Welles and Nolan

Welles as a director is well known for his use of mise-en-scene’s low-key lighting in Touch of Evil and the diegetic time sequence consisting of flashbacks and flash forwards in Citizen Kane. He creates complex storylines which are slowly unraveled, but not fully until the end. Similarly, modern day director Christopher Nolan can be seen using some of these same concepts in movies like Memento.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vS0E9bBSL0

In this trailer of Memento, Nolan’s use of two parallel storylines which intersect at the end, one in black and white and the other in color, is similar to what Welles did years ago. Citizen Kane’s storyline is told mainly to Thompson the reporter through the use of flashbacks told by people who previously knew Kane. In Memento, the film’s story is pieced together by the main character Leonard who suffers from short term memory loss condition known as anterograde amnesia. In both movies, characters discover the storyline simultaneously along with the audience. The black and white shots can also be compared to Welles’s in Touch of Evil.

Touch of Evil features low-key lighting which creates stark contrasts between black and white. This use of mise-en-scene can also be found in Memento’s black and white shots making certain characters faces dark in concurrence with the character’s actions and the unfolding storyline. Touch of Evil can be viewed as James Naremore puts it, “Touch of Evil begins shifting back and forth between the legal plot and the sexual plot, between Vargas’s idealistic concern for justice and Suzy’s gradual descent into the Los Robles underworld.” Similarly, Memento has one chronological storyline shown in black and white and another storyline moving in reverse order shown in color. In both films, there is a scene towards the end which ties the parallel storylines together.

While not as complex as the story of Memento, Welles used this style of parallelism in his films to create dramatic thrillers years before Nolan was even born. Nowadays, many directors employ this use of multiple stories wrapped under a single overarching plot. Welles found ways in which the camera could add to a character’s persona such as through low-key lighting. The stark contrast between light and dark is used in Touch of Evil to amplify the evil in characters like Quinlan and Grandi and the good of Susie for example. If anything has become evident to me about Welles this semester, it is that he was a pioneer director who’s techniques and style have had a profound effect on the industry for years and will for the foreseeable future.