Download or read book Narrative Complexity in Christopher Nolan s Memento Narrative Structure Unreliability Fabula Construction and Cinematography as Key Elements for the Spectator s Manipulation written by Claudia Rumms and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2015-10-16 with total page 21 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject Film Science, grade: 1,3, University of Münster, language: English, abstract: In my term paper, I will examine the narrative structure in “Memento“ which switches between chronological narration and reversed temporality. With respect to this unique narrative structure, I will take a closer look at the black-and-white and colour sequences, the opening sequence and the outstanding and resolvent scene 22/A, especially regarding the cinematography used. In the further course of my work, you will learn of the essential role of the unreliable narrator regarding my thesis and finally what impact the fabula construction in “Memento” has on his viewers. „Causes and their effects are basic to narrative, but they take place in time“. This quotation from Bordwell’s and Thompson’s work Film Art, an Introduction does not only show a fundamental principle of narration but furthermore depicts a possibility to manipulate the spectator’s understanding of a story. Christopher Nolan’s “Memento” is one example of what a complex narration can be. The film shows two separate stories of Leonard, an ex-insurance investigator who suffers anterograde amnesia and attempts to find the murderer of his wife, which is the last thing he can remember. On the one hand there is a forward moving storyline, the black-and-white scenes while the other one, the colour sequences, tells the story backwards. Although the story behind the film is rather simple, the narrative structure is extremely complex and clever, which demands constant attention from its spectators. This term paper will deal with the methods used in “Memento” which mislead the audience’s understanding of the story. My thesis is therefore: Narrative complexity in Christopher Nolan’s “Memento” – Narrative structure, Narrator’s unreliability, fabula construction and cinematography as key elements for the spectator’s manipulation. Apart from the film “Memento”, the central literature I will work with is the essay by Stefano Ghislotti “Narrative Comprehension Made Difficult: Film, Form and Mnemonic Devices in ‘Memento’”, the documentary “Anatomy of a Scene” about the making of “Memento”, a text by Andy Klein named "Everything You Wanted to Know about ‘Memento’” and different filmic narrativity by Jakob Lothe, David Herman and Edward Branigan. In addition to that, there is a self-generated sequence analysis attached to the term paper in order to have an overall view of the scenes I take a closer look at.
Download or read book Christopher Nolan s Memento Analysis of the narrative structure of a noirish revenge film written by Torben Schmidt and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2003-04-11 with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Other, grade: 1 (A), University of Frankfurt (Main) (Institute for England and American Studies), course: Decadenca and Modernism in Late 20th Century Cinema, language: English, abstract: Christopher Nolan’s low budget film Memento (2000), which is based on the concept of a short story named Memento Mori written by Nolan’s brother Jonathan, was certainly one of the most successful films in the United States in 2000. In most cinemas it was shown for more than 15 weeks in the summer season – the most competitive season of the year. While the success of many modern Hollywood films is a result of “money, hype and more money”, Memento “represents a triumph of writing, directing, and performance” (Klein 2001). This film belongs to the so called neo-noir and revenge-film genre. In this paper these two genres will first of all be described in detail. Afterwards, the plot and the narrative structure of Memento – which is extremely complex, clever and demands intelligence and constant attention from its spectators – will be discussed.
Download or read book Classical Hollywood Cinema and Christopher Nolan s Memento written by Jonas Lucas and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2011-05-05 with total page 10 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,0, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, language: English, abstract: This paper shows that Memento does mostly not fit in with Classical Hollywood Cinema (CHC). It will give a definition of the characteristics and aims of CHC to provide background information. Then, CHC is compared to Memento in the second part of the paper. It is going to show to which degree the film Memento can be seen as CHC, where the similarities and differences are and therefore give a solution of the film’s category.
Download or read book Memento written by Claire Molloy and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-28 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book introduces Memento as an important independent film and uses it to explore relationships between "e;indie,"e; arthouse and commercial mainstream cinema, independent film marketing practices and online fan communities. The book also locates Memento within debates around key film studies concepts such as genre, narrative and reception.
Download or read book Visuality and Identity in Christopher Nolan s Memento written by Anett Koch and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2014-06-26 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Communications - Movies and Television, grade: 1,3, University of Mannheim, language: English, abstract: Christopher Nolan’s film from 2000, "Memento," takes a critical look at the visually dominated world we live in and challenges traditional cinema by addressing the film’s artificiality and visuality. Memento draws attention to the sheer mass and variety of visual stimuli that surround us by playing with the use of camera, photographs, mirrors and other visual media. The focus on visuality illustrates our dependence on visual media in determining who we are, how we see the world and how we think. Memento is centered on a protagonist – Leonard Shelby – who is especially reliant on the help of visual media but does not realize how much it influences his identity. Leonard is a former insurance claims investigator who suffers from anterograde amnesia, a condition that prevents him from turning short-term memories into long-term ones. Leonard’s amnesia is the result of a head injury he received while he was trying to rescue his wife from a murderer. Thus, Leonard lives in episodes that last about 15 minutes and after each such episode he forgets everything that happened before. Being deprived of the ability to remember anything that has happened since his wife’s murder, Leonard has to come up with his own strategies to deal with everyday life. In the course of the film, the audience learns that Leonard has developed a system of visual cues to replace his memory. He even goes further and declares that his method of remembering via photographs, mind maps, tattoos and notes, is more reliable than memory itself. Leonard calls his visual cues ‘facts’ and ignores the lack of context that comes along with a memory that consists only of separate Polaroid photos, ink on his skin and a few slips of paper.
Download or read book Postmodern Narrativity in Absalom Absalom and Memento written by Jessica Jain Williams and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ABSTRACT: This paper argues that narrative techniques in Absalom, Absalom! demonstrate Faulkners anticipation of postmodern thought and style. Similar techniques in Christopher Nolans film Memento serve to highlight how both writer and director confound the notion of master narrative by disrupting chronology and raising questions about the reliability of the narrators in each work. Nolan orders all events of the film in reverse while threading chronologically ordered events throughout to tell the story of Lennys murder investigation. Faulkner likewise uses dischronology, such as flashbacks to tell the story of Thomas Sutpen. Both Faulkner and Nolan provide key information through questionable narrators at strategic times to manipulate readers/viewers thoughts and opinions about specific characters. Nolan and Faulkner use several narrators, none of whom witnessed all events, to tell the stories of each work.
Download or read book The Distortion of Classical Narrative Techniques in Modern Film Using the Example of Vanilla Sky written by Christian Schlütter and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2009-07 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject Communications - Movies and Television, grade: 1,3, University of Siegen (Forschungskolleg 615), course: Narration and Film, 10 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: For a long time, most Hollywood directors stuck to a certain kind of narrative strategies to convey their view of the world to the recipient. Movie-conventions were therefore set from the beginning of profitable movie making and were fastened by the rise of big movie studios. In recent modern movies however, some directors have laid extreme interest on not sticking to the conventions and established a kind of non-narrative technique. As a result some of the most astonishing movies of the 90ies and the new millennium were created. The success of some of these movies can be explained by two facts. First of all, the abolishing of movie conventions resulted in the filmic reproduction of stories that had before been said to be unfit for filmic expression. Secondly the movies created drew their fascination from a non-understanding. With no classical movie conventions aligned, these movies seemed disturbing and frightening but it is also this disturbance that mesmerizes the viewer. In this essay I will try to outline in which way narrative conventions are abolished in modern productions and what effect this has on the spectator. To reduce the amount of information and to exemplify certain points I will stick to Cameron Crowe's movie Vanilla Sky (2001) which is based on the motion picture Arbre los Ojos (1997) by Alejandro Amenabar. The choice is justified by a rather confusing structure of the film which corresponds perfectly to the new way of moviemaking and also by the roots of the motion picture in an Off-Hollywood production area. These roots show that, although many non-classical movies have earned a lot of reputation, most moviemakers stick to conventions and that inventions are still entrenched in alternative cinema.
Download or read book Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema written by A. Cameron and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-07-11 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early 1990s there has been a trend towards narrative complexity within popular cinema. This book examines a number of contemporary films that play overtly with narrative structure, raising questions of chance and destiny, memory and history, simultaneity and the representation of time.
Download or read book Impossible Puzzle Films written by Miklos Kiss and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-18 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narrative complexity is a trend in contemporary cinema. Since the late 1990s there has been a palpable increase in complex storytelling in movies. But how and why do complex movies create perplexity and confusion? How do we engage with these challenges? And what makes complex stories so attractive? By blending film studies, narrative theory and cognitive sciences, Kiss and Wilemsen look into the relation between complex storytelling and the mind. Analysing the effects that different complex narratives have on viewers, the book addresses how films like Donnie Darko, Mulholland Drive and Primer strategically create complexity and confusion, using the specific category of the impossible puzzle film to examine movies that use baffling paradoxes, impossible loops, and unresolved ambiguities in their stories and storytelling. By looking at how these films play on our mind's blind spots, this innovative book explains their viewing effects in terms of the mental state of cognitive dissonance that they evoke.
Download or read book Narration in the Fiction Film written by David Bordwell and published by Madison, Wis. : University of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, David Bordwell offers the first comprehensive account of how movies use fundamental principles of narrative representation, unique features of the film medium, and diverse story-telling patterns to construct their fictional narratives. The result is a pioneering, far-reaching work which will change the way we perceive narrative film--and which every serious film scholar, student or fan will welcome.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Christopher Nolan written by Jason T. Eberl and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-06-20 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a director, writer, and producer, Christopher Nolan has substantially impacted contemporary cinema through avant garde films, such as Following and Memento, and his contribution to wider pop culture with his Dark Knight trilogy. His latest film, Interstellar, delivered the same visual qualities and complex, thought-provoking plotlines his audience anticipates. The Philosophy of Christopher Nolan collects sixteen essays, written by professional philosophers and film theorists, discussing themes such as self-identity and self-destruction, moral choice and moral doubt, the nature of truth and its value, whether we can trust our perceptions of what’s “real,” the political psychology of heroes and villains, and what it means to be a “viewer” of Nolan’s films. Whether his protagonists are squashing themselves like a bug, struggling to create an identity and moral purpose for themselves, suffering from their own duplicitous plots, donning a mask that both strikes fear and reveals their true nature, or having to weigh the lives of those they love against the greater good, there are no simple solutions to the questions Nolan’s films provoke; exploring these questions yields its own reward.
Download or read book The Levels of Narrative Cinematic Techniques written by Hanne Coorevits and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book MEMENTO written by and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book THE MEMENTO written by and published by . This book was released on 1845 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Cinema of Confinement written by Thomas J. Connelly and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-15 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Thomas J. Connelly draws on a number of key psychoanalytic concepts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Joan Copjec, Michel Chion, and Todd McGowan to identify and describe a genre of cinema characterized by spatial confinement. Examining classic films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, as well as current films such as Room, Green Room, and 10 Cloverfield Lane, Connelly shows that the source of enjoyment of confined spaces lies in the viewer's relationship to excess. Cinema of Confinement offers rich insights into the appeal of constricted filmic spaces at a time when one can easily traverse spatial boundaries within the virtual reality of cyberspace.
Download or read book Narrative and Media written by Rosemary Huisman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-26 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narrative and Media, first published in 2006, applies narrative theory to media texts, including film, television, radio, advertising, and print journalism. Drawing on research in structuralist and post-structuralist theory, as well as functional grammar and image analysis, the book explains the narrative techniques which shape media texts and offers interpretive tools for analysing meaning and ideology. Each section looks at particular media forms and shows how elements such as chronology, character, and focalization are realized in specific texts. As the boundaries between entertainment and information in the mass media continue to dissolve, understanding the ways in which modes of story-telling are seamlessly transferred from one medium to another, and the ideological implications of these strategies, is an essential aspect of media studies.
Download or read book Psychology at the Movies written by Skip Dine Young and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-04-09 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychology at the Movies explores the insights to be gained by applying various psychological lenses to popular films including cinematic depictions of human behavior, the psychology of filmmakers, and the impact of viewing movies. Uses the widest range of psychological approaches to explore movies, the people who make them, and the people who watch them Written in an accessible style with vivid examples from a diverse group of popular films, such as The Silence of the Lambs, The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, Taxi Driver, Good Will Hunting, and A Beautiful Mind Brings together psychology, film studies, mass communication, and cultural studies to provide an interdisciplinary perspective Features an extensive bibliography for further exploration of various research fields
