Buckland-Warren-Puzzle-Films-Complex-Storytelling-Contemporary-Cinema

Film Form and Mnemonic Devices in Memento 97ms5.C5.ms4ms4.C4.ms3ms3.C3.ms2ms2.C2.ms1C1.ms1Figure 4.2Chronological structure of Mementofirst sequence into the final position of the story, and adding each newsequence as a premise for the subsequent events:(. . . C3 + C2 + C1)The effect of “a missing past” is due to the fact that we are going back andeach time we need a new premise for the events we are seeing. The operationof mental rotation is not simple. We can do it at a point in time, butnot for the whole range of the story. Each time we need a mental representationof the fabula, beginning from the end, and we have to considera great number of elements. A sketch of the required structure is shownin Figure 4.2.It is impossible to keep more than a few elements in our short-termmemory. While the film continues to present new elements to be processed,we cannot keep the complete ordered fabula structure in mind. So, we tendto keep a local map of the events, mainly those that are under the focusof attention, and we need mnemonic devices that remind us of former orsubsequent stages of the action. Another difficulty in the mnemonicreconstruction of the events comes from the backward direction. Exceptfor the first sequence, which is in reverse motion, the color sequences areto be placed in the opposite direction of the film screening. Yet, theflowing of the film invites us to make progressive mental representations,and it is difficult, especially the first time we see the film, to make a cleardistinction between the two different mental representations. We have aregressive concatenation, presented by the film, that flows in a “natural”way along time and that is processed by our episodic memory.[C1 + C2 + C3 + ...→And we have a chronological concatenation of events, obtained by mentalrotation.