the film?

Inception was shot by Christopher Nolan and Wally Pfister on anamorphic 35mm
film, with significant sequences filmed in 65mm. Aerial shots were taken with VistaVision.
The sequences you see shot in slow-motion are done at 1000 frames-per-second on a
Super-Sonics 35mm camera.

In terms of cinematography, there is one pivotal sequence in the second layer of the
dream, and it’s one of the most memorable scenes of any film in the past decade. When
shooting zero-gravity shots, it’s typically normal to use different camera angles, apply
fast-cutting takes, and give an illusion weightlessness through clever camera movement;
at other times, harnesses come into play, and most of the shots get post-processed
through computer animation. But with how relentless Chris Nolan is in practicality, as
we’ve already noted, the zero-gravity fight sequence was approached with a different
method – building a rotating 360-degree hotel hallway.

Inception was filmed in a number of different locations – Morroco, Paris, Los

Angeles, and Japan.

In Inception, each setting in the main act of the film is a different dream, and that’s
where Chris and Wally’s practical approach in filming counted; the dream had to feel real.
That meant if something could be pulled off without CGI, then it was for damn sure pulled
off without CGI. With realism being one significant factor in the cinematography of the
dream, the next was color. What ultimately served as the most successful guiding point
for audiences to know what level of the dream they were in was the fact that each had its

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own distinct color palette. And we can learn how Wally’s cinematography played its role
by studying the levels of the dream themselves (Khan, 2014).

Content / Subject matter / Theme

Inception, while it wholeheartedly subscribes to the theory of Go Big or Go Home,

isn’t quite sure what it wants to be. It is by turns a character drama, a science-fiction
exposition-fest, and a heist. At some of these things it’s better than at others, but there’s
no denying that the movie is largely gripping, often interesting, and occasionally
awesome.

One of the necessary evils with Inception is that its premise is so complicated that
the characters spend the first hour on dream-within-a-dream auditions and gotchas,
banging their shins on exposition. Unfortunately, this means that much of the dialogue in
the first act is uncharacteristically clunky for Nolan, though it does what’s necessary in
laying out the stakes and freeing up the second and third acts for visual overload.

In short, the setup goes like this: extraction—the accessing of secrets from
someone’s mind—is a lucrative underground business which has spawned the usual
shady corporations and needs for private security for the rich. There are a squillion rules
about how it works, many of which are discussed at length, and many more which aren’t
discussed until they’re immediately relevant (and usually over the sound of gunfire).

Master extractor Cobb is offered One Last Job planting an idea in someone’s mind:
inception. It requires going several levels deep into someone’s mind (with each level
slowing down time a little more and making it that much harder to wake), implanting an
idea simple and organic enough to grow on its own, and timing the “drop” to wake
everyone out of all the levels at once. Inception is incredibly dangerous, exceptionally
illegal, and probably doomed to failure (Valentine, 2010).

Composition of the Art Piece

The goal of the director was to convince the audience that the inceptors, such as
the character played by DiCaprio and his team can infiltrate the mind of a target and steal
corporate secrets and at the same time plant an idea, a suggestion that the target willingly

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accepts as his own. This requires the use of camera shots, lighting and visual composition
techniques that will allow for the merging of the real and the surreal.

The director used soft lighting such as diffused light that created shadows a subtle
message that there is more than meets the eye in this film. Since the separation between
fantasy and reality exists in the mind of the characters the movie showed a great number
of close-up shots and medium close-up so that the audience can have access to the
emotions of the characters. Superb acting complemented everything to produce a
compelling movie experience (Bordwell, 2010).

Opinion

Inception reminds the public of the common claim that Hollywood films are no longer
character-centered. Yet the nearly universal complaint, for those who don’t like the film,
or some aspects of the film, is that they don’t get to know the characters.

Why would people expect to find rounded characters? Is this complex intellectual
film ironically going to prove critics of modern Hollywood blockbusters right?

It cannot be denied that the characters in Inception, apart from Cobb, the
protagonist, are barely assigned traits. Ariadne, for example, does not return to join
Cobb’s team as its architect because she has some personal goals or traits that incline
her to want to do so.

But if there’s little characterization, is Nolan substituting something interesting in its

place – apart from the usual computer-effects and spectacle? The first time the film is
viewed, it couldn’t be figured out. As a result, people don’t really enjoy it until the point
where the van breaks through the railing on the bridge and starts to fall. The van’s fall
marks the end Development of the film and the beginning of the Climax.

At that turning point, it dawned that Nolan has elevated exposition of new premises
to the main form of communication among characters. Discussion of their personal
relationships, hopes, and doubts largely drops out. As the Russian Formalists would say,
exposition, usually given early on and at wide intervals later in a plot, becomes the
dominant here. That’s an unusual enough tactic to warrant a closer look.

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 REFERENCES

Bordwell, D. (2010). INCEPTION: or, Dream a Little Dream within a Dream with Me.
Retrieved from http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2010/08/06/inception-or-dream-
a-little-dream-within-a-dream-with-me/

GradeSaver (2019). Inception Study Guide. Retrieved from

https://www.gradesaver.com/inception

Khan, M. (2014). We Built Our Own World: Wally Pfister and the Cinematography of
Inception. Retrieved from https://www.diyphotography.net/built-world-wally-pfister-
cinematography-inception/

Palmer, L. (2010). Culture Warrior the Self-Reflexivity and Surrealism of Inception.

Retrieved from https://filmschoolrejects.com/culture-warrior-the-self-reflexivity-and-
surrealism-of-inception-fee56fc781c9/

Proffitt, K. (2017). Are Movies The Highest Form Of Art? 5 Reasons Why I Think. “Yes.”
Retrieved from https://www.actionvfx.com/blog/are-movies-the-highest-form-of-art-
5-reasons-why-i-think-yes

Rivera, H. (2012). Inception. Retrieved from

https://philosophynow.org/issues/88/Inception

Valentine, G. (2010). Review: Inception. Retrieved from

https://www.tor.com/2010/07/19/review-inception/

Warner Bros. Pictures, (2010). Inception Plot Summary. Retrieved from

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/plotsummary

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