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I first thought of "Memories", a film released in 2000 directed by Nolan and adapted from Nolan's brother's novel "Memento Mori" (Memento Mori).
is an early work of the great god Nolan. The film is full of experimentation. The whole film is almost a flashback. You can really understand it if you brush it. In addition, you can also get a glimpse of the great god Nolan. The fun and movie style of the early years.
"Memory Fragment" actor Gapierce was not well-known at the time, but in the film, the method of recording important information on his body with tattoos is still very cool, which is similar to Michael in the classic American drama "Prison Break" Wonderful.
and the heroine Carrie Anne Moss, when she took over the filming of "Memory Fragment", she just made her mark with 1999's "The Matrix" and her popularity has soared.
The most important highlight of "Memories" comes from the narrative. The hero has amnesia. Nolan tried a flashback narrative strategy to make this suspenseful story of deception and amnesia unfold in front of the audience step by step.
Actually, "Fragments of Memory" has two versions, regular and flashback. Although the regular version is easier to understand, it is much less interesting. What makes the reverse version different is the self-deception through amnesia—the past self to deceive the future self.
In order to present this kind of scam that is difficult for ordinary people to understand, Nolan had to use flashbacks to achieve an almost amnesia look. However, this pit is too deep, even if it is the narrative god Nolan, "Memories" is still very difficult to understand.
There are two options for most suspenseful movies. One is to let the audience explore the plot along with the protagonist’s adventure, and finally solve the mystery. The second is to first describe the illusion on the surface, and then break the key at the end, so that the whole story will instantly change color.
The first type is smoother, but the second type has a sudden sense of clarity.
Nolan's attempt is to combine the advantages of the two strategies-gradually turning over as it develops. The disadvantage of the second type of narrative is that it will destroy the smoothness of the movie when it is resumed, but if it is not resumed, the audience will have to watch it a second time to understand the plot.
However, if the flashback method is used, every cause is narrated after the consequence, so that every time the timeline jumps, the audience can see the truth below the surface.
This makes the narrative process conform to the structure of the scam, thereby eliminating the need for review. At the beginning of the
movie, the audience saw the ending of the plot, but they were still at a loss. Only with time rewinding, the audience gradually understand the story. At the end of the movie, the audience can understand the ending when they see the beginning of the plot. If you don't see the cause, you can't see the horror of the consequences.
Causal inversion is not only a narrative technique, but also a key to the whole film-amnesia. The protagonist is unable to form new memories due to psychological trauma. For the protagonist, everything after the trauma is unimpressed after five minutes. Nolan uses flashbacks to allow the audience and the amnesiad protagonist to see the world from this special perspective.
When the audience is confused because they don't know the past, the protagonist is also confused. The protagonist's "symptoms" make him have to use a system composed of Polaroids to make life work.
However, the records written in the past may not only be misunderstood by the present self, but also may have been deceived at the moment of writing the record. The errors in these records deceive the protagonist and act as a narrative trap to deceive the audience.
Whenever an incident occurs, the audience has no idea about the cause of the incident, but already knows the consequences. After each timeline jump reveals the reason, it makes the previous story completely different and makes the plot constantly flip. The seemingly kind character becomes the protagonist of the design in the next shot; the person who seems to be full of lies finds that he is the only one who tells the truth in the end. The usual stories of
follow causality, step by step from the beginning to the end. "Fragments of Memory" re-examine the known "future" through the newly learned "past". After knowing the "past", some "futures" become creepy, creating the unique suspenseful charm of "Memories".
due to a thorough flashback, the audience understands the direction opposite to the actual plot, forming two retrograde logical lines.
Therefore, the plot must be reasonable in both directions in order to make the audience understand and form a huge challenge for screenwriting. Nolan tried his best and used many exquisite narrative techniques to make "Memories" an understandable movie.
amnesia and fallUnder the dual restrictions of narrative, introduction and setting are even more difficult. The protagonist has forgotten, so it is unreasonable for the protagonist to say it by himself; the story has reached the end, so the commonly used sections at the beginning cannot be used.
But through the tattoos on the protagonist and the Polaroids in the wallet, dialogue and moderate narration, and slowing down in the early part of the movie, Nolan still at least keeps the audience from completely clueless. In contrast, even if there are no restrictions in current movies, they still only use awkward dialogue to introduce settings, which shows Nolan's brilliance.
Because the timeline keeps jumping forward, another difficulty brought by the complicated sequence of flashbacks is to express the sequence clearly. For this reason, Nolan uses a lot of changes in objects to mark the plot before and after.
Broken car windows, scars on a woman's face, and instant photographs with words written on them, these irreversible changes not only played a foreshadowing before the antecedent was revealed, but also marked the before and after the incident. The multiple roles of the objects in the narrative make the plot elements concise but not lacking, and the narrative techniques can be seen once again.
But to be honest, despite Nolan's superb skills, "Memories" is still not a movie that can be understood for the first time. This is the first attempt to combine narrative techniques and plot elements-flashbacks and amnesia-cannot be considered a success.
However, in 2006's "Deadly Magic", Nolan successfully used a more complex narrative sequence to correspond to the three stages of magic-replacing the real with the fiction, changing the sky, and turning decay into magic.
Nolan in 2008's "Dark Knight" used the technique of multiple uses of a single element to the fullest, so as to put multiple narrative lines in a movie.
"Fragments of Memory" and the earlier and younger "Follow" are actually Nolan's exercises. Nolan’s biggest feature is that the narrative means itself is a means of narrative, which means that the way of presenting the story is also part of the story.
Although "Memories" does not have very good box office feedback on the market, without these experimental attempts, there would be no Nolan who has played the narrative to a superb level today.
