essay revision

The film Memento uses a combination of depiction, flashback and narration interposition in its narrative techniques. When the scene only stays in black and white, the narration of the film uses depiction, when the scene becomes colorful, the narrative of the film changes back to flashback. In my understanding, the black and white scene reflected a more objective state, such as Leonard answering the phone or shaving. However, the direction of the storyline is mainly based on the Leonard subjective thoughts. Also, during the process, the actions of Leonard are dominated by his subjective thoughts in the color scenes, which means that the narrative of the story is mainly told in the way of flashback. Lastly, In the part of narration interposition, the film reflected Leonard's character by portraying the character Sammy Jankis.

As we know that the montage technique is a technique often used in movies. The using of the Philippine lens is often used to express the feeling of dreamlike and unrealistic moments. As expected, the montage technique is also used in this film. The director uses the techniques where he switched the montage lens to highlights Leonard inner struggle under the condition that Leonard may only obtain ten minutes of memory.

In this film, the whole story line was focused on Leonard’s revenge for his wife. In the narrative part, that is, in the black and white part, when Leonard talking with someone over the phone, the information constantly appearing on the little notes he made or the sources he got from the tattoo would drive audience's curiosity to a large extent. The film itself actively boosted plot’ trend through the clues appeared in the film, which promoted audience’s expectation to the ending. In the subsequent development of the plot, the film also initiatively compared the actual result with the preset plot so that audiences will be brought into the protagonist's perspective. As a result, the fragmentation of the story clues points out the theme of the film Memento.

Secondly, the scenes from the film reflected most of the clues of the story. The color scenes were cut into 23 individual parts, which separated by the black and white scenes, reflecting the length of memory retained by Leonard. Just because each segment was divided, along with the appearance of information on the cards and tattoos, Leonard’s doubts to reality also drive the audience to rethink and reanalyze the truth of the story. Furthermore, as audience’s’ curiosity to the truth of the story becomes stronger, it arouses the movie’s viewability. The film uses flashbacks to give audiences the ending of the story first and increases the suspense of the film through " cause and effect inversion".

The film encouraged viewer identification where it used mental subjectivity in many different ways. A memorable scene in the film would be where Leonard teared his notes apart for the clues he collected. In the early stage of the movie, Leonard was rendered into a person who loves his wife to death, the only reason he still lives after his wife’s death is because he has to finish the revenge. However, the truth is that his wife was actually died from injecting too much insulin. Leonard himself couldn’t accept the truth that his wife was died from his own mistakes. Thus, the story was told under his own point of view from the beginning. Because of his own subjective thoughts, audiences got mistakenly led to another way of the development of the movie. Another thing to reflect on this would be the story of Sammy Jankis, which was an illusion of Leonard’s inner state. Audiences got completely misled by this story as it was told in Leonard’s own point of view. At the beginning, the audience's perception was totally based on story told by Leonard, audiences don't know the truth of the story until the end. The scriptwriter made the connection between the truth presented in the last minute of the film, making the whole story complete and smooth.