Memento

Sequence of events play a huge role in telling a story and can greatly influence many factors such as the amount of information an audience will have, how much an audience must pay attention and make connections to fully understand, and how much an audience is kept wondering. Sequence is a tool that many directors such as Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino and many other artists use and manipulate in order to achieve such thought evoking works. As we can see in works such a Memento and Pulp Fiction, Sequence is often used to tie everything together by Showing part of the end scene at the beginning of the movie. For example, In Memento, the opening scene shows Leonard killing Teddy, which is the same scene that we see at the end of the movie, only this time, we now fully understand how the two characters got there because we now have key information that was left out the first time the scene was shown. Similarly, in Pulp Fiction, the opening scene begins with a couple about to hold up a café; once the couple draws their guns, the scene changes and leaves the audience wondering “What that was all about.” After this, we are introduced the main characters who, at the end of the movie, find themselves in the midst of the café hold up. Sequence, as it is so brilliantly used in Memento, gives the audience a sense understanding of the Leonard’s disability as the scenes come and go in short, chronologically displaced, cuts which end up giving a short explanation of the prior scene. This just goes to show how the manipulation of sequence can greatly influence how an audience will view a piece of work.

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