Memento as Film Noir

Christopher Nolan's Memento as Film Noir

Film noir rose to prominence in the late 1940s and was at first described as being "murder with a psychological twist (Spicer 1). Since the 1940s, the film noir genre has undergone a few changes, yet the central concepts of the genre remain the same. Christopher Nolan's 2000 film Memento is a neo-noir film that integrates many of the concepts found in traditional film noir into its narrative and editing. Memento utilizes traditional film noir devices such as narrative structure, the opposition of good and evil, setting, lighting, and mise-en-scene to play upon the themes of memory and perception.

Memento follows Leonard Shelby, played by Guy Pierce, a former insurance investigator with anterograde amnesia who is on a quest to find the person that helped to rape and kill his wife. During the course of his investigation, Leonard meets Teddy,...
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