It’s a sprawling magnum of emotionally fuelled storytelling. Transcendental in its ambition, non linear and complementarity in its delivery.
Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) thematically plays on his movie heritage which is diverse, yet moored in the art of memory. Is that not the way for all great filmmakers, the continentals such as Bresson, Godard, Jean and Renoir, then Wells whose Citizen Kane is also an example of synchronicity?
I’ll return to memory in a moment. For there’s something else his vision for this film mimics, captured in the essence of the science that his characters are seeped in — Quantum physics and complementarity.
In life, Niel Bohrs in 1926 acting on Einstein’s 1905 proposal of the duality of light, formally cracks its. Light is both particle and wave. Ergo the world, or even the movie world, is both inner consciousness and outer feelings.
The idea that events are happenings collapsed together around multiple interactions of chained causes and affects — is Quantum, and also synchronicity (see Junger). Synchronicity — things that seem meaningless knit together into some coherent form.
In more hyper flexed kinetic cinema it’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once (2002), and Iñárritu’s Babel (2006).
I was a chemistry and maths graduate approaching the 1990s — not a good one, before I became a journalist, filmmaker and artist in residence at one of the UK’s prestigious centres, The Southbank Centre.
I had a weakness in deciphering inorganic reactions; I loved Organic and can still see on the board the nucleophilic attack of Nitrogen on its benzene molecule leading to Tri-Nitro-Toluene (TNT). But I had no hope for where my chem career would take me , and hence in my second year of Uni lost my hunger for science’s abstruse approach and its delivery and became fascinated in radio and the science history of innovators. My MA radio dissertation was on DNA and its new breakthroughs interviewing Baroness Warnock, before I got a job at the BBC.
I’ve a sweet tooth for science movies. The brilliance of Oppenheimer, fiction as it is, was bringing together physicists and players in dialogue: Bohr, Einstein, Teller, Strauss, and Oppenheimer.
It’s not entirely original. Playing on BBC I-player at the moment is Sam Waterston’s Oppenheimer; a 1980s seven-part mini series. There are parallels with Nolan’s script, yet Nolan’s visuality, the intensity of repartee dialogue creates an edge — as if there wasn’t one already.
There are many piquant moments and it’s widely reported that Nolan held fast to the Pulitzer Prize-winning bio by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Nolan also, its reported acknowledges cinematic license, much like Oliver Stone altered some scenes on his epic Nixon.
That conversation between Einstein and Oppenheimer which becomes a homing pigeon; the need for Einstein to run calculations to validate the world would not end on the explosion of the A-bomb, never happened. It was Nobel Prize winner Arthur Compton who directed the Manhattan Project’s University of Chicago that got the call. Einstein was just a better film figure for this dramatic arc Nolan told The New York Times.
Oppenheimer as a nod to quantum physics, for what some scientists see as a poor choice of words, means a particle can exist in different places. It’s explored cinematically by different expositions in varying time space happening at once: various hearings, a love tryst, and the science narrative towards to creating Trinity (the bomb). What then knits it together for its denouement is memory.
Nolan’s giant jigsaw puzzle of a film, much like in some ways his Tesseract in Interstellar (2014) culminates in different time frames falling neatly together. It’s the Rosebud moment from Citizen Kane.
This post isn’t an article about the film per se rather the idea expressed in Tenet (2020) as “Just feel it”. So what’s the quantum lit fuse?
Filmmakers have perfected the art of borrowing. “They watch each other’s work and learn how to tackle scenes that have gone before” writes Mark Cousins in his erudite “A Story of Film”. I’ve written about Nolan’s films in the past and what it offers. Tenet, Dunkirk, and Interstellar.
In training the UK’s first newspaper journalists to become video journalists in 2005 I created a feature news piece influenced by the kinetic movement of the camera inspired by Paul Greengrass’s work.
I’ve built a career in news and journalism which has had a problem with memory. If the very nature of news is what’s new, then arguably during its inception you could point to current affairs and documentary to perform the function of remembering. Admittedly there’s only so much you can do with 2 minutes. But these structures in journalism are constructs that suited television journalism at its birth, but in the world today are inadequate.
Professor Catherine Loveday, a psychologist and regular contributor to the BBC talked to me about memory and journalism. Here’s an excerpt:
Loveday: A news story is a shorter piece of information. It may be something that doesn’t engage you as much and so you don’t pay too much attention to it. More importantly it hasn’t necessarily got a narrative that runs through it. So you don’t invest in the story psychologically or immerse yourself the same way you would a film in which you’re relating to the characters integrating it with your own knowledge base and experience.
Dunkley Gyimah: So how does that happen?
Loveday: So one of the things is how deeply you process something. The second is how engaging it is. The third, which is related is how much attention you pay it. The forth is the different kind of formats that the same sort of information is presented to, so if there’s any kind of repetition. So for example in a film you might have music in it and the music might allow you to engage emotionally more with what’s going on.
So it’s employing more than one sense, so visual sense and auditory sense. I know this happens with documentary, as well as with the news but not to the same extent. Those are some of the things that make film memorable…There are some formats that are more memorable than other. ’There’s a bit of discrepancy around this but we tend to remember visually more easily than auditory stuff.
Dunkley Gyimah: Because?
Loveday: Memory tends to be more visual, using more visual areas of the brain. If I ask you to remember something from last week or ten years ago, fifteen years ago, it tend to be visual. The other thing with narrative is that we are primed as human beings to remember stuff as narrative. We try and reconstruct our life and our kind of world as narrative, and we need to do that to in order to place ourselves in context in the rest of our lives.
Memory is at the heart of how people function. Yet it’s often rendered obsolete in journalism. You can gaslight, and all but believe there’s no consequences, that obscenely, “Black people benefited from slavery because it taught useful skills”, and that’s it!
Nolan’s gift to me, like I said we all take and modify something from auters is to reimagine how in a world of 2030, even now, how our memories will serve us in media in a world where we’re reliant on AI.
If the media did not already exist of an event, if the past is strafed with representation harms that are caked into AI what then? The Interdisciplinary school in London made a video in which it asked Gen AI text to image about how Barbie would look in territories like Sudan and South America. It’s worth a look.
How can I take Nolan’s thoughts to create a piece of work, which becomes immersive and triggers engagement?
How does Nolan prompt me as a filmmaker, artists and educator?
This is one example: a two minute project promo featuring the story of my father, a policeman in the Gold Coast in the 1950s, who came to Britain to advance his career. We’re unravelling several interesting story arcs, but we’re bereft of archive. What though if relying on memory we could build these scenes in Gen AI?
