Nolan is adept and happy to set the tone for the entire film within the first five minutes of the film, with classically clean cuts and tense music. At the beginning of the film, a pair of hands wearing rubber gloves organizes some scattered personal items. At this time, the editing of the footage is compact and concise, and the music is like a mechanical drum. Although the whole film is shot in black and white, it seems that it can be Peek into the shadows of the future Batman trilogy - compact and practical shots and seamless background music to match.
Perhaps due to budget constraints at the time, hand-cranked footage in the film took up most of the time. And from this film, one of the most notable features of Nolan's later works emerged—the characters' dialogues are basically a simple, direct and effective editing technique.
Narratively, Nolan uses two lines. Although they are all flashbacks in memories, one is based on the natural sequence of events, and the other is a trivial and incomplete plot that constantly intersperses plug-ins. The two lines are alternately interspersed at the same time, which seems to be chaotic, but actually makes the whole story more full. The most brilliant thing about Nolan is that he often uses the plot to capture the audience's attraction. In "Following", you can feel that the story was ingeniously dismantled, disrupted and reorganized by Nolan.
A natural sequence narrative. "The young man" tells a series of events that happened to him through a confession at the police station. Although this is a flashback, it belongs to a natural sequence. And then Noaln interspersed with a series of scenes in disorder, this is another line, some scenes before and after The young man encounters Cobb before and after changing his image, in fact, these should belong to the memories of the male protagonist----more specific It is said to be fragmented memory. This technique can be used to see the clues of the later "Memento", but the latter is better.
Overall, the film that made Noaln's claim to fame may seem rudimentary due to budget constraints, but Nolan's script construction and effective control over shot synopsis have gradually developed his own unique style since then. In later works, Nplan, who rejected 3D, took this simple and effective method to the extreme.
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