Even the most ambitious filmmakers have to start at the bottom — and that was surely the case for Christopher Nolan. The Oscar-winning director, whose adaptation of The Odyssey has been a highly anticipated summer blockbuster, has the brand power of a major movie star or established piece of IP today. But back in the ’80s, he began his legendary career by making micro-budget mystery noirs with a crew of friends in the United Kingdom.
Back then, even though he still had a long way to go, Nolan constructed the prototype for his signature style in his early short Doodlebug and his debut feature film, Following. However, another, earlier short, Tarantella, shows Nolan at his rawest and most amateurish. Channeling the surrealist nightmares of David Lynch, Nolan’s 1989 short is difficult to track down online, making it all the more alluring to every die-hard fan.
Christopher Nolan’s ‘Tarantella’ is a Surrealistic Experiment
Image via UCL Film Society
Considering that Nolan has comfortably earned legend status in the world of film-making, everything he’s ever worked on will surely be preserved and remastered to survive the rest of time. For now, though, Tarantella, co-directed by Roko Belic, is more or less impossible to watch in high-quality form; it periodically turns up on fan-run message boards, where it then inevitably gets taken down for copyright purposes.
It stars the director himself in his lone on-screen performance, along with his brother and recurring collaborator, Jonathan Nolan, playing, respectively, a tortured young man in black and a young man in white. While Nolan would become synonymous with dynamic, time-bending narrative structures, Tarantella is devoid of any plot, as the short is a collection of feverish images consisting of spiders and demons that have haunted the two young men. It is an experimental voyage into the subconscious without the spectacle (and certainly budget) of Inception.
Watching this amateurish manipulation of the form will recall the early work of the late David Lynch, whose name became synonymous with these kinds of inscrutable explorations of dreams and distorted realities. It’s not as polished or formative to Nolan’s own filmography as Eraserhead was for Lynch, but Nolan’s interest in deconstructing film language was evident from the start.
The Early Signs of Christopher Nolan’s Style in ‘Tarantella’
Shot on 16 mm color film and devoid of dialogue, Tarantella features various Nolan hallmarks, including the manipulation of time and reality, fragmented editing, and characters absorbed by their own minds. Despite its fantastical imagery, all the surrealist shots of spiders and other non-sequitur dreamlike images feel quite tactile, akin to Nolan’s steadfast commitment to using practical effects over CGI and grounding outlandish scenarios like space travel and comic book universes. Nolan is not a director who operates on a frugal budget, but it’s impressive to see how far he could stretch a dollar in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
There is one element present that never turned up in any of his future work: the director himself on screen. Seeing Nolan appear on camera in one of his movies — something he’s never done since, even in cameo form — is quite jarring. Indeed, there was a time when he couldn’t rely on Christian Bale or Matt Damon to be his leading men, and had to get the job done himself.
Beyond just serving as a curio in Christopher Nolan’s monumental career, Tarantella serves as a reminder that the Odyssey director is overdue to make his foray into the horror genre. From each Joker (Heath Ledger) monologue in The Dark Knight to the church speech scene in Oppenheimer, Nolan has long specialized in crafting nerve-wracking scenes with minimal touches. His control of uncanny moods and unsettling auras is distilled to its most essential in his early short.
Like most early shorts by great auteurs, Tarantella is not as much a clear-cut blueprint for Nolan’s future masterpieces, but rather, a charming expression of a young filmmaker working out his creative muscles. Rarely do we see Nolan this raw and loose, as he’s made a career off of clinical and calculating mystery thrillers, sci-fi epics, and expansive biopics. He may not always be in complete control of the frame, but his palpable effort and theatrical flair behind and in front of the camera in Tarantella unlocks a vulnerability that would be harder to decrypt in his features.
