Saturday, February 15, 8:00 p.m. & Wednesday, February 19, 6:00 p.m. | A neo-noir tour de force, Christopher Nolan’s MEMENTO is a labyrinthian puzzle box—if you’ve seen it once, you’ve just scratched the surface. Leonardy Shelby (Guy Pearce, always exceptional) is a man suffering from short-term memory loss. Determined to find the person responsible for his wife’s death, he uses Polaroid photographs, tattoos, and notes to track clues. MEMENTO uses two intertwining narratives (one starting at the beginning, one at the end) to tell the story, plunging the audience into Leonard’s fragmented memory and underscoring the fallibility of memory itself. As Leonard says, “Memory’s unreliable. Memory’s not perfect, it’s not even that good.” Print provided by the Library of Congress.

Awards & Nominations

Nominee - Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing, Academy Awards
Winner - Best Action/Adventure/Thriller Film, Saturn Awards
Nominee - Best Actor (Guy Pearce), Saturn Awards
Winner - Best Feature, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Female (Carrie-Anne Moss), Film Independent Spirit Awards

Persistence of Memory: Ten films (poetically, all quite memorable) that explore recollection, unreliable narrators and amnesiatic protagonists, ghosts real and imagined, the way others remember us (ouch), and the coming to terms with that, as much as we try to hold on to them, as time passes our memories shift and slip away. Read more

The Film Center is ADA accessible. This presentation will be projected without open captions. The theater is hearing-loop equipped. For accessibility requests, please email filmcenter@saic.edu