Visual Rhymes: The Cinematic Resonances of ‘Tenet’

Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video essay that looks at the cinematic resonances in — and influences on — Christopher Nolan’s Tenet.

Very few filmmakers create within a vacuum. I challenge you to think of a filmmaker who, by and large, is not enthusiastic, open, and enamored with their own cinematic influences. Movie-making is an inherently referential art, and a lot of it rhymes with each other, intentionally or otherwise.

And sure, there are downsides to this distinctly post-modern notion that everything is a remix. In certain instances, plagiarism can masquerade under the cover of homage. There is also the lurking fear that too much intertextuality can stifle genuinely new ideas. But I think we’d be kidding ourselves to argue that filmmakers don’t watch films and that these films don’t then affect their own creative output.

It’s no secret that Christopher Nolan is a passionate cinephile. What is Inception if not a love letter to Satoshi Kon’s Paprika? How can you watch Interstellar and not see the connective tissue to the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris, and Slaughterhouse-Five?

Noting cinematic rhymes and visual similarities isn’t necessarily pejorative. Instead, I’d argue such comparisons merely acknowledge the fruitful reality that art influences artists. And that’s precisely why videos like the one below, remarking on the cinematic similarities within Nolan’s Tenet to Looper, To Live and Die in L.A., Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, the James Bond movies Goldfinger and Casino Royale, and many more, are so valuable.

Watch here “Déjà Vu: Tenet” here:

A défaut de vous donner toutes les réponses sur #Tenet, on vous propose certaines références. Une raison de plus de voir et revoir le film de Christopher Nolan ! pic.twitter.com/msPVwBZViw

— CANAL+ Cinéma (@CanalplusCinema) May 17, 2021

Who made this?

Paris-based actress and videographer Candice Drouet is an old favorite around these parts. She has worked with the likes of Adidas and Fandor, and she currently collaborates with the French premium television channel Canal+, for which she created today’s video about the cinematic resonances of Tenet. You can follow Drouet on Instagram here. And on Twitter here. And you can check out her back catalog of videos on Vimeo here.

More Videos Like This

• Candice Drouet’s lyrical split-screen examinations of film resonance are pure bliss. But she doesn’t just use her powers for Oscar darlings and auteurs. For instance, her look at all the film-echoes in Venom is *chef’s kiss*.
• Another sample from Drouet’s Déjà Vu series: on the influences and visual similarities in Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Favourite.
• And one more: a side-by-side comparison that looks at the cinematic rhymes in Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
• On the Tenet beat, here’s a video essay on what the film can teach us about the limits of expository dialogue.
• One thing that Christopher Nolan is very good at is cross-cutting between different scenes to build suspense. Here’s a video essay from Lessons From the Screenplay explaining how Nolan weaponizes cross-cutting.