Introduction

Christopher Nolan's MEMENTO (2000) – based on Jonathan Nolan's short story Memento Mori – is perhaps the most debated complex narrative to date. In addition to countless formal dissections, the film has been the subject of innumerable critical examinations. It has been perceived as exemplary of various different philosophical and theoretical positions, and the philosopher Andy Clark (2010) has even suggested that the film's main character can be perceived as the embodiment of his extended mind thesis. On account of this, Robert Sinnerbrink (2011) has humorously asserted that MEMENTO should now be fconsidered the philosophers’ favourite film, thereby suggesting that it has trumped such beloved examples as RASHôMON (Kurosawa 1950) or more recently THE MATRIX (Andy & Larry Wachowski 1999) (48). The extended attention devoted to the film demonstrates that ‘MEMENTO is a very good example of what a complex narration can be’ (Ghislotti 2009, 87). Although MEMENTO affirms the inferential nature of cinematic spectatorship, it simultaneously renders difficult the cognitive processes that organize narratives into chronological series of events. This chapter argues that MEMENTO thereby questions the narratological coupling of realist and constructivist epistemologies and defamiliarizes linear cinematic perception . In so doing, the film enfolds or embeds the spectator into the narrative, and thus spectator and film become deeply intertwined. To better capture this aspect of the cinematic experience induced by MEMENTO an embodied reconfiguration of spectatorship is required.