This is what happened. When I watched Wang Xiaobo a long time ago, I found that he always likes to say, "Of course, there is another version of the story." I admit that the kind of girl who is still showing her thighs today, sexy and charming, and a cute ponytail tomorrow is indeed quite a man's power to resist, but I can't accept it for a while when I am young. Later, I watched "The Lover" under his recommendation. I felt that the thoughts of Duras' narrative seemed to be mixed in the water of the Mekong River, which spread from Vietnam to Laos. Later, when I read Li Yinhe's memoirs, I realized that both Wang Xiaobo and his obscene teacher Duras had a habit of typing the written manuscript into the computer, and then letting the computer reorder the paragraphs.
I see! The so-called narrative order turns out to be no order - I've told you everything, the cause and effect, the beginning and the end, all depend on your own lust. To understand this, Nolan's feature-length debut "Follow" and "Memento", which made him an instant hit, seem to be less unprecedented in terms of narrative structure, but at least in the history of film, he is still the first to eat crabs. people.
The film "Following" tells the story of a down-and-out young man who met a thief by following others, followed the thief to learn stealing, and finally fell into a deception. As far as the story itself is concerned, the plot design of deception and the exploration of the desire of the lower classes of society for normal social life are enough to make an excellent film. It is a pity that this film is by Christopher Nolan, which means that these plots and thoughts will be expressed in a very individualistic narrative way, or rather, submerged, after all, for most audiences In other words, just trying to keep up with the rhythm of the director's camera requires them to concentrate and use their brains. We know from experience from literary pioneers that Nolan divided his story into three paragraphs, showing the first part of the first paragraph, then the first part of the second paragraph, then the first part of the third paragraph, Then, and so on, the corresponding parts of the three paragraphs are shown in sequence. Not only that, the film is narrated in the way of memory, that is, the flashback part of the memory is disrupted into disorder, and when the camera takes our down-and-out youth back to reality from memory, Nolan uses what he has already prepared. A good deceit within a deception completely overwhelmed him and completely fascinated the audience. It seems that Western movies understand what a village is better than their neat gardens. The charm of this novel and bold narrative method is that, due to the disorder of the time sequence, the story is completely presented in the form of fragments, and the audience will pay more attention to the picture and think about the relationship between each fragment because of the inability to sort out the context for a while. Better integrated into the interaction with the director. At the same time, because the audience often gets information about images that are disordered and out of sequence, they lack the necessary causal relationship with each other, and suspense arises. Of course, this narrative method also has its inevitable shortcomings, that is, the overly clear form often obscures the intended connotation of the film, which may be why most viewers choose to sort out the logic after watching this film instead of paying attention to the social fringes The tragic situation of the characters, which may be why Nolan later did not use this narrative when filming "Batman Prequel 2 The Dark Knight". After all, there is still a joker waiting to test the good and evil of people's hearts and give the audience enough thinking used brain cells.
The film "Memento" tells the story of an insurance company investigator who is unable to live normally due to short-term memory impairment, and has to deceive himself in order to live forever in the investigation of a wife murderer who has been brought to justice. The application of Nolan-style narrative techniques can be described incisively and vividly in this film. In contrast, "Following" is really just a small study. The director divides the narrative context of the film into two parts, and the main line is flashed back step by step with color pictures, that is, from what just happened (the protagonist shoots Teddy) to recall the previous events one by one, but each memory is carried out in sequence. The other story line is interspersed between each memory with black and white pictures, showing a vague memory that seems to be a long time ago, until the end of the film, the memory that starts from reality and the memory that starts from long-term memory in sequence in time When the top coincides, all the suspense and mysteries are revealed. It is worth mentioning that, in order to bridge the difference in the color of the two memories, the director skillfully used a photo that is being exposed as a transition, naturally combining the black and white long-term memories. Connecting with the real world of color, and the color of the picture changes at the same time as the protagonist's eternal clothes and his revenge target - the next John.G. The different colors of the picture not only distinguish the time, but also the attitude of the protagonist towards different memories - the color part is due to his short-term memory impairment and cannot remember it, which is a physiological problem, and the black and white part is because he is afraid to face him. Selective forgetting due to the fact that his illness has forced his wife to death is a psychological problem. With the sharp contrast and the ingenious connection, Nolan's use of color in this film is a wonderful brush.
The subtlety of the film's narrative is not only that, you must know that a good film is destined to be piled up by countless carefully arranged small details that are not noticed by the audience. Hitchcock once said, "Suspense consists in giving the audience some information that the characters don't yet know; the characters don't know many things, but the audience knows, so whenever the audience guesses how it ends, the dramatic effect The tension is created.” Specifically, in this film, because the main story adopts the narrative technique of flashback paragraph by paragraph, the audience is always watching what happened before, that is, they already know the outcome of the protagonist in this paragraph, but they do not know How did the plot lead to this result, plus the protagonist has short-term memory impairment, everything in each story is new to him, and the audience is aware of it, so it will be guessed how our ignorant male protagonist will deal with this. A new world and endless suspense came into being. The film generates suspense through a special narrative method, and the suspense will of course take the opportunity to feed the film back. If we compare the time of each main story carefully, it is not difficult to find that in fact, most of the clips are about 3 minutes, but when the audience watches the movie, they will feel that each paragraph is getting shorter and shorter, and the time is getting faster and faster. This is the success of suspense. It plays a role in speeding up the rhythm of the narrative and strengthening the tension of the audience. The last point is that this narrative style itself is actually very consistent with the human way of thinking - our brain stores information in segments, and when needed, extracts useful fragments to form what we call memories. Of course, the brain has another function, which is selective memory - remembering what we prefer to remember, forgetting what we don't want to recall, and even further distorting our subjectively modified memory for this purpose - this probably That's where the movie came from.
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