Christopher Nolan
Personal project — 2024
Such temporal dislocation was surely a good omen, not that any were needed, for Christopher Nolan and “Oppenheimer.” Nolan’s films, after all, are nothing if not laments for lost time, composed in bravura bursts of chronological anarchy. In his early calling-card classic, “Memento” (2000), the noirish plot runs both backward and sideways; in his virtuosic Second World War thriller, “Dunkirk” (2017), three splintered time lines duck and weave and occasionally do battle, as if the perils of military combat had caused linearity itself to become unmoored. Most magnificently disorienting of all is the science-fiction epic “Interstellar” (2014), in which a team of astronauts slip through a wormhole for a few hours and emerge to find that twenty-three years of Earth time have passed. Applying the same math, one could theoretically plow through ninety-six years of Academy Awards history in about thirteen hours—which, for many viewers, is about how long the average Oscars ceremony feels anyway.
sketches
