Memento

Memento is a film that was filmed in a short 25 days.  Christopher Nolan's screenplay was based on his brother Johnathan Nolan's story "Memento Mori". But the screenplay is still considered original, rather than adapted because Jonathan's story wasn't published until after the film was completed.  The medical condition experienced by Leonard in this film is a real condition called Anterograde Amnesia - the inability to form new memories after damage to the hippocampus.

The film starts out in reverse with a Polaroid picture but all of the sound is moving forward.  To get a better looking scene in reverse, they didn't simply film it forward and reverse it in editing. They fed the film through in reverse, making a crisper picture.  The transitions in the is film go from color to black and white.  Color has probably been used most often to signal important changes.  This can be accomplished by using color in conjunction with black and white or by switching to an obviously different color emphasis or style at the point of transition. The Art of Watching Films pg 233 The film's events unfold in two separate, alternating narratives — one in color, and the other in black and white. The black and white sections are told in chronological order, showing Leonard conversing with an anonymous phone caller in a motel room. Leonard's investigation is depicted in color sequences that are in reverse order. As each sequence begins, the viewer is unaware of the preceding events, just like Leonard, thereby giving us a sense of his confusion.

While composing the soundtrack, they created different, distinct sounds to differentiate between the color and black-and-white scenes.  Julyan says, "The emotion I was aiming at with my music was yearning and loss. But a sense of loss you feel but at the same time you don't know what it is you have lost, a sense of being adrift, (Wikipedia)  The cast for this movie fit their roles well.  The ultimate goal of any character should be to make us believe completely in the reality of the character.  The Art of Watching Films pg 319
Guy Pearce makes you believe that he has no short term memory by repeating himself and using pictures to find things, by looking a little shocked by the notes he finds. 

Christopher Nolan's love of literature is an integral aspect to his style as a film-maker.  “ I studied English Literature. I wasn't a very good student, but one thing I did get from it, while I was making films at the same time with the college film society, was that I started thinking about the narrative freedoms that authors had enjoyed for centuries and it seemed to me that filmmakers should enjoy those freedoms as well.” (Wiki quote) Memento was only his second debut film.  With his films he is creative and uses his own style, he does not conform to regular Hollywood standards.