Christopher Nolan is well known to domestic audiences for his career milestone "The Dark Knight" trilogy and the phenomenal science fiction masterpiece "Inception"; but Nolan entered the public eye abroad more early with his second feature film", "Memory Fragments".
Fragments of Memory is an adaptation of a novel by his younger brother Jonathan (originally titled Symbol of Death, published in Esquire magazine in March 2001), when Jonathan had the inspiration for the story and told it to Nolan when he first started writing the novel. As a result, the two brothers who were very interested in the concept of this story, one continued to complete the novel, and the other adapted the story into a movie. So, when Nolan made the film, the novel had not yet been officially published.
It is for this reason that Nolan was able to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay for Fragments of Memory.
For the movie "Fragments of Memory", Nolan once said that it was a "non-linear thriller".
The biggest feature of the whole film is the non-linear narrative structure, which tells the simple story of the protagonist with memory impairment tracking down the wife killer in a combination of flashback and main narrative.
The story itself is not complicated, the scene is very simple, but the plot development of the whole movie is very eye-catching; the tight film rhythm makes the audience even if they do not understand the story from beginning to end, but the film has always been able to maintain the audience's attention to the film.
The purpose of the script is to tell a very, very simple story and to allow the audience to experience the perceptual distortion that Reiner Shelby experienced, making this simple story seem extremely complex and challenging. This is not to say that the end of the story is not complicated, but that the basic plot is simple. - Nolan
Therefore, we will start from the narrative method of the film, analyze how "Memory Fragments" burns the brain, and how Nolan completes the fragmented puzzle of the film.
Why does "Memory Fragments" burn the brain? The biggest reason is that the story of the film is divided into twenty-six fragments.
The twenty-six fragments are divided in two chronological order—the last thirteen are presented in flashbacks, in the form of color pieces; the first thirteen are in the main narrative, which are added to the thirteen color fragments, and the colors are presented in black and white.
That is to say, the narrative of the film, not only has flashbacks and positive narratives, not only color pictures and black and white pictures, the most fatal thing is that these two completely different narrative styles are cross-interspersed in the film with 26 film fragments. Fragments of Memory is always toggled back and forth between the colored passages of flashbacks and the black-and-white passages of the narrative.
In the past films with non-linear narrative structures, there has never been such a fragmented narrative method.
The story structure of the whole movie is like a hairpin, the story is broken and divided into two parts, the beginning of the story and the end of the story are placed at the beginning of the movie at the same time; the end of the movie becomes the intersection of two stories before and one end.
The whole film also forms a more interesting phenomenon: the two stories of the main narrative and the flashback, like two people who run from cause to effect and from effect to cause, respectively, finally meet at a certain point on the story line.
Therefore, the audience knows the end and beginning of the movie story in the first three minutes of the beginning of the movie, and in the next 2 hours, it is the process of stripping the audience of the cocoon.
This is one of the more fascinating aspects of the unique narrative of the movie "Fragments of Memory": even if you already know the outcome, you will still be constantly attracted to the plot of the movie.
The reason why this amazing movie-going experience is that Nolan constantly provides fragmented but useful information through one condensed short fragment after another, and through this fragmented information, he constantly throws one question after another to the audience.
For example, we see the protagonist Lenny killing a man named Teddy at the beginning, but the subsequent plot of the movie makes us wonder - why did Lenny kill him, was it Teddy who killed Lenny's wife?
This is also a point that Nolan wants to argue and express:
The process is more interesting and important than the result. Always show you the results first, and then explain the process and the reasons.
The reason I can do this is that while the movie looks complicated, the story is simple, and that's what the movie is all about: we use a relatively simple story, filtering the story through someone's unusual point of view, and thus perceiving the world.
This is precisely the brilliance of Nolan, 26 fragments, not only a show of showmanship film skills, he through this narrative arrangement, let the audience have a suspense film unique to the thrill of passing through the problem.
And this kind of pleasure does not rely on complex stories and complicated clues, but on the exquisite structural arrangement of the film.
In the movie "Fragments of Memory", fragments and fragments, color and black and white are not separated.
In the constantly intersecting color and black and white fragments, the color paragraphs maintain a looming connection between each other, and these connections can lead to a satisfactory ending; the black and white paragraphs constantly provide the necessary information to prepare for the beginning of each subsequent color paragraph.
The narrative technique used to achieve this goal is "repetition", especially the repetition of the picture of the color fragments - the end of each fragment, the beginning of the previous fragment, and vice versa.
This repetition of the picture is not only in the audience to explain what position the film is in, but more importantly, to play an emphasis role, to mark the background of the film clip, or the background of some specific event.
And as the film rhythm gradually becomes better, the alternate rhythm of the fragments of the film is getting faster and faster, and at a certain time in the middle, not only the length of the fragments between the fragments is shortened, but the repetition is also shortened, and even some fragments actually no longer repeat the same picture, but instead create illusions and carry out a certain degree of picture jumping in the same way as conventional movies.
Because sometimes two fragments are obviously connected on the timeline, there is no need to explain the temporal relationship between these fragments.
And some fragments need to be "repeated" to locate and emphasize, for example, there is a scene in the movie, and It is Lenny who is looking for a pen, eager to write something, want to record something. When the audience sees it for the first time, it is not understood, but when it is seen the second time, it will understand different meanings.
The color and black and white tones in the movie "Memory Fragments" are not only used to distinguish flashbacks and main narratives, but also symbolize the subjective content and objective content in the film, respectively.
Fragments of color pictures are usually more subjective. In the colored images, usually from Lenny's point of view, the fragments seem to have been in his mind, at least for the first time.
Fragments of black and white pictures represent objectivity to some extent. Therefore, the way the black and white picture is presented is more cinematic, more grainy, and more like a documentary style.
And the lens is shot from top to bottom from time to time, with a little sense of distance, which highlights the objective position. One detail is that when Lenny answers the phone in the hotel, the voice on the other end of the phone is not audible, indicating that we are not in his head at the moment.
Introducing this documentary-like element at the beginning of the film is to convey a message to the audience about Lenny as a person, how his life has ended here, and what he is thinking at the moment.
In addition, the difference between the color clip and the black and white clip in the film is that the narration in the color clip is almost all Lenny's inner voice, which is spoken from his first-person perspective, which basically represents what he is thinking at this moment.
In the black-and-white clip, Lenny's narration sounds a bit like an interview, and after polishing the film's technique, there is a sense of his looking back at life in the room.
The main narrative of the black and white fragments and the flashbacks of the color fragments are constantly converging towards the same focus in the same rhythm in the film, along or against time. As the film progresses, the color clips become slightly less subjective, and the black clips become less objective.
When the film is over and the two meet at the same point, we suddenly realize that we begin to think and even question the information that is instilled in us at the beginning of the film about the character of Lenny, or the information he instills in himself. The so-called objective and subjective, whether their boundaries are really as clear as we think.
And this is the second layer of nolan's idea that he wants to express through the film:
A conflict between our subjective perception of the world and the subjective way we experience life, and our beliefs and objective reality. Is our identity based on our memories, or is it based on our existence?
After all, most movies show and construct a relatively comfortable reality or environment, and movies usually give us the objective truth that we don't often get in our lives – which is why we go to the movie.
But in the movie Fragments of Memory, Nolan didn't want to do that. In the film, he shows us a problem - Lenny can't get out of his own thinking and can't recognize objective facts.
Nolan focuses the two story lines on the end, and as far as possible by creating an extreme plot, so that objective and subjective perspectives intersect at the end, so that the audience themselves are constantly thinking about what is real and what is imaginary.
"I've been thinking about it for months trying to figure out a way to make the audience experience the amnesia" – Christopher Nolan
This method, that is, the entire movie, uses the first perspective.
Even the story of "Fragments of Memory" was inspired by his younger brother Jonathan, and at that time, the two brothers were only a conceptual framework for the story, but both brothers agreed that the most appropriate way to narrate was to take the first person, that is, to put the audience or reader into the perspective of the protagonist.
Such a perspective is very novel for the audience. In "Fragments of Memory", Nolan cleverly uses fragmented film clips to bring the audience to Lenny's perspective - what the protagonist does not know, the audience does not know.
Through the continuous narration and flashbacks, the plot of the film and the appearance of other characters, the audience has the same confusion as the protagonist: how he knows the other party, whether he has seen each other before, and whether the other party is trustworthy.
And Lenny's amnesia makes it impossible for him to know how long it has passed, his concept of time is blurred, and the audience is also blurred by the film's exquisite narrative technique.
"One day I thought, if you can hide it from the audience as well as the protagonist withholds information, so that you can convey the feeling of amnesia to them very well, this method is to flashback the story" – Christopher Nolan
Therefore, the non-linear narrative and the first perspective of the method in the film is not simply for showmanship, not a gimmick, but to effectively enhance the audience's experience of the story, becoming an inseparable part of the story expression.
In Fragments of Memory, Nolan has achieved that the structure is rooted in the story, rather than the story originating from the structure.
As Trubby once wrote in Anatomy:
"The design principle organizes the story into a whole, which is the internal logic of the story, organically combining the various parts together, so that the story as a whole achieves the effect of one plus one is greater than two, making the story original"
In this film, Nolan hopes to actively show the audience the problem that the protagonist cannot distinguish between subjectivity and objectivity, and hopes that after watching the film, the audience will want to make the same judgment as the protagonist: whether to believe or not to believe what they think will happen in life.
Just like the title "Fragments of Memory", Nolan allows the audience to experience the fragmented inner world of the protagonist Lenny by recombining the fragments of the film fragments. And Nolan found a seamless story for this complete reverse narrative technique, and also found an incomparably suitable narrative structure for this simple story, which integrates many factors such as crime, horror, mystery, etc., and can see the thinking about the philosophy of life and psychological memory, which is a masterpiece.