From Doodlebug to Oppenheimer: An Analysis of Christopher Nolan’s Film Work

This is a book on the films of Christopher Nolan, who is internationally well-known by his film Oppenheimer.

The analysis of the corpus formed by Christopher Nolan’s works allows us to derive its poetics. The

key to this is provided by the magic tricks script in The Prestige. All of Nolan’s films from Insomnia

onwards are influenced by this aspect. The analysis not only shows how outstanding Nolan’s films

are, but they also prove to be surprisingly political. Other key topics in this analysis: the attack on the Kiev Opera house in Tenet and the Russian war against Ukraine in 2022; the references in Inception on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris; the relation of the dead female characters in Nolan’s films to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Philosophy of Composition; in Nolan’s later films, the canary birds of The Prestige transformed into planes; the escape from earth in Interstellar complemented by the evacuation in Dunkirk; the interdependencies between Interstellar and Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel; neoliberalism reflected in Michael Mann’s thriller Thief; the allusions in Tenet on the James Bond film Skyfall by Sam Mendes.

Konrad Kirsch is a PhD in literature and an enthusiastic viewer of films. He has published texts on Georg Büchner,

Elias Canetti, Robert Walser, Franz Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist and William Shakespeare. The Edition Menges has published his volume The Second Look, that deals with films of Alfred Hitchcock, Ridley Scott, Blake Edwards

and Stefan Ruzowitzky