Memento Project Research, Part II
- Tami
- Feb 2, 2021
- 4 min read
Updated: Feb 9, 2021
Memento, 2000 the film
For this film I read a review and explanation so that I could properly understand what I was watching and not make any mistakes. I guess a review doesn't really help but I just did it. I am not going to post everything from the different places here but just some summative and/or interesting points.
"The story follows Shelby, who has a short-term memory loss following a break-in at his house that gave him his "condition" and also his wife was raped and murdered. Leonard has been chasing the guy who did it, but his search is complicated by the fact that he can't make new memories since the accident. So Leonard convinces himself that through conditioning, he can be disciplined enough to find vengeance. But as the story unfolds, the reveal isn't the true culprit but to show that Leonard is chasing his own ghost. He has purposefully been creating a mystery he can never solve because he's already solved it, but forgotten that he already achieved his vengeance."
In this sort of interview article you are explained to a little bit about what the film is about and then the interviewing begins. I don't think the film is really related to what I want to do but I think it is interesting to look at what the brothers' (Christopher who directed and Jonathan who came up with the idea) had in mind about this film.
"Memento, after all, is a film about death, photography and the philosophy of going about everything backwards - a film that starts with its ending and keeps forever jumping back into the footprints it’s only just finished making – presents the world from Leonard’s own scrambled, self-erasing point of view."
Christopher "Film noir is one of the only genres where the concept of point of view is accepted as a fairly important notion in the storytelling, and where it’s totally accepted that you can flashback and flashforward and change points of view. His psychological condition and his point of view are crucial to why the structure is there: it’s an attempt to put the audience inside his head, and to make them think about the characters around him and the situations he’s in in the same way that he does.
Jonathan "I already had a number of different things that I knew I wanted to deal with in a story, ideas about identity and memory. I was at a period in my life when I was thinking a lot about victimization; about what being victimized does to people, and how they recover and learn to get over it. One of the things you find yourself doing in that period of recovery, once the initial aura of the incident fades, is willing yourself to remember the incident. In some cases, obviously, people are flooded with memories, and they can’t escape them, but I was more interested in situations where people force themselves to remember the bad things that happened. I got very interested in the idea of a character who was stuck in that moment."
"I don't understand one key plot-point. If the last thing the main character remembers is his wife dying, then how does he remember that he has short-term memory loss?" Michael Cusumano of Philadelphia writes with the same query. They may have identified a hole big enough to drive the entire plot through. Perhaps a neurologist can provide a medical answer, but I prefer to believe that Leonard, the hero of the film, has a condition similar to Tom Hanks' "brain cloud" in "Joe vs. the Volcano"--Leonard suffers from a condition brought on by a screenplay that finds it necessary, and it's unkind of us to inquire too deeply."
"The film is seemingly very complex, the story is actually very simple, and that’s part of the point of the movie: we’re taking a relatively simple story and filtering it through somebody’s very unusual way of perceiving the world."
The Diary of Anne Frank, 1947
This is a book made from the diary entries of a young girl and her family while they were hiding during the Nazi occupation in Netherlands. We all know about the terrible things that happened then and Anne Frank's diary is a way that we can look back at what happened but through the eyes of a child. I was interested in biographies/autobiographies and real life events that were documented to be kept to help us remember because that is the type of thing I want to try and portray through the video I want to make. I am better at ideas than I am at executing them but it's okay to give it a try. I read the Wikipedia page about the published book and I read the official website for Anne Frank.
It's interesting how ordinary objects and things we don't consider too important can become so important overtime, it's like how we don't really understand the importance of situations until they have passed and we look back on them. Alongside her diary, Anne Frank also wrote a book about her time in the hiding place. She was inspired to do it after hearing "an appeal on the radio from Dutch minister Bolkestein, who had fled to London because of the war. He asked the Dutch to hang on to important documents, so that it would be clear after the war what they all had experienced during the German occupation.
He inspired Anne: she planned after the war to publish a book about her time in hiding. She also came up with a title: Het Achterhuis, or The Secret Annex. She started working on this project on 20 May 1944. Anne rewrote a large part of her diary, omitted some texts and added many new ones. She wrote the new texts on separate sheets of paper. She describes the period from 12 June 1942 to 29 March 1944. Anne worked hard: in a those few months, she wrote around 50,000 words, filling more than 215 sheets of paper."
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