Following / Man With a Movie Camera / Storytelling
And so, in conclusion....is how one might parody the beginning of anything in the style of Christopher Nolan. Since Memento, where I first encountered his work, I have come to associate him with stories told in a temporally dislocated/fragmented way. Following is an example of his early work. Speaking of temporal permutation, it would probably have been more satisfying to me to have seen his movies in the order that they were produced, because I would have had a better insight into his latter work (Memento, Inception) had I already seen Following. I say that because in Following we have a low-budget (Nolan described it as “no-budget”) treatment of storytelling techniques that, come his later involvement with large commercial studios, are turbo-charged by larger production budgets. In contrast, Following was filmed entirely in London, often, as Nolan explains, without shooting permits, or in locations furnished by friends and family. The story is based around concepts that support the functioning of society in a modern city, especially at the level of the individual (we might say trust, respect for personal space). There are strong elements of crime and an interesting extra on the DVD menu is the facility to watch the movie's scenes in chronological order.
In Storytelling, Todd Solondz presents a darkly witty screenplay. The action is preceded by the opening credits (in chronological convention) accompanied by a tune that reminded me of Gangs of Rome by MAVIS and Kurt Wagner. A binary Fiction/Non-Fiction theme is evident in the visual style of the credits. The opening theme music returns at various times and has certain similarities to what we're now used to hearing in shopping malls and hotel foyers, and so is a good match for the affluent middle-America that provides the context (or fodder) for much of the movie. It’s a modern-day milieu, and much of the script contains details that places it firmly in the “now”, which is the year 2000, when the film was released. (An expression used early on by one of the characters, “The year 2000, can you believe we made it?” is an authentic-sounding conversational throwback to that period.) Solondz presents the action in two chapters, headed Fiction, and Non-fiction, in that order. In the former, we are presented with what looks like a creative-writing seminar class in an unnamed American university. The Non-fiction chapter depicts the travails of a middle-class Jewish family in New Jersey when a filmmaker, played by Paul Giamatti, makes them the subject of a “post-Columbine” documentary. Given that it's ostensibly all fiction, what is the thinking behind the Fiction/Non-fiction chapter titles? I won’t guess, although I have an idea, but will note the remark of the profoundly discomfiting Pulitzer-prize winning leader of the creative writing class : “Even if it happened, once you write it down, it’s fiction”.
The preamble to Man With a Movie Camera informs us (more or less) that we what we are about to witness is the result of an experiment in filmmaking, and that the film we are about to see was created without a preconceived “scenario” or other commonly used filmmaking concepts of the time. In layman’s terms, what we witness is a day in the life of an early 20th century Russian coastal town, ostensibly captured by the “man with a movie camera”, depicted as a dynamic fellow in riding breeches who hoicks around the ancient camera and it’s large wooden tripod capturing images of the world around him in the interests of filmic science. (Today's audience have similar camera capabilities installed in their mobile phones.) In the version I saw, the accompanying score (the movie, as explained in the preamble, has no “intertitles”) was composed by Michael Nyman. Watching the movie with the sound turned down is also possible, perhaps to better appreciate some of the extraordinary images. These include a live human birth and the intrepid camera operator filming while standing upright on the back of a speeding car. As he fervently rotates the arm of his wind-up camera, one of his subjects, a passenger in a different speeding car, mimics him. (Incidentally, the external scenes in the aforementioned Following were also filmed with a wind-up camera.) More generally, the images of the “ordinary people” conducting their lives, and almost every conceivable aspect of life is captured, are extraordinary to witness. In a touch that Christopher Nolan would surely commend, the editing of the film is also filmed and depicted, and the director, in one of his many innovative techniques, sometimes moves from the still frame on the editing table to the moving picture version of the same subject.