#18 Nolan's Following and Shorpy
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We’ve made it through another week of this. Yes, I know that time isn’t working correctly and a week now feels like six months and two days at the same time. Hell, I almost forgot it was time for another newsletter.
I do have some good news to report. My graduate school, Goddard College has approved a $3,000 grant for me to cover expenses during this pandemic. This is part of a $200,000 gift given to the college by an anonymous alumnus.
It’s occurred to me that I am operating at an advantage. Many people right now are having to adjust to no longer working, not having any money, or no longer having a home of their own. My advantage is that I lost everything before the pandemic. My expenses are already cut down as low as they can go. Between the stimulus, the grant, and unemployment, I won’t have to worry about money until for the next few months unless I want to do something like get a place of my own.
In other news, I’ve decided to start writing email letters to people. (I say ‘email letter’ rather than ‘email’ because these are more than a sentence or two.) So far this experiment has gone fairly well. The letters I get back tend to tell me more about my friends than I’d get in a month of looking at their Facebook feed.
If you’d like an email letter from me, let me know.
This is going to be a short one. I hope you don’t mind.
The Gallery - Shorpy
I recently learned of the website Shorpy. It is an online archive of high quality historical photography. And if you’re anything like me, it’s highly addictive.
This one is from 1918 in Seattle during the Spanish Flu pandemic.
Here’s another one of a mother of four in the early 1960s.
If you’re tired of spending time on social media looking for something new, check out something old over at Shorpy. It’s time well spent.
The Screening Room - Following
Last week I talked about Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy. Despite my true Marvel loyalties, it’s probably my favorite superhero movie trilogy. (But that’s just because they haven’t made The Incredibles 3.) Nolan is one of the most innovative, creative, and flat out interesting writer/directors working today. I didn’t have to see the trailer for Nolan’s next movie, Tenet in order to know I wanted to see it. I just needed to know that Christopher Nolan was making it.
As I mentioned last week, the first Nolan movie I saw was Memento, but that was not his first feature film. His first feature film, Following, is a 69 minute black and white movie shot in England with an operating budget of $6,000.
Following was written as a no-budget movie by Christopher Nolan. Everyone involved in the movie had a full time job when they made it. So they shot it on weekends and whenever they could find time. It took them over a year.
The entire film is shot on handheld cameras. This can lead to a bit of jerkiness, but you get used to it quickly. To add to the disorientation, Nolan does not tell the story in a linear way. He called this ‘telling a story in three dimensions’.
The plot bounces backwards and forwards in time forcing us to put the pieces together in order to get the whole story. The first image we see is a box that we won’t know the significance of until half way through the movie. We are introduced to a young man who is unshaven with long hair who likes following people. Then we see the same young man but he’s got short hair and he’s badly beaten. And why the hell did he have a plastic glove in his mouth? It is all eventually explained but Nolan is in no hurry to do so.
Often a movie is made in such a way that even the dumbest person in the theater can follow the plot. Nolan assumes that if you’ve come to see one of his movies you have the ability to pay attention and think. Though his movies often have amazing visuals his are not movies you want to put on in the background. These are stories you want to experience.
What we eventually learn is that Following is about a couple of thieves who have more interest in breaking in and looking around than they do in just stealing stuff. Nolan came up with the idea after his place was broken into. He was interested in the stories of the thieves. But Nolan clearly had no interest in telling a story simply. More to the point, by telling the story in a non-linear fashion he’s able to create an ending that is both unexpected and inevitable. This is a signature of his as he does the same thing in movies like Memento, The Prestige, and Inception.
The acting isn’t the best, but that’s to be expected in a no-budget movie. Nolan’s uncle, John Nolan is the only actor who had any sort of resume at the time the movie came out. He would a Wayne board member in the Dark Knight Trilogy and a recurring character in Nolan’s brother’s first television show, Person of Interest.
The DVD for Following allows the viewer to watch the movie in chronological order or listen to the movie while reading the screenplay as well as commentary by Nolan. If one is interested in film making, it’s the DVD succeeds in being a mini-masterclass.
Following is an impressive debut. It’s no wonder people saw this movie and decided to help produce his next movie, Memento. But that’s for next week.
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That’s it for this week. Stay safe out there. I know things are bad for a lot of people right now. I try to remind myself that good times follow bad. If we can get through this, we’ll be the better for it.
- Jack Cameron