momento

Memento is the story of a man called Leonard, searching for a man who he believes raped and murdered his wife during a burglary. He also suffers from severe amnesia so he can’t store any new memories, so carries around pictures, note and draws tattoos on himself to remember vitale pieces of information.

The opening sequence consists of many things that grab your interest. For the start there is a man shaking a photo, we can’t see what the photo is of, where he is or know why he has taken the photo. But over time we can see that the photo fades into view and we can see it is of a dead body.

The next scene is showing a man being killed, which we can now make an assumption that the man taking the photo is also the murderer.

In the next scene the man is sitting in a bed in a motel. This has nothing to do with anything that has gone before, but we assume this is after the event that just occurred. This tells us that there is going to be a lot missing and jumpy bits in the film.

We understand this further in the next scene, when he says to a mechanic “I’m sure I’ve told you of my illness” and shows him pictures. From this I understand that the man has a memory loss problem, so he wasn’t taking a picture of the dead man for the fun of it, he was doing it to remember all of the horrible deeds he had done.