诺兰小传 | 从超级英雄到敦刻尔克的小感动
Christopher Nolan: from superheroes to Dunkirk’s small tales of heroism
When initial details emerged about the new film Dunkirk, attention focused disproportionately on the news of the acting debut of Harry Styles, of One Direction fame. Creditable as the pop star’s performance may be, he isn’t the main reason for the excitement now surrounding the movie.
新电影《敦刻尔克》细节陆续披露，“单向组合”乐队著名成员哈里·斯泰尔斯初登大屏便吸睛无数，可就算这位流行歌手的表演可圈可点，他也并非影片引发轰动的主要原因。
That’s all due to Christopher Nolan, who already has a place on the distinguished roll-call of celebrity film-makers, alongside Cecil B DeMille, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Spielberg and James Cameron. Or, for that matter, his friend Quentin Tarantino, who has spoken of Nolan’s “old film-making craft”, arguing that he would be “just as potent a film-maker as he is if he was making movies in 1975. Or, if he was making movies in 1965. I’d like to see Chris Nolan’s version of “The Battle of Bulge” [sic]. That would be fucking awesome.”
影片所以火爆全靠克里斯托弗·诺兰，他是电影导演名人榜上的佼佼者，堪比塞西尔·戴米尔、希区柯克、库布里克、斯皮尔伯格及詹姆斯·卡梅隆。说到不朽，诺兰的朋友昆汀·塔伦蒂诺曾盛赞他掌握着“老派的电影技艺”，认为“如果诺兰在1975年甚或1965年拍电影，他会同现在一样具有影响力。我喜欢看诺兰版的《凸出部战役》（原文如此），实在太精彩了。”
Well, now we can. Dunkirk is a film that brings together the director’s finest qualities. In his reconstruction of the events of May 1940, when hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers were evacuated from Dunkirk after being trapped by the Germans, he stages some daredevil action sequences. As this is a study of survival, as opposed to combat, there is also an immersive level of detail underpinning the set-pieces. Finally – and this is arguably the most Nolan-esque touch of all – the action unspools in three interlaced strands that, we come to realise, are not happening simultaneously. The cumulative effect is to bend our perception of time. To mess with our heads.
我们如愿以偿，《敦刻尔克》是集诺兰导演之大成的作品。影片再现了1940年5月发生的事件，当时几十万盟军被德军围困，决定从敦刻尔克撤退。诺兰将某些视死如归的情节搬上银幕，可电影关注的是生存，并非战斗，因此，除了在战场上调兵遣将，影片对细节的表现让人身临其境。最后，大概是最具诺兰特色的，三条叙事线相互交织，我们意识到它们并非同时发生的，这逐渐扭曲了观众的时间感，实在费脑子。
Nolan’s admirers, who have risked dizziness and delirium trying to unpick the knotted twists and time structures of films such as Memento and The Prestige, would surely be disappointed if he didn’t. He is a skilful, stylish storyteller, capable of combining the spectacle of Spielberg with the intellectual intricacy of Nicolas Roeg or Alain Resnais and no less fanatically adored in his own way than any boy-band member.
在《记忆碎片》和《致命魔术》等影片中，诺兰的拥趸们冒着头晕目眩、神志不清的风险，试图理清影片错综复杂的事件关系和时间结构，要是理不清，他们无疑会大失所望。诺兰是一个技巧娴熟、独具风格的叙事者，把斯皮尔伯格的宏大场面和尼古拉斯·罗伊格或阿仑·雷乃的烧脑情节结合起来。人们疯狂追捧他，丝毫不逊于对任何男生乐队成员的喜爱，他有自己的风格。
That is only to be expected for the man who turned the moribund Batman franchise into the Dark Knight trilogy, one of the most respected and lucrative properties in Hollywood, while inventing the concept of the cinematic reboot. “I don’t even know who was first banging around the term ‘reboot’ or whatever,” Nolan said in 2014, “but it was after Batman Begins, so we didn’t have any reference for that idea of kind of resetting a franchise.”
将死气沉沉的蝙蝠侠打造为“黑暗骑士”三部曲，成了好莱坞最受尊敬、盈利最丰厚的财产，同时发明了“电影再造”的概念，这个男人绝对值得期待。2014年诺兰说，“我甚至不知道是谁首先想到“再造”什么的，但应该在《蝙蝠侠：开战时刻》以后，所以我们没想过要再造一个品牌。”
Alongside those pictures there is Inception, which takes place in its characters’ dreams, and the time-warping Interstellar; these are either tantalising cinematic enigmas or mega-budget Magic Eye puzzles, depending on your point of view.
诺兰拍摄了《盗梦空间》，影片发生在主人公梦中，还有扭曲时间的《星际穿越》。这些影片或是令人欲罢不能的难解之谜，或者用天价预算打造令人眼花缭乱的效果，取决于你怎么看。
With this body of work, both commercially successful and critically admired, Nolan has dictated the sombre, thoughtful tenor of the modern blockbuster. If you want to see the Nolan effect in action, look at the gritty, and, yes, rebooted Planet of the Apes series, which might easily have been retitled Bonobo Begins.
影片不仅取得商业的成功，也获得评论界的赞赏，诺兰制造出现代大片那种冷静、沉思的调性。想弄明白什么是真正的诺兰效应，不妨看看情景逼真的《决战猩球》系列，没错，这又是再造之作，不妨称它为《黑猩侠：开战时刻》。
How Nolan arrived at this influential position looks now like a strategy that would be admired by any military commander. Practically born with a Super 8 camera in his hand, he made shorts when still in shorts. He was educated at Haileybury, the English boarding school, and knew from the age of 11 that he wanted to direct movies. He studied English literature at University College London, where he met his future wife and producer, Emma Thomas. They have been married for 17 years and have four children; she has produced all his work to date.
诺兰怎么会具备这么大的影响力，现在看来这像是任何军事指挥官都会仰慕的战略。他打小就手握速8相机，还穿小短裤时就制作短片。他在英国海利伯里寄宿学校接受教育，11岁起就想拍电影。诺兰在伦敦大学学院学习英语文学，在那里遇到未来的妻子兼制片人艾玛·托马斯。他们结婚17年，育有四子，妻子是诺兰迄今为止所有作品的制片人。
Nolan’s entry into film-making came in a series of careful increments, making small budgetary steps each time until he had proved his mettle and gained the industry’s trust. He made a small splash with his low-budget but characteristically slippery 1998 noir thriller “Following,” which was shot piecemeal over the course of a year, and a bigger one with its fiendishly smart 2000 follow-up, “Memento,” based on a story by his brother, Jonathan (who also co-wrote four of his other films).
诺兰进军电影行业，可谓积跬步而成千里，他的拍摄预算小步加码，最后才证明自己大有作为，并赢得业界信任。他凭借低成本犯罪惊悚片《追随》（1998年）红了一把，影片意义暧昧，那是他的典型风格。该影片拍摄断断续续，耗时一年。2000年，他再接再厉，导了精巧不凡的《记忆碎片》，引发更大轰动。这部电影以他的兄弟乔纳森撰写的故事为基础，乔纳森也是他其他四部电影的联合编剧。
The genius of that fragmented, backwards-moving thriller about a man (Guy Pearce) with no short-term memory is that it never allows the audience to know more than the protagonist. When he finds himself running through a car park, he cannot be sure whether he is chasing someone or being chased and neither can we. The film keeps its cards close to its chest, much like as its director does. “I don’t want people to know anything about me,” he once said. “The more you know about somebody who makes the films, the less you can just watch the movies.”
这是一部碎片化、使用倒叙手法的惊悚片，盖·皮尔斯塑造了一个没有短期记忆的男人，其精巧之处在于，它不让观众了解太多主角的信息。当他发现自己跑过停车场时，他无法确定自己在追逐某人还是被人追逐，观众也不知道。这部电影把底牌掖在胸口，就像导演本人一样不动声色。“我不想让人们知道我的任何事情”，他曾说，“你对拍电影的人了解越多，就越是无法单纯地看电影。”
He does, though, have what might be called a persona: the dapper, diffident gent. He drinks tea from a flask on set. “He’ll drink it all day,” said Michael Caine. “He’s made all these millions of dollars but he lives exactly the same way. He still has the same watch he always had, still wears the same clothes.” And he is always spiffily dressed. Making “Memento,” he never removed his trademark blazer, even in the scorching Californian heat. This, he said, was “out of respect for the crew”.
但他确实具备那种被称为个性的特质——干练又谦逊的绅士气派。他用一个长颈瓶喝茶。“可以喝上一整天，”迈克尔·凯恩说。“纵然有成百上千万家产，可生活方式从未改变。他一直带着同一块手表，穿一样的衣服。” 他总是穿得很整洁。即使加利福尼亚州酷暑难耐，拍《记忆碎片》时，他也从没脱下那件标志性的运动上衣。他说这是“出于对剧组人员的尊重”。
From “Memento,” Nolan took another small but significant step up, to make the thriller “Insomnia,” with 10 times the budget and a formidable cast (Al Pacino, Hilary Swank and, in a rare sinister role, Robin Williams). It’s not a personal film (it’s a remake and remains the only film of his that he didn’t write), but it is craftsmanlike. And it was vital in beginning a relationship between Nolan and Warner Bros that has been maintained with patience and care.
《记忆碎片》后，诺兰迈出意义重大的一小步，他拍摄惊悚片《失眠症》，预算是前者的十倍，演员阵容强大（阿尔·帕西诺，希拉里·斯旺克以及一个精彩绝伦的大反派罗宾·威廉姆斯）。 这不是一部个人创作的电影，影片是重拍作品，这是唯一一部不是诺兰编剧的作品，但也颇见功力。该片让诺兰开始和华纳兄弟合作，他们之间的关系一直耐心、友好。
The director has attracted favourable comparisons to Kubrick since his earliest movies, largely owing to his technical expertise and clinical, controlled tone. In his bond with the studio there are echoes, too, of the devotion Warner Bros showed to Kubrick from the mid-60s onwards.
从最早期的电影开始，导演诺兰就被人赞许堪比库布里克，这主要归功于他的专业技巧和情绪平淡、收放有度的格调。他与影业公司关系融洽，从中可以看到六十年代中期以来华纳兄弟对库布里克死心塌地的影子。
Like that director, Nolan has been accused of coldness. Any warmth and sympathy in his work, his detractors claim, tends to come solely from his actors, especially Pearce in Memento, Hugh Jackman in The Prestige as a magician who knows he will never be as good as his rival, or Heath Ledger’s posthumously Oscar-winning turn as the compellingly damaged Joker in The Dark Knight.
像库布里克一样，诺兰一直被诟病为情感冷漠。批评者称，他作品中的些许温暖和同情基本来自演员，如《记忆碎片》中的皮尔斯，《致命魔术》中的休·杰克曼（作为一个魔术师，他知道自己永远比不上对手）或是《蝙蝠侠之黑暗骑士》中的希斯·莱杰（饰演一个极具破坏力的小丑，莱杰死后该片获得奥斯卡奖）。
While this overlooks Nolan’s part in coaxing and shaping those performances, it is true that there can be a distant quality to his work, as though some human component is not quite getting through.
虽然这种论断忽视了诺兰在处理和塑造角色方面发挥的重要作用，但他的作品拒人千里之外，没什么人情味，这也是千真万确的。
We know he can be passionate: it’s there in his campaign to keep celluloid alive (he shot Dunkirk on Imax cameras and a lot of money is going into making sure it is shown as much as possible in 70mm). But the emotional content of his movies can be as muffled as Tom Hardy’s notoriously garbled voice in The Dark Knight Rises. Look at Inception, with its antiseptic, business-class dreams that feel too clean to have been torn from anyone’s subconscious. Or Interstellar, where astronauts settle down for an eight-month hibernation without so much as a “sleep tight”.
我们知道他有热情：正是他努力让电影胶片重焕生机（他在Imax上拍摄了《敦刻尔克》，并花大量资金确保尽可能在70毫米胶片上显示出来）。但影片中的情感内容是隐而不宣的，如同汤姆·哈代在《蝙蝠侠之黑暗骑士崛起》中臭名昭著的含混口音。看看《盗梦空间》，在商务舱里整洁如新的梦境如此清晰，无法同某人的潜意识区分开来。或是《星际穿越》，宇航员进行八个月的冬眠，一点也不像“睡个好觉”那么简单。
“We first met when I was 18 and he was 19 and obviously I don’t think that he is cold,” Thomas has said. “But people think his films are going to be complicated, a little demanding of the audience, maybe too dense.” Caine says Nolan is anything but icy on set: “I’ve had intimate direction from great directors but I’ve never had the sort of intimacy [that] I get from Chris.”
“我们初次见面时，我18岁，他19岁，显然我认为他并不冷漠，”托马斯说，“但人们认为他的电影越来越复杂，对观众要求有点高，可能要表达的内容太多了。”凯恩表示，诺兰开始一点也不冷，“我同其他大导演有过接触，可谁都没有克里斯身上那种亲切感。”
Perhaps the insularity of the worlds Nolan creates is mistaken for coldness. A university lecturer recently bemoaned to me the viewing habits of applicants for undergraduate film courses: “The only directors they know are Christopher Nolan and Wes Anderson. Why aren’t they curious about anything else?” The answer may lie in the seductive but airlessly self-contained visions of those directors. Spielberg at his greatest views reality through a magical prism; Nolan seems to prefer not to engage with it at all.
也许诺兰创造的封闭世界被人误认为冷漠。一位大学讲师就本科生电影课程申请者的观影习惯向我抱怨：“他们知道的导演只有克里斯托弗·诺兰和韦斯·安德森，为什么不能对其他东西感点兴趣呢？”答案可能是两位导演拥有诱人却自成一体的想象力。最伟大的斯皮尔伯格透过魔法棱镜观照现实，但诺兰看起来压根不涉及现实。
Until now. Dunkirk marks an exception to that rule, as well as being one of the anomalies of the summer blockbuster season, being neither a sequel nor an adaptation. There has been talk of Nolan directing a Bond film or returning to the superhero universe. In shaking off those more obvious choices and making this fine-grained film, he proves he is his own man. Superhero diehards may see it as a retreat but it has turned out to be a victory. Not unlike the events at Dunkirk, in fact.
可如今，《敦刻尔克》打破了常规，成为夏日大片季中的另类作品之一，它既非续集也非改编。一度有传言说诺兰将执导邦德系列电影或重回超级英雄主题。拒绝了平淡无奇的选择，选择深耕这部《敦刻尔克》，诺兰证明了他自己说了算。也许超级英雄的铁粉将这视为倒退，但结果他大获全胜，同敦刻尔克大撤退差不多。
译者 陶峰
观世界，学英文
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