American Cinematographer - April 2001 - 94

Flooding to Sundance
The modern noir
Memento

follows Leonard

Shelby (Guy
Pearce), whose
lack of short¬
term memory
creates a variety

of

complications

he attempts
down
his wife's killer.
as

to track

Upper Left:
Leonard and his
friend Teddy (Joe

Pantoliano),
whose intentions

dubious,
inspect a crime

appear

scene.

Upper Right:
Taking constant
Polaroids and

tattooing notes
on his body help
Leonard cope
with the

problem.
Bottom:

Cinematographer
Wally Pfister
captures a closeup of a key
tattoo.

shoulder.
were two

Speed and handheld work
skills that came in handy

for Memento, which

days, with

a

was

shot in 25

to

fiction film-

Film

Institute's

cine¬

secondary strand, which
protagonist on the phone
in a hotel room, narrating a flashback
of a similarly impaired man named
Sammy Jankis, is in black-and-white.
This monochrome section

moves

forward in time while the color
moves

backward, until the

in what Nolan calls "a

two meet

hairpin turn"

across

of the film, the

that the color sequences were

what he sees."

the

two

visual strands.

sense

He

shoulder
corner

or

of the

of

camera

never

camera

Moss), the effect is
most

dimension

to

camera

zoomed in. Wally has a

When the

always close to Leonard's POV,
always closer to him physically in
conversations, and that we're moving
through doorways with him, seeing

always had in my head the alterna¬
tion between color as the subjective
view of the story and black-andwhite as the objective view," says

over my

looking

the

breaks from

this pattern during a scene between
Leonard and Natalie (Carrie-Anne

during the film's last act.
In addition to providing struc¬
tural clarity, there's a psychological
"I

whether

place¬
compromised,
always keeping the POV as the
absolute guiding principle."

point of view is Leonard's; we see the
world through his eyes, and accept
his self-image as the avenging angel
for his dead wife. Cinematically, this
involved the camera staying close to
Leonard and adopting his line of
sight. "What Pfister was able to do
with his camera placement and
blocking," says Nolan, "was to get

shows the

difference

ment.

and-white sections. The main

shot in

a longer
It makes a big

camera.

is

room,

Nolan. For

was

the

wonderful

divided the film into color and black-

plot,

on

whether it's in the far

matography program, he learned an
approach that also served him well
on this film: "An
emphasis on the
story - that's my philosophy as a
cinematographer."
To help clarify Memento's
intricate story structure, Nolan
(whose screenplay was based on a
short story by his brother Jonathan)

color. A

April 2001

lens

making in 1988 by enrolling in the
American

aware, on

shooting. You can't just slap

camerawork handheld. When Pfister
made the transition

always

subconscious level, of the
camera's distance from what it's

good quarter of the

which recedes in time,

92

the audience is
some

Nolan is adamant about the

importance of camera placement in
creating this sense of identification
with the protagonist. "I believe that

cal

a

subtle but criti¬

turning point in the viewer's

identification with the character.
"There's

a moment

when Leonard

Natalie's apartment

and is
sitting on the couch," explains Nolan.
"She's saying, 'Look, if the police have
all of this information, why haven't
they caught this guy?' She's asking the
question that's been on the audi¬
ence's mind: 'What's really going on
here?' We just lifted the camera
slowly from Leonard's eyeline up to
Natalie's, and then on her shot, [we
comes

to

moved it] down to his. It's a beautiful
shot. For the first time, you're seeing
him

more

objectively. It's very subtle,

but I think it works
At this

subconsciously."

point, the image of avenging
angel dissolves into a wholly different
one:
our
protagonist shuffling

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American Cinematographer - April 2001

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