Compared with the specific "problem-solving steps" of "Creed", we want to know what Nolan is expressing.
The structure of this article is very simple. We talk about the content from the narrative form of "Creed", and then return to the medium form of film from the content:
1. The narrative magic of "Creed" is like Escher's "paradox painting", end to end, without beginning and end.
2. And such a complex time-space structure hides a "theological" question: In a world without "God", how can human beings be redeemed? Nolan gave an "anti-theological" answer - without the help of God, God or any "other", human beings can be saved by themselves.
3. From the perspective of the film medium itself, the so-called "time reversal" is Nolan's return to the early film film technology.
One hundred years ago, French director Georges Méliès invented the "upside down" technique, and a sausage turned back into a live pig on the screen; one hundred years later, in "Creed", how does the male protagonist understand "reverse bullets" how does it work? Instead of relying on "language" to explain, the process of "grabbing" the reverse bullet with the hand is filmed with a camera, and it is played in reverse.
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Creed: From the future to the past, and from the past to the future
Anne Hathaway has a classic line in "Interstellar": "Time is relative, it can be extended, it can be compressed, but it cannot be reversed." However, in Nolan's eleventh film "Creed" , the director who is keen to explore time intends to "reverse" the irreversible arrow of time dictated by the second law of thermodynamics.
Unlike Nolan's partial attempt in the early film "Memento", the entire story of "Creed" is based on the sci-fi setting of "time reversal". In Operation Tallinn, the film presents the audience with two diametrically opposed "times" that exist simultaneously in the story in the form of "space" - on both sides of the "revolving gate", the red space represents positive time (positive entropy). ), while the blue space represents the world in reverse time (negative entropy).
As the male protagonist turns from the red space to the blue space, the narrative of the film also changes from "forward" to "reverse". After one hour and fifteen minutes of waiting - the midpoint of the entire film's screening time is also the narrative. The moment of reversal - the audience can finally witness this miracle created by the film medium.
Just like the "folded" Paris in "Inception", Nolan once again successfully constructed a visual spectacle that violates the rules of everyday physics in "Creed": in this impossible world, water will flow backwards and fire will form Ice, the car is speeding in the opposite direction on the highway.
Without considering these puzzling sci-fi settings, compared to Nolan's previous works (such as "Memento" or "Deadly Magic"), "Creed" is actually a Nolan movie that is easy to "understand". Because the entire story of this film, no matter the first half or the second half, is actually "positive" for the audience in front of the screen, and the audience always follows the hero's narrative point of view.
That is to say, the "reverse" story in the second half of the film is not what we usually call "flashback", but is still a "forward narrative". And Nolan unexpectedly ditched the fragmented, non-linear cross-cutting he is best at in this film.
Therefore, although the sci-fi setting "outside" the film is quite complex, the storyline that the audience can see inside the film is still a complete, traditional linear narrative. The "reversal of time and space" promised by the film's promotional poster actually only occurs at the visual level and does not affect the narrative logic of the story.
Just like the consistent style of Nolan's films, the stories set by strong sci-fi indeed hide deeper mystery, and the "code" to decipher the deep structure of "Creed" is actually the title of this film, namely the word "TENET", TENET The "allusion" of the stele comes from a square palindrome stone tablet found in the ruins of Pompeii.
First, this completely symmetrical "palindromic" structure suggests the possibility of time reversal in the film; secondly, the spatial scenes in the film appear in turn in the order of tenet's return - let's say the story is divided into a, b and c three In part, the sequence of the narrative is abcba, where c is the middle point of the reversal of the narrative direction, and it is also the Tallinn action in the film; finally, and most importantly, the infinite loop formed by the overlapping of the first letter t and the last letter t ( tenetenet pinpointed the film's deep circular narrative structure:
The hero moves both from the future to the past and from the past to the future. Or to use the military terminology repeatedly mentioned in the film, this operation to save the world is, as a whole, a "pincer offensive" in a time (rather than space) dimension (Note: Divide your own army into two Attack the enemy in two directions, forcing the enemy to stretch the front and fight on both sides).
In other words, the basis for the narrative magic of "Creed" is still Nolan's beloved Dutch printmaker Escher's "paradox paintings" (such as the eternally ascending circular staircase) or the "Möbius ring" in mathematics. They are both end-to-end, reflexive structures with no beginning and no end.
Take, for example, the paradoxical structure evident in this Escher's masterpiece "The Hand Draws the Hand": since the two hands draw each other, we cannot temporally or logically distinguish who drew the other first. , a painting process that has neither beginning nor end.
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Nolan: Theological questions and 'anti-theological' answers
If this paradoxical time structure is still difficult to understand, we might as well "review" "Doraemon", a masterpiece of time and space travel.
In the comics, "Doraemon" is a companion intelligent robot (cat) that travels from the "22nd century" back to Nobita's house in a time machine, but the intriguing question is, why did "Doraemon" begin To come?
Few readers may realize that the entire story of "Doraemon" is actually based on an Escher-style time paradox: in the original setting of the comics, "Doraemon" is Nobita's great-grandson A gift from the future to Nobita from the past (to help him through his "miserable" childhood). In other words, Nobi is both the "cause" and the "effect" of the whole story - the future Nobi saves the childhood Nobi, and the childhood Nobi will surely become the future Nobi.
If we can understand "Doraemon" from this perspective, it is not difficult to understand the most fundamental "problem" behind the seemingly complex space-time structure in "Creed" and other Nolan films:
In a world without "God", how can human beings be redeemed? Although it may sound exaggerated, this is indeed an uncompromising "theological" question, but Nolan gives an "anti-theological" answer to this question - no need for God, God or any "other" "With the help of human beings alone can save themselves.
This concept is concentrated in the circular narrative structure used in "Interstellar" and "Creed", which is dressed in "science fiction" --
In "Interstellar", the expedition to find a new extraterrestrial living space is actually a script pre-arranged by humans in the future "five-dimensional world"; in "Creed", the war on "present" humans and Those who try to save "present" humans are all humans from "future" (the only difference is whether the "grandfather paradox" is believed or not).
All in all, in Nolan's movie universe, human beings will eventually save themselves and the world-through this "hand-painted hand" paradoxical structure, Nolan's film subtly clears any "others" other than human beings (such as Animals, aliens, or gods) in this world's historical process toward doomsday/redemption, as Matthew McConaughey's hero's final epiphany on his "Interstellar" journey: "There's really no'" They', only 'us'!"
Paradoxically, although Nolan constantly presents the cruel reality of "doomsday" in his films, such as the food crisis in "Interstellar", global warming in "Creed", poverty in the "Dark Knight" series. Rich differentiation, etc., but the final solution given by the film is an extremely thorough developmentalism and technological optimism——
"Spear wounds still need spears to cure", the problem of development can only be solved in development, and the trajectory of human history is a closed cycle that contains inevitable salvation. That is to say, although Nolan's film creation is "avant-garde" on the surface, its deep values still cannot escape the ideological framework of Hollywood commercial films.
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Cinema: Reviving the "Time Reversibility" of the Film Medium itself
Finally, let's go back to "Creed," the film's most visually memorable final 30 minutes of a peculiar battle that takes place simultaneously in two opposite directions of time. But this astonishing visual spectacle is more of a revival than an innovation, and we can think of it as a throwback to the early days of film cinema by "filmist" Nolan.
Because the so-called "time reversal" - although impossible in reality - is a simple task for the film medium.
In the film, the shooting technique of "reversing time" is usually called "reverse", which can be traced back to one of the founders of film art, French director Georges Méliès's film a hundred years ago practice.
With his extensive experience in stage magic, Méliès created an "expressionist" film path that was completely different from that of the Lumiere brothers, and among the many film "special effects" techniques he invented, the most important one was "stop and repeat." Shoot" and "reverse" - in Nolan's films, the two correspond to "Teleportation" in "Deadly Magic" and "Time Reversal" in "Creed", respectively.
As the name implies, "reverse playback" refers to reversing the original time sequence of the film during the shooting process when it is actually shown, that is, putting the first frame of the film at the end and the last frame of the film at the front.
Méliès used the "upside down" technique several times in his short films, most notably in "Mechanical Delicatessen" (Mechanical Delicatessen), where the camera first shot the next live pig being slaughtered , until it was finally made into a sausage, and when the film was shown, because the direction of time was completely reversed, what the audience witnessed on the screen was a "surreal" transformation from a sausage to a live pig. "Process.
In "Creed", Nolan actually consciously hinted at the "time reversibility" of the film medium itself through a seemingly trivial detail:
At the beginning of the film, Laura, a scientist played by Clemence Posey, did not choose to use "language" to explain the working principle of "reverse bullet" to the male protagonist who did not understand "time and space reversal" at the time. Instead, the process of "grabbing" the reverse bullet with the male protagonist's hand is subtly filmed with a camera and played back to the male protagonist. The posture "throws" the bullet.
From the perspective of media history, the "TENET" in ancient Rome is actually today's "Creed". The media technology that humans have to reverse time has changed from words on stone tablets to movies on film.
And just like Laura's double-meaning line "Don't try to understand it, but feel it", whether it is the film "Creed" or the media technology itself of "movie", the key to us is It is not about "understanding" but "feeling".
Therefore, even though Nolan's new work has many shortcomings and deficiencies, it still gives us a precious opportunity to return to the theater after the epidemic subsides, and re-experience the unique charm of the film medium on the long-lost big screen—— After all, cinema is not only the past but also the future of cinema.
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Written by: Che Zhixin
Editor: Du Mengwei
Source: Internet "Creed" posters, stills
Operations Editor: Xiao Gugua
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