Read the full article on Firstpost, here: https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/venice-film-festival-2019-the-reverse-chronology-in-gaspar-noes-irreversible-which-gets-an-out-of-competition-screening-7172071.html
Talking about Memento (2000) in a Creative Screenwriting interview, Christopher Nolan said that he and his brother Jonathan (who came up with the story) felt that the most interesting approach was to tell the story from the first person point of view, putting the audience right in the mind of the protagonist. But how? “How do I tell a first person story through the eyes of someone who, when he meets someone, does not know when or how they’ve met [before] or whether that person should be trusted? The answer was to put the audience in that position.” Nolan’s solution was to tell the story backwards, so that it denied the audience the information that the protagonist is denied. It works. We are exactly in the protagonist’s position when he says, for instance (see clip below), “I lie here not knowing how long I’ve been alone… How am I supposed to heal if I can’t feel time?”
Time is at the centre of Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (2002), too. The film opens and closes with the line “Time destroys all things,” and this story, too, is narrated in a reverse chronological order. Why this peculiar choice for a film about a pregnant woman who ends up brutally raped. We first see her boyfriend bashing up the assailant, then see him search for this assailant, then see him realise his girlfriend has been assaulted, then see the assault, then see the couple at a party, then see them in bed (in a wonderfully romantic stretch), and then see the woman use a pregnancy test and watch it turn positive. Would we not (emotionally) respond to the rape better if we know this woman, know that she is pregnant, rather than meet her, first, as an unknown female who is assaulted?
Continued at the link above.
Copyright ©2019 Firstpost.
Baradwaj Rangan 
Kay
August 16, 2019
BR – May I request you to add where these movies can be watched at the end of the article? Would really appreciate it.
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Rahul
August 18, 2019
This is a fascinating topic and can bring up so many different vantage points . You have mentioned a few – I remember thinking about this when I saw these movies.
Firstly, there is an element of fatalism . When the future has already happened and the past is following\being worked out from it, then what is the significance of free will? The agency of a person to effect the events is undermined to the point of being negligible. In Memento there is another layer added to this – that of memory loss. Memory is one of the most important faculty that informs the sense of self. If memory is being taken away from someone, then their sense of self is muted and their ability to view the world as a moral cause and effect system is severely compromised. What better way to demonstrate this than to show reverse chronology , kind of a subjugation to destiny.
The other thing that I was thinking about was mindfulness. If someone is unburdened with memory, they have no choice but to be mindful about the current instant, without thinking about past or future, and to such a person, the direction of time will not matter. For someone who just wants to take a bath in the river, does not care if its flowing upstream or downstream. To rephrase, if one does not know which direction the river is flowing, they cannot reach anywhere. They can only savour the river by bathing in it. What better way to show this than reverse chronology..
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brangan
August 18, 2019
Superb comment, Rahul. Thanks.
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Sutheesh Kumar
August 19, 2019
Rahul,
That’s quite deep! Took me a while to wrap my head around it.
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Varsha
August 19, 2019
Rahul: Really intriguing thought! In fact, this opens a Pandora’s box of philosophical debates, not to mention the innumerable leads it gives to aspiring story tellers! Which is also why I find it strange that you thought of it in the context of the movies mentioned in this article, especially the part about fatalism and free will. Before I explain my reasons for thinking so, I would like to confess that I have not seen all these movies. I saw “Irreversible” a long time back(2006, I think), I have heard of “Memento” but not seen it, and I have not even heard of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” until now. I am now interested enough, after reading BR’s article, to watch them some time in the near future, but for my present purpose, I feel I can manage with the information from the article, the plots I read from Wikipedia and my memory of “Irreversible”.
When you say the future has already happened and the past is being worked out from it, what do you actually mean? On the face of it, this sounds like an oxymoron. In normal scenarios, which is what the stories of these movies are about, anything that has already happened is, by definition, the past, and anything that follows is, again by definition, the future. The reverse chronology is employed to create a certain effect for the audience about the story being told, which is indeed significant from the filmmaker’s point of view. The stories, themselves, are simple, straightforward ones and could very well have been filmed without reverse chronology. And that is what makes them completely unrelated to concepts such as fatalism or inquiries on free will. The characters themselves don’t go through the future first and then the past, save for whatever memory loss brings into the picture(Memento). But even memory loss is a weak device when it comes to fatalism.
Inquiries on free-will have been/can be much better addressed by time-travel movies. A typical time travel movie will have someone having access to a time travel device and that person has the capacity to go to the past. In this scenario, the future has already happened(in your memory, at least) and you could have used the time travel device to go to a past where you may not even have existed and lived it through. Vikram Kumar’s tamil movie “24” does it even better, by providing a twist on the time travel method. In that movie, time travel is practically a rewind button on life itself! It not only takes you back in time, but also reverses time itself for the whole universe! Though it raises a lot of unanswered questions(For instance, what happens if you set that watch to a time when you were not even born?! This movie really needs sequels!), it says a lot about fatalism. In such movies, one can, through the story itself, explore free will. Heck, why go to time travel and all, when you have the Final Destination movies, where, whatever you do, once you are marked, you can’t cheat death and die of old age! A cheap way to talk about fatalism, but it does address the issue, whereas reverse chronology in the above said movies does not even come close!
As for memory loss and mindfulness, sure, they have no other choice, but that does not stop them from worrying, as the protagonist in Memento expresses through the line, “I lie here not knowing how long I’ve been alone… How am I supposed to heal if I can’t feel time?”. As BR has pointed out, Nolan wants the audience to feel the same, which is where the reverse chronology helps him elegantly!
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Rahul
August 20, 2019
Varsha, I think my post could have been worded better. Yes, I was talking about the effect that is produced by showing future first , not that the future actually happened first. The film itself is called “Irreversible” . It is as if, the chain of events that were set into motion by that brutal act of rape were inevitable . One has free will in some context if one has the ability to make a decision that is not completely determined by or the result of prior events . I think this is what explains the excessive brutality of the rape scene. As the impact and intensity of an event on someone tends to infinity, the free will that one is able to exert subsequently tends to zero.
By showing the events in a reverse chronological order, the idea of irreversiblity is emphasized. The viewer is not wondering what would happen next because he already knows.
Reverse chronology is used to show faux retro causality. (where the effect happens first and cause happens later).
As for Memento, I had meant to indicate mindfulness as an accidental byproduct of memory loss. His memory loss is not complete. He suffers from anterograde amnesia , so he still conserves his sense of self (which causes him distress) but is unable to create new memories. Considering N chunks of time , if someone cannot create new memories, then they cannot place those N chunks of time in an order relative to each other. So, the order in which they occur are irrelevant to him. Reverse chronology is therefore an apt way to denote this condition .
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Varsha
August 20, 2019
“The viewer is not wondering what would happen next because he already knows.
Reverse chronology is used to show faux retro causality. (where the effect happens first and cause happens later).”
True, but instead, isn’t he/she wondering what happened previously? See, fatalism is the belief that everything is predetermined, right? Since, in life, we always experience the past before the future, this translates to saying the future is predetermined. The words past and future are just placeholders. What we have experienced, and what we have not is what really matters when you talk about fatalism. Causality does not matter as much as uncertainty. The question “What is the cause of this effect?” is as much relevant and the answer can be as much uncertain as for “What is the effect of this cause?” Otherwise, we wouldn’t have philosophies like karma theory and scientists would not be so much concerned about the beginning of the universe. Reverse chronology simply changes what we know and don’t. There is still uncertainty(‘how much’ depends on the story being told), and there is only as much concern about fatalism as there is in regular chronology. In “Irreversible”, the rape is in the victim’s present/future, but for the viewer, it’s in the past and hence he/she is concerned about his/her future(“What WILL I be shown about this woman’s past?”).
My point is that filmmakers/story tellers do this all the time, so there is nothing unique about these movies and fatalism/free will. Sometimes it’s effective, sometimes it’s not, but most often than not, it’s there. We are so used to it that we take it for granted. To give a recent example, consider the film “Aadai”. The makers did do a sort of reverse chronology, but they did it outside the timeline of the movie. The first trailer of Aadai showed us scenes leading up to a girl waking up in a deserted building and finding herself naked! Then she hears some noise and looks around in horror! That’s it! What happened next in the real world is, as they say, history! Now imagine the same scene to be the very first scene in the movie, provided it was not shown in any trailers, and no inkling was gives as to what to expect from this movie starring Amala Paul. Just think of the viewers! Won’t they be at the edge of their seats contemplating what happens next, which is, in addition to what the girl is going to do(her future), what happened to her(her past) that led her to this dire situation? Her past is as much uncertain here as her future. In movies that are whodunits, we are mostly shown a crime, and after the fact, till the end, we keep thinking of the past, and the future events we see only to get a clarity on that one past event. Roger Ebert’s interpretation of Irreversible is something similar. Instead of suspense, here we have morality. The rape is in our(viewer’s) past and the events shown thereafter(past for the characters, but our future) exist to let us contemplate on that one horrific incident. There is only as much fatalism/free will here, for the viewers as well as the characters, as in most other movies.
“His memory loss is not complete. He suffers from anterograde amnesia , so he still conserves his sense of self (which causes him distress) but is unable to create new memories.”
Yes, his memory loss is not complete, but it’s interesting to think what would happen to him if he loses all his memories and is not able to make new ones either. Would he lose his sense of self too? If he doesn’t, which is what I would think, given that he has his other faculties intact, then the worry factor is still there, provided he does not go mad first! 🙂 Anyway, as you say, reverse chronology is an apt way, but not just to denote this condition but to put the viewer too in that condition, which was Nolan’s intention too.
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brangan
August 20, 2019
Kay: Here you go:
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Kay
August 21, 2019
Thank you very much!
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