Watch: Christo­pher Nolan’s Time Puzzle

How bet­ter to cel­e­brate the release of a brand new Christo­pher Nolan film that to take stock of his breath­tak­ing back cat­a­logue? As we her­ald the arrival of Dunkirk, we’re thrilled to present a new video essay by Luís Azeve­do (aka Beyond the Frame), made exclu­sive­ly for LWLies, which delves deep into the writer/director’s obses­sion with and manip­u­la­tion of time. Here’s a short back-and-forth with Luís about how he became a video essay­ist and how he went about attack­ing Nolan’s daunt­ing body of work.

LWLies: How did you first get it to the world of video essays?

Azeve­do: I’ve been a film enthu­si­ast since very ear­ly on. My cinephile diet con­sist­ed most­ly of Rocky movies, the Karate Kid series and the Van Damme/​Jackie Chan clas­sics. Any­thing with punch­ing and kick­ing, real­ly. Along the way, I start­ed pick­ing up issues of the Por­tuguese ver­sion of Pre­mière, devel­op­ing my taste as I read more, and found dif­fer­ent film fod­der to watch. Dis­cov­er­ing the writ­ing of Roger Ebert was a cor­ner­stone, as it is for so many film lovers. It got me inter­est­ed in read­ing film crit­i­cism and, even­tu­al­ly, cre­at­ing it.

Read more about Christo­pher Nolan in our lat­est print edition

The next log­i­cal step was to study film. I was told it was too hard to make a liv­ing with a film degree, so I com­pro­mised and opt­ed for a sta­ble and pros­per­ous boom­ing field: jour­nal­ism. I fin­ished a bachelor’s in UTAD (Uni­ver­si­dade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro), after intern­ing on the set of a small film. My exper­tise led me to a year mak­ing cof­fee in the UK. I returned to Por­tu­gal for a new degree, now in film, putting down the milk jug and pick­ing up the pen again.

When did you start Beyond the Frame and what was the first essay you did?

In my first year at UBI (Uni­ver­si­dade da Beira Inte­ri­or) I learned about video essays through Paulo Cun­ha, a pro­fes­sor that who guid­ed me through my the­sis. He intro­duced the class to the works of Kevin B Lee, Tony Zhou, ::kog­o­na­da and Cather­ine Grant. I was hooked. I still find myself tak­ing notes of old­er Kevin B. Lee works and dis­cov­er­ing excit­ing video essays by new­com­ers, or vet­er­ans like Leigh Singer.

For class, we were told to cre­ate a video essay that explored the rela­tion­ship between cin­e­ma and oth­er arts. I looked into Wes Anderson’s rela­tion­ship with lit­er­a­ture. Despite an utter lack of knowl­edge about mon­tage the­o­ry or edit­ing pro­grams, I pro­ceed­ed to place bits and pieces of footage where they didn’t belong, cre­at­ing new mean­ings by manip­u­lat­ing their place­ment, speed or fram­ing. The work quick­ly became exhil­a­rat­ing. It cul­mi­nat­ed in the first video essay I pub­lished on Beyond the Frame.

With vary­ing reg­u­lar­i­ty, I con­tin­ued to cre­ate video essays while study­ing them for my the­sis. After turn­ing in those 70 pages, I spent a week mani­a­cal­ly edit­ing a super­cut that looked at Tarantino’s char­ac­ters and placed them with­in the same uni­verse. Soon after, I spent almost two months study­ing Wes and Roy Anders(s)on and con­nect­ing them, but in a dif­fer­ent manner.

How did you approach this new film?

It was that work on the Anders(s)sons that con­nect­ed me with LWLies and now here I am, writ­ing about myself and Christo­pher Nolan’s Time Puz­zle. The ini­tial goal for this essay was to find a mean­ing­ful con­nec­tion between Nolan’s films and to get clos­er to the core of his film­mak­ing. It was the way Nolan plays with time that piqued my interested.

Watch­ing the films all over again, I found the accu­sa­tions of a per­ceived lack of emo­tion in his films, now mak­ing head­lines, to be base­less. At the cen­tre of his char­ac­ters, there’s a strong rela­tion with the past and its inhab­i­tants. It was that rela­tion­ship, of past moments and time break­ing, that we decid­ed to explore.

Three wives fall to their deaths in The Pres­tige and Incep­tion, and Coop­er falls into a time­less dimen­sion in Inter­stel­lar. In the edit­ing, I placed these shots togeth­er to show how Nolan con­tin­u­ous­ly returns to the same themes and motifs. As I explored the nar­ra­tive manip­u­la­tion of time, I tried to repeat­ed­ly con­nect these moments to cre­ate a work that not only reflects Nolan’s obses­sions, but rein­forces them through juxtaposition.

Styl­is­ti­cal­ly, I also tried to recre­ate some of Nolan’s choic­es in the edit­ing. I played around with the won­der­ful music by Kevin MacLeod to set the tem­po and tone of video, with the films’ sound design as their compliment.

Find more videos by Luís at Beyond the Frame here, and fol­low him on Twit­ter.

LWLies 107: The Sin­ners issue – Out now!