Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000)

Memento, the product of brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s collaboration, follows an anterograde amnesia patient searching for his wife’s murderer. Director Christopher Nolan adapted his brother’s short story and later came up with the unique idea to tell the story backwards. The structure of the film alternates between black and white segments and color segments. The black and white segments fit together in chronological order, depicting a phone call between the protagonist, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), and an anonymous man. The color segments are played in reverse order starting with the end of the chronological events and represent the time in between Leonard’s memory lapses. The innovative structure of the film creates a tense and mysterious drama that makes the audience share the protagonist’s experience because, like Leonard, we don’t know what happened before the scene we’re watching.

Memento falls into our Film Noir series, but as a modern film made in 2000, critics would categorize it as “neo-noir.” While Memento may lack a number of the stylistic traits associated with classic film noir, it exactly embodies many of the noirist motifs. One might compare Memento to Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Somewhere in the Night (1946), about an amnesiac ex-marine, in which “memory and identity is an absolute metaphor for the inability of the noir hero to distinguish between benign and malign as he moves through the noir underworld,” critics Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward write. The same is true of Leonard.

The neo-noir tones of Leonard’s identity crisis and memory loss and the cruel subjectivity of the characters of Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) emerge very subtly. The subtlety of Natalie and Teddy make the depressive emotions of the neo-noir genre even more pervasive as their ambiguous motives lurk just beneath the surface of their everyday demeanors, just waiting to take advantage of the confused Leonard. This sense of paranoia is further enhanced by casting Guy Pearce, a relative unknown, to play Leonard. Alec Baldwin and Brad Pitt were originally considered for Leonard’s role and but both were unable to accept, allowing the film to take on a more down to earth feeling without the attending “star power.”

Finally, what makes the film so sharp in all of its facets is the intense passion and attention to detail of all of the actors and directors involved. Guy Pearce personally called the director looking for the part and was on set every day of the incredible 25-day shooting schedule. Besides the tremendous work effort necessary to shoot a movie in 25 days, the director’s attention to detail to create Leonard’s condition, anterograde amnesia – the experience of memory loss of events that follow an injury, as opposed to retrograde amnesia where the victim experiences a loss of memory of events prior to injury – as realistic as possible that it garnered praise from Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch saying Memento is "the most accurate portrayal of the different memory systems in the popular media."

Director Nolan emphasizes this realism by avoiding conventional Hollywood touches. In a fight scene where Leonard attacks Jimmy, Guy Pearce insisted on a realistic fight. While on the phone in the black and white scenes Pearce was allowed to improvise his narrative. We hope you enjoy Memento, both as a thought-provoking addition to the noir genre and as a unique film in its own right.

Daniel Preus
Film Club Co-President

Howard Hawk’s The Big Sleep (1946)

One of the most intriguing aspects of film noir is its use of a strong narrator. Voice-overs and first-person, or restricted, narration are used with both style and consistency in the genre, so much so that we tend to associate those characteristics with film noir and to describe other movies that use the technique as “noirist.” (There is even one film, Lady in the Lake, filmed entirely from the main character’s point of view; that is, all the camera shots are all restricted to what he sees, as if the camera were his head, and the only time you see the character himself is when he’s looking in a mirror.)

Let’s hit the quote machine: “What is significant about The Big Sleep in terms of narration is that is strictly adheres to restricted narration – that is, the camera is always tied to Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart’s character), so the spectator finds out what happens in the narrative when Marlowe does. For example, while waiting outside Geiger’s house, Marlowe sees a car pull up outside. He hides in his car so as not to be seen. Interestingly, the camera remains outside the car and shows a figure get of the other car and enter Geiger’s house. Yet, the figure remains in shadow. So, even though the camera does not directly imitate Marlowe’s point of view as he hides in the car, it does not privilege the spectator either” (Buckland, Film Studies, 43-44).

So what does this limited perspective do for our understanding of this film and of the film noir genre? Well, for The Big Sleep, we get a simple connection. Based on a Raymond Chandler novel, The Big Sleep is a detective story, a genre that likes to unravel mysteries one clue at a time. Limiting our experience to what Marlowe learns as he learns it both maintains the suspense and allows us to enjoy the step-by-step solving of an intricate puzzle.

Beyond this, we may conclude that film noir employs this technique consistently because it tends to depict an urban world in which a single character struggles (usually unsuccessfully) against the forces of corruption, temptation, and chaos. A first-person narration enhances this focus. In addition, film noir frequently delves into the psychological effects or torment of its characters, and this is more cathartic for the audience if we are closer to the character.

This is not to say that film noir avoids third-person or omniscient narration. Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, regarded as the final film noir of its period, employs third-person very effectively, from its opening scene where we watch someone put a bomb in the rear of a car, then follow the car as it works its way slowly through a Mexican border town, then shift to follow the two protagonists as they take an evening stroll. The third-person here allows us to meet characters (exposition) and regard the situation (with its rampant hypocrisy and corruption) objectively and a kind of distanced horror.

But The Big Sleep loves its protagonists. And with Bogart we’re unlikely to get a character who suffers because of the disillusionment of the post-war generation. He may be cynical (world-wise). He may be imperfect (human). He may struggle with a world going to hell. But Bogart usually, as you’ll see here, remains above the morass. The film’s restricted narration makes us his sidekick. It’s a great place to be.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser