Why TENET is Nolan’s Disappointed Work——From Inception to TENET, how Nolan’s audiovisual language has changed

Through Nolan’s Inception to Interstellar and finally to Dunkirk, the audience can get a glimpse of his attempts at audiovisual language, but in his latest cinema TENET, his attempts have the signs of returning to Inception, combined with the core of the expression of TENET, made TENET the best but also the worst cinema Nolan has made in recent years. Although through the narrative method of TENET, the audience can indeed see the possibility and uniqueness of the film as a constructed space-time relationship, but this cannot conceal Nolan’s lack of progress or even retrogression in audiovisual language. The high-frequency use of the IMAX in film did not bring any visual effects beyond that of the same type of film (especially compared with director Damien Chazelle’s First Man), but only a larger screen area, which is often shot by IMAX. It just seemly unnecessary, even confusing and stranger, like a waste of larger format equipment, and there is no spectacle-like visual effect presented by Nolan’s previous cinemas through the IMAX film machine. This is obviously not a good phenomenon, for a director, continuous innovation in audio-visual language is necessary and important. The audience can feel different levels of fear from Psycho and The Birds through different audio-visual languages and can not only feel the poetry in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, but also can glimpse the charm of science fiction in his Solaris. It is the development of audiovisual language that enables cinemas to continuously glow with new inner charm. It is also because audiovisual language is naturally self-consistent with human perception, it is possible to build an independent space-time system through cinemas. Audiovisual language is the main body of the cinema, so it is extremely necessary to discuss Nolan’s performance in this aspect in recent years.

Before discussing the characteristics of Nolan’s audiovisual language in detail, the first thing that should be clarified is the film element that Nolan has insisted on for so many years and can even be called obsession, that is, the complex film story or the composition of the setting. Nolan’s stories usually choose innate themes that can combine strong drama conflicts and spectacular visual effects, such as consciousness exploration or time travel (this is why Dunkirk and TENET are in all Nolan cinemas It is so unique that it even constitutes the two opposite extremes of his creation) and loves the use of “practical effect” in the film production process. Nolan’s choice of story is undoubtedly strongly related to the visual style he is used to (Dunkirk and TENET are two exceptions). Although Nolan was not a top Hollywood commercial film director since his first film, but since his first film, Nolan’s use of audiovisual language and creative ideas began to take shape. If we want to explore the formation of Nolan’s audiovisual language model in depth, we must start with his debut novel Following.

From the first point of view, Following, a black-and-white 16mm film machine hand-held cinema, has a visual style that is far from Nolan’s current commercial blockbusters, but if you can look at it in depth, it may not be the case. In his first work, Nolan embodies his obsession with technical challenges, and some of the skills he learned from it continue to this day. In Nolan’s various biographies and interviews, whenever he mentioned Following, he would interpret it as the best choice he made in his near zero budget and various combinations at the time. He believed that was what he could achieve at the time. It is reasonable to believe that his idea of creating new effects by challenging the limits of technology has been maintained to this day. He often mentioned that when he created “Following” he couldn’t get permission to shoot in public places, so he had to use handheld photography for a long time. In the process of continuously following the actors, hand-held photography gave the film a sense of documentary and “direct cinema” during the French New Wave film period. Also because of budget constraints, Nolan had to use a non-linear narrative method to deal with material loss or loss of key shots that may occur during shooting, so as to ensure that he can construct a complete story from the surviving material anyway (the cinema Memento and Dunkirk undoubtedly used similar techniques). At the same time, film also meant another problem. When Nolan didn’t have the budget to use artificial lighting and instead used a large area of natural light at zero cost, matching the color temperature of each lens would become a hassle, so he chose a black and white film that does not need to consider the color temperature. The uncontrollable factors of the large area of natural light require him to often make the character stand by the window to obtain sufficient lighting. This is not difficult to find in his later works. For example, Inception has a series of shots in the opening part show scenes where the character is standing by the window while natural light comes from the side. There was a similar manifestation in the part before the end of Dunkirk. The British troops evacuated from the beach walked towards the railway station, their sides illuminated by light. Although the audience would guess that there were huge streetlights of the railway station on their side because it was night, but considering the overall spatial structure, this layout should also be regarded as a kind of “natural light”. “Natural light” is the first feature of Nolan’s visual style, and this is also for the aesthetic characteristics that almost run through Nolan’s entire film creation career. It makes many of Nolan’s pictures have an oil painting-like Gordon Willis’ style looking and feeling. As for the later period he can use a lot of expensive equipment and perfect lighting setting, he still frequently makes this “cheap effect” appear in his works.

And Nolan’s second clear and most well-known picture feature is his obsession with film. Although Steve Yedlin has proved through a series of visual style experiments that today’s film digitized film that is separated from the traditional film process does not have an absolute and purely digital film’s visual style, they can all be adjusted to almost the same effect, but Nolan still tirelessly defended the film. His obsession with film can even be said to indirectly save the Kodak Company and the Hollywood Film Processing Factory, which were on the verge of bankruptcy due to the impact of digital photography and made him the most prestigious film-making cinema director today (Although from a personal point of view I think the most talented film-making cinema director today is still Paul Thomas Anderson). But is film really indistinguishable from digital cinema cameras? Of course not. From the imaging results, the film still has better highlight performance. With its own grain properties, it can indeed effectively create a retro and warm effect that a digital cinema camera can achieve at a higher price. Also, there are devices such as the IMAX movie machine that have a format that is difficult to match with current digital cameras, and the optical characteristics they bring are temporarily irreplaceable.

Nolan is undoubtedly the director who likes to use this kind of equipment in the film industry today. Why he likes the IMAX movie camera and how he uses such equipment to achieve breakthroughs in his own audiovisual language has become the focus of this discussion. Although Nolan used 65mm for filming in Inception and started using IMAX cinema cameras in the Dark Knight trilogy, it was not until Interstellar that most of the audience began to feel the strong impact of the breadth picture of IMAX cinema cameras. Then, 70% of the pictures of film Dunkirk were shot with an IMAX cinema machine, and the film TENET was completely shot by an IMAX cinema machine. So, what does this show? Still have to go back to Inception for discussion. Although this film used the same Kodak 65mm film as the IMAX cinema machine during the shooting process, the screen ratio after its release was fixed at 2.39:1, which is one of the mainstream wide format ratios for a long time. If don’t pay special attention to the shooting equipment of Inception, most people will not realize the application of 65mm film in this movie. This shows that even when Nolan uses the IMAX-like format, he does not rely solely on the equipment itself, but still puts more emphasis on how to use equipment to achieve his own aesthetic goals. Nolan, who is deeply influenced by naturalism, used the wide-format ratio in place in the movie Inception is definitely a correct decision today: the wide-format picture is a good representation of multiple characters appearing in the picture at the same time. Through the composition of all the characters at a glance, combined with the compression of the width, the audience can clearly grasp the tension and relationship of the characters in the movie, and at the same time feel the boundary of the dream world. In highly difficult special effects scenes, the wide picture gives it a thorough and mysterious effect caused by a wide horizontal transmission. This is why I believe the reason Nolan uses an IMAX movie camera in Interstellar and shows a 1.78:1 or even 1.43:1 picture closer to the college ratio during playback is not because of technological progress but to achieve his own audiovisual aims. This is not difficult to understand. There are a lot of shots involving outer space in the movie Interstellar. The pictures taken by the IMAX movie camera almost perfectly present the empty but profound beauty of space on the big screen. The huge screen brought by the resolution firmly occupies the realization of the audience, and more white space also makes more environmental pictures absorbed into the shooting. It allows the audience to be immersed in the magnificent scene. At the same time, when some high-speed motion pictures arrive, such as the scene where the Ranger and Eternity are docked in the movie, compared to the wide range that can only show the motion scene, the IMAX picture retains the excitement of the high-speed motion lens while accommodating more static backgrounds. As a result, viewers are less likely to experience the dizziness that was common in the past. Nolan’s use of the IMAX movie camera and the pictures recorded by IMAX make “Interstellar” a classic work that is enough to leave a name in the history of science fiction movies. His precise depiction of the grandeur and mystery of space without lack of realism and naturalism makes the scenes in this film enough to match masters’ pieces were created by director such as Steve Kubrick and Ridley Scott. However, Nolan and his IMAX use in Interstellar brought not only the fantasy of the magnificent universe, but also activated another level of breakthrough in his audiovisual language. Compared with the previous works, the number of shots that appear for a longer period of time in Interstellar can be perceived more often, but the lines contained in them are less.

Most of Nolan’s films show one of his preferences, that is, he likes to insert an explanatory segment mainly composed of lines and actor performance at the beginning of the film or shortly after the opening. Since his stories usually have quite complicated background settings or technical settings, from the perspective of allowing the audience to clearly understand the plot of the movie, it seems reasonable for him to choose to do this, and if he only uses similar settings at the beginning of the movie So his choice is indeed justifiable. However, this is not the case. Before Interstellar, Nolan not only likes to use explanations to elicit the story world at the beginning of the movie, but he also likes to add explanation fragments in the plot. In this way, although it seems to be very effective in helping the audience understand what is happening in the movie, it does not take into account that this method is essentially a waste of lens language. If we trace back from the early film ontology, the lines do not participate in the formation of the film ontology. No matter how literary the lines are, they are essentially just adding luster to the film ontology that has been composed of sound and light. Even if technological progress strengthens the status of lines in today’s film production, and audiences rely more on lines to help them deepen their understanding of the film when they are watching movies, the lines themselves should still not assume the main body of film narrative (in fact, there are some directors have used their own films to prove to the world that the lines are not necessary in the film even today. Gaspar Noé Climax and Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse are good examples). In most of Nolan’s works, when the characters begin to explain the world or technology, the movie screen only shows the process of one character explaining to another character, and what the audience can see is basically the ordinary conversation between two people. On the screen, they can only obtain sufficient information by listening to the lines or reading the interactive way with the text. In other words, in Nolan’s processing logic for similar bridge segments, the text is placed on the information-carrying sequence that has priority over the narrative of the shot. At the same time, Nolan’s emphasis on textual explanations in movies does not stop at those relatively abstract worlds or technical issues that are difficult to visualize. He even deliberately adds some purely functional lines to address some of the visually presented lines. Some scenes or concepts are explained twice or even more. For example, in Inception, the word “paradox” is mentioned many times in the scenes where Escher Stairs appear, although he has completely demonstrated through visual means that Escher Stairs possess a kind of anti-reality geometric characteristics. Even without the word “paradox”, the audience can understand why the application of Escher Stairs is only possible in dreams. There is a similar performance in Interstellar. For example, there is such a bridge: as a highly educated aerospace engineer, Cooper needs to listen to his partner to explain the most basic principles of wormholes and why wormholes are spherical in three-dimensional space. From a realistic point of view, this is undoubtedly very illegal to people’s common sense. Obviously, this is only a functional explanation to ensure that the audience understands his visual design. Similarly, when Cooper drove the spacecraft into an icy cloud, the movie had already made a full visual performance, but when the camera returned to the cabin, Cooper still emphasized the “Ice cloud”. Through text interpretation and visual presentation, there are always incomprehensible repetitions in most of Nolan’s films, which seems to give people a feeling that he is trying to ensure that the audience can understand but ignoring the reliability and meaning of the lens language itself.

As mentioned earlier, Interstellar has more single shots with longer shots, and there are fewer or no lines in these shots. In other words, although Interstellar still has a series of problems in Nolan’s past, he has tried to improve this, and he has not laid the foundation for the creation of Dunkirk since then, also makes TENET backwards in this regard even more unacceptable. Interstellar may be Nolan’s most emotionally expressed film so far. Its story can be said to completely surpass Inception in terms of emotional drive and the climax of emotional explosion. Compared with the narrative style in Inception where character emotions and character interests are driven by each other, Cooper played by Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar has the highest narrative priority for his strong affection for his daughter as a father. From the perspective of audience perception, it far exceeds the more ambitious and “important” goal of saving the world. However, it is worth noting that, compared to the family and love mentioned in the text of Inception, Interstellar does not emphasize the expression of family affection or the hint of love in the way of lines, but is completely uncharacteristically communicate through the performance under the language of the lens. This may explain why Interstellar has more single shots with longer shooting time, that is, the lens language has improved compared to the past. Nolan needs a long enough single lens duration to accommodate Matthew McConaughey’s superb performance, through the combination of the camera and his performance, the lines have indeed become an unnecessary existence: when the audience sees the tearful face of Cooper played by Matthew McConaughey in the picture, any textual intervention at this time just seems superfluous and cannot be compared with direct and pure emotional catharsis. Through empathy, the audience can accurately perceive the emotions that the movie wants to convey. There is a similar scene when Cooper is repairing the robot before the end. Although there is no pure visual deduction without lines in this segment, the proportion of lines is still very low, and it can almost be regarded as a kind of accompanying performance and the synchronized rhythm of the mood swings brought about by the camera (This feeling is very similar to some of the passages in the Latvian film Exiled. The lines do not convey a lot of actual information to the audience, it is more like a soundtrack that is not music. Accompanied by the lens language, it forms a rhythm of sound and light synchronization, like a kind of poetic concerto). Accompanied by almost casual chats and daily lines that do not carry the main message, the audience feels Cooper’s memories and subtle changes in emotions. At this time, he not only saved the earth, but also the endless miss for his daughter was covered under the night. The successful attempt in Interstellar is obviously inherited from Nolan’s next work Dunkirk, but it is not only inherited, but also presents a distinct innovation in his past works. After fully discussing the significance of these innovations in Dunkirk, the disappointment of TENET will be easier to understand.

A large part of the reason why Dunkirk is so important in Nolan’s creative process is that this film has achieved a high degree of integration with the above-mentioned naturalistic visual style, emotional drive, and IMAX shooting, while achieving a breakthrough to one’s own audiovisual language habits, and greatly reduced the text presentation in the movie. Regarding the feature of naturalism, Nolan and his DP Hoyte van Hoytema took the characteristics of naturalistic aesthetics to the extreme in Dunkirk. In their previous co-production films, there has never been a film Dunkirk that has been shot for such a long time and a large area of outdoor scenes, and the natural changeable weather and light conditions on the beach and sea It virtually adds a natural and random feature to the visual construction of the movie. Although this film uses a non-linear narrative similar to many of Nolan’s works, the overall structure is similar to the three-line narrative of Following, and it has three timelines of varying lengths. But for each timeline itself, Nolan emphasized the characteristics of linear time changes. As time progresses, various changes have been taking place on the beach and the ocean, the sun and the clouds are constantly intertwined, and the time gradually advances from early morning to dusk. As a result, the light also changes, and different plot conflicts and emotional relationships are reflected in the edited movie. This is different from Nolan’s previous processing style. Before Dunkirk, natural light was merely an aesthetic expression for pure aesthetic purposes in his films, but in Dunkirk he succeeded to chang the aesthetics of naturalism into a kind of expression in lens language that can directly carry the visual power of narrative. It is undoubtedly a breakthrough. On this basis, the application of the IMAX movie camera in Dunkirk has become more powerful. Different from the outer space scene in Interstellar, it is inherently suitable for shooting by IMAX movie camera. When facing the deep and boundless space, the audience does not need to look for the so-called visual center of gravity in the grand scene. The huge screen brought by IMAX’s super high resolution is itself a manifestation of the magnificence of the universe. Dunkirk is one of the movies with the highest resolution so far, and most of its picture composition focuses on a few silent characters. The portrayal of the sea or the beach is not the main audio-visual composition of this movie. As a result, the audience can see that in Dunkirk, compared to Nolan’s past works, the visual focus of this film is lower, leaving more space about the sky at the top. This is indeed due to Nolan’s usual naturalistic aesthetic considerations, because the height of the focus of this field of vision is indeed more in line with the way the human eye sees others in daily life, requiring the audience to keep their necks up in the cinema to watch the movie for audiences are very unfriendly. But this is not just the result of naturalistic aesthetics, taking the 4K Blu-ray version released as an example, Nolan did not use 1.78:1 throughout the movie, in some clips, he also uses 2.2:1 for presentation. Through the comparison, it is not difficult to find that all the clips presented with the expected effects of IMAX have relatively broad background images. When these images are integrated into the shooting of the characters, a stronger sense of presence is created by Nolan. This is not just the presence of the scene restored, because the subject is still the character rather than the environment, and it also brings a stronger emotional presence.

Therefore, we have to mention the point that Dunkirk was conservatively criticized by ordinary audiences after its release, that is, there is a common view that the story narrative of this film is too simple, and it seems that Nolan deliberately passed different timelines. The switch makes it more difficult for the audience to understand the movie. But from the perspective of audiovisual language analysis, this view is really biased, because Nolan has never hidden any key information about the movie’s plot. For example, at the beginning of the movie, Nolan still adopted his usual interpretation method, but this time it was not done through the expression of the character, but the main background of the story was directly presented to the audience through the parallel editing of subtitles and pictures. The main content of this process is a row of British soldiers evacuating to the beach. In the visual narrative without a trace of dialogue, the IMAX camera moved steadily, switching, showing the status of each soldier in detail to the audience. At this moment, the sound of machine guns suddenly remembered, and several soldiers began to fall to the ground. Without any textual explanation, the mental pressure and tension during the defeat and flight can be expressed through pure audio-visual language. Similar techniques have appeared many times in this movie. The screaming sound of the BF109 fighter jet diving and bombing the beach, the sound of bombs falling on the sand, and the roar of propellers from the perspective of the cabin. All of this is combined with the presentation of IMAX’s fine-grained pictures, and Nolan’s preferred emotionally driven narrative is expressed in a brand-new way. In Dunkirk, Nolan treated the characters with a personalityless treatment, but retained the emotions that would drive them to act. At the same time, he did not use any text to allow the characters’ lines to explain their emotions. He Put everything directly into lens language. Through the screen, the audience can empathize with the character’s emotions from their own perspective, rather than a comprehensive feeling based on text interpretation. Not only that, the empty shots in Dunkirk also exhibit characteristics similar to those used by Dennis Villeneuve in Blade Runner 2049 and Arrival. Although these are still empty shots used for transitions, they are not without any information transmission, they are also part of the narrative, and even a few empty shots in Dunkirk can be regarded as subjective perspectives from the characters Observation of the outside world. They are given a strong emotion, and the audience can peek into the deeper emotions of the characters, as the same type of lens that the audience will see in Tarkovsky’s films. In terms of plot driving force, the script of Dunkirk is still Nolan’s usual emotion-driven story, but when constructing the relationship between the characters, he gave up the clearer text of the information and turned to pure audio-visual language to express. Although this made Dunkirk subject to criticism from certain viewpoints, it also proved Nolan’s unremitting efforts in the exploration of audiovisual language. Through the minimalist script composition and the more prominent narrative language of the lens, when the audience is immersed in a movie composed of IMAX images, they should be able to touch the innermost part of the character more deeply. From this perspective, perhaps Dunkirk is Nolan’s boldest and most valuable work in recent years, and it also makes the problems exposed by TENET more obvious and disappointing.

So why is TENET disappointing, because it has almost all the shortcomings of Nolan mentioned above and has produced many new shortcomings. It can even be regarded as Nolan’s retrogression in the use of audiovisual language. In fact, in TENET, Nolan’s lens language was weakened to an incredible point. There are only very few fragments in the film trying to use lens language to narrate. For most of the time, Nolan just points the lens at the object, and then unconsciously tries to express the dialogue scene with the lens. Compared with Inception, the “textual narrative” or “textual interpretation” in TENET appears purer. If Nolan is at least trying to present textual explanations and visual expressions in Inception, the audience can intuitively see the important information mentioned in the text through a series of visual elements and will perform later interpretations. Seeing similar fragments repeatedly in, so as to establish the most intuitive impression in my mind. In TENET, Nolan’s previous combination method is completely absent, and the text information is purely text. Only after the opening explanation of TENET, there is a scene where both text and visual presentation are emphasized. In subsequent movies, Nolan just borrowed the role of the character to say the information he wanted to repeat through lines over and over again, at best, it’s only the explanation of the details is slightly different. Even more, in TENET, there is a section about three people discussing the following almost. In this section, apart from the camera revolving around the three people and recording the conversation of the three people, there is nothing superfluous meaning in this scene, it is just to capture the textual information conveyed by the role dialogue. At the same time, even we put aside these regressions, it is only in this paragraph that another problem of TENET is exposed, that is, the abuse of IMAX. In Dunkirk, Nolan combined the IMAX movie camera and the super-sized screen to achieve a natural and very realistic visual effect, but in TENET, the excessively high visual center of gravity is directly destroyed the possibility of reproducing this kind of naturalistic beauty. When audiences need to watch with their necks up and even more than 2/3 of the height of the screen in a movie that lasts for more than two hours, they have no chance to experience the so-called “shock”. What’s more, in TENET, the use of IMAX is far worse than in Interstellar or Dunkirk. It does not have the former’s deep and mysterious expression of the grand universe, nor does it have the visual effects of Dunkirk that force the audience to have a nervous and immersive natural perception. TENET can even be said to be a wasting of IMAX, especially when the editing rhythm of this film clearly exceeds that of Dunkirk, the audience has not even had time to realize that it is an IMAX lens and feel anything from the big screen about emotions, the next shot will follow. The IMAX of “TENET” is only a super high resolution, but there is no manifestation of visual style. When it came to the last scene of the whole film about the war, Nolan still did not retrieve his clear visual presentation ability in Dunkirk, the whole scene seemed chaotic, and IMAX did not bring any visual advantage in effect is just messed up by the high-speed editing rhythm. Compared with the huge contrast brought by the contrast between the 16mm family video and IMAX’s moon surface scene in First Man to reflect Armstrong’s inner feelings, TENET‘s use of IMAX could be said to be unreasonable. Did Nolan really lose his visual expression ability in Dunkirk? It doesn’t seem to be, because whether it’s the scene of the final male second and the actor’s farewell or the scene of the heroine jumping off the yacht, it once again shows the strong emotional call and the lens language of narrative ability that he successfully realized in Dunkirk. At the same time, though Nolan’s love for applying teal-orange tones to film images first appeared in Interstellar, almost the entire film’s color palette in Dunkirk is presented in a teal-orange tone, TENET’s grading style and film application are still incomprehensible. The huge picture contrast brought by the extremely dark black seems not so coordinated with the highly saturated colors, but it does not highlight the contrast between the explosion and the environment in the final battle. It is impossible for the audience to understand Nolan’s reasons for insisting on using film through these, and the only understanding of this grading style seems to be based on the film’s own obscure and sci-fi world setting. Nolan’s insistence on film reduced to a meaningless obsession in this film. No matter from a technical or artistic point of view, the reason for filming TENET cannot be explained, and the audience cannot be in it to seeing the shocking depth of field effect brought by the IMAX movie camera similar to the pilot played by Tom Hardy at the end of Dunkirk standing in front of the fire, even with this optical characteristic, in TENET nothing shows up at all.

In short, although Nolan did use TENET to make a bold attempt to express the transcendental perception of internal time unprecedented in the history of film and television, and from this perspective, TENET is enough to be called a success, but this cannot be a reason to cover up Nolan’s complete regression of audiovisual language in this film. The audience has reasons to be excited and happy about the director’s innovative attempts, but also have reasons to be frustrated by his failure. It is undoubtedly a disappointment that Nolan’s breakthrough in audiovisual language has not been inherited from Dunkirk to TENET. The original film core and failed lens language make TENET the most exciting but disappointing film in Nolan’s history. And for all this, if possible, I hope to see Nolan pick up his outstanding performance in Dunkirk in his next film, to Prove to the audience that he is indeed an increasingly mature and innovative director.