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Films

Memento

Does Hollywood sometimes get everything back-to-front? A new film called Memento certainly does. Our movie maestro Thomas Wartenberg takes a look.

Classical Hollywood films were shot and edited with a view to making the viewer comfortable as he or she watched the film. Since editing together two shots breaks the continuity of the scene portrayed in a single shot, a system was developed that allowed audience members to easily interpret how the later shot was related to the earlier one. A series of conventions – eye-line matches, establishing shots, the 180 degree rule, etc. – was developed that allowed viewers’ experience of a film to be uninterrupted by the intrusion of editing and other camera techniques. As a result, this style of filmmaking was claimed to make the act of filming transparent, meaning that the audience would watch a film so constructed with no conscious awareness of how its experience was being shaped by the filmmakers.

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