The experimental short films of Christopher Nolan

Produced during his formative years as a student, Christopher Nolan’s short films have attracted comparatively little critical attention when set against the backdrop of his feature filmmaking. Indeed, the existing discourse on Nolan’s work is overwhelmingly focused on the director’s theatrical releases; Todd McGowan’s The Fictional Christopher Nolan (2012), Jason T. Eberl’s co-edited collection with George A. Dunn titled The Philosophy of Christopher Nolan (2017), Darren Mooney’s 2018 critical companion, Tom Shone’s biographical account The Nolan Variations (2020) and even my own The Cinema of Christopher Nolan (2015) and The Traumatic Screen (2020) are guilty of avoiding an in-depth discussion of Nolan’s short films. While these works each have something significant to offer readers, what is clearly missing from the current scholarship surrounding Nolan is a detailed analysis of his shorts.

There are practical reasons why these texts have been neglected thus far, partly because Tarantella (1989) and Larceny (1996) have not been made widely available; the former aired only once on public broadcast television and the latter featured briefly at the Cambridge Film Festival. But the reluctance of scholars to critically engage with Doodlebug (1997) is indicative of a broader disregard of the form. In an article for the Journal of Short Film Studies celebrating a decade devoted to the art of the short film, Per Fikse, the Director of the Minimalen Short Film Festival in Trondheim, Norway, remarked that all too often, the short film has been considered ‘merely a “stepping stone” or “calling card” on the way to making feature-length films, rather than an important art form in its own right” (2021: 5). With this in mind, this chapter attempts to address the perceived imbalance of critical analysis afforded to short films by offering an in-depth discussion of Christopher Nolan’s short films Tarantella and Doodlebug. Specifically, I explore their stylistic, visual, and thematic terrain and interpret them as being indicative of an alternative temporal experience offered by the short film form.