I hadn't heard of the name Christopher Nolan until one day in the university dormitory and watched a "gun version" with five confused pictures, five lost voices, and five lost translations. VCD - "Memento". I didn't understand it, but I thought this film was weird, so everyone watched it again, and this time I realized that the narrative "Five Confusion and Three Ways" of this film is not just because it is a gun version VCD.
I have seen many movies with flashbacks, but none of them have such thorough and wonderful flashbacks—as if a suspenseful movie was dismembered and then reconnected—every 15 minutes. If expressed in base 100, the structure of the film is 85-100, 70-85, 65-70... 1-15. At that moment, I remembered the name Christopher Nolan.
To call "Memento" a revolution in film narrative would be an exaggeration, it's just a variation of "flipping", but "Memento" is indeed special because Nolan describes this extremely bizarre The narrative structure and the story itself are almost perfectly integrated. The 15-minute flashback is in line with the logic of the story and the subjective logic of the protagonist of the story. This severe amnesiac patient can only keep 15 minutes. memory, and he must find the murderer of his beloved wife. This kind of avant-garde-like extreme formal editing and relatively realistic story content have created an unexpected and magnificent spark.
Through this delicate structural arrangement, Nolan allows the audience to enter the spiritual world of the protagonist, to find the lost time of the protagonist, and to overcome the panic and confusion caused by amnesia. And the layers of traps and intrigues are like thick fog, fading in one 15 minutes, and permeating in another 15 minutes. All the way to the end of the story - just the beginning of the protagonist's life, I suddenly realized that the director's arrangement was not just to show off his tricks and ingenuity, but to sigh and sigh about the meaning of life. The gloomy feeling of sadness is still as tender as yesterday when I think of it.
As a result, this bizarre low-budget movie always appeared in my mind, with the withered branches outside the window of the dormitory in Beijing in late autumn, carrying the chill of feeling or the warmth of memory.
Not afraid of over-interpreting, I think maybe Nolan wants to show more than just such a special and weird story. Behind the story may contain the creator's perception of the philosophy of existence and the experience of survival - our existence in the present and the present What is the value of life, and what supports us on this path of life? Looking back, can we get some answers? In the 15 minutes that once flew by.
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