02.11.2022

‘Rotating hallway’ from Inception (2010), Dir. Christopher Nolan

William Brown (2013) explains how digital cinema has opened up an unique ‘continuous’ logic that has created a way for movies to ‘push beyond the human understanding of space.’ Which creates plots and scenes that make sense to an audience while watching but are completely surreal and sometimes hard to fathom when trying to explain what is going on to someone who has not watched that piece of digital audiovisual content. With digital cinema came ‘ontological perplexity’: moving an audience out of realistic time and space. Many directors who create post-cinematic movies/TV shows have played around with this concept, but one that has really stood out is Christopher Nolan. He is especially known for his mind-bending movies.

Looking closer at one of his many masterpieces, Inception, a scene that has gained a lot of attention is ‘the rotating hallway’ scene. A scene so complex and layered, literally, that it can be hard to wrap your mind around the concept of it. To put it as simply as I can, jumping right into the scene: While the team is stuck in a dream, they are in a van (in real life) which flips, making the environment (the hallway) they are in inside the dream rotate with the van.

This complex idea might seem very unrealistic while reading it, but seeing it on screen, it makes sense. We are transformed into the world of the film, having been visually and verbally explained how the dream state works. While watching it, it simply makes perfect sense that what happens around the characters in real life will affect what happens to the characters in the dream.

Surprisingly the scene is indexical. This means it was created without the use of any CGI. Instead, the hallway was built to rotate and the actors were trained and hooked to wires to make Nolan’s vision come true.

Sources:

• William Brown (2013), Supercinema, Berghahn Books. Accessed: 02.11.2022.
• Christopher Nolan, (2010), Inception.
• Patrick Phillips (2021), The Truth About Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Hallway Fight in Inception. Accessed: 02.11.2022. Available: https://www.looper.com/305750/the-truth-about-joseph-gordon-levitts-hallway-fight-in-inception/ 

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