Square One: Christopher Nolan’s Following (1998)

Whenever a filmmaker of note premieres a new film, it’s a good time to revisit that director’s first film to gauge how far they’ve come as an artist. With Dunkirk hitting theaters next week, we look behind us at Christopher Nolan’s 1998 debut, Following.
If the title of Christopher Nolan’s Following were a gerund, it would describe the actions of the film’s young male protagonist (Jeremy Theobald), who, as a means of ridding his life of boredom, aimlessness and likely some other, unspecified feeling of ennui, decides to tail random (and, eventually, not so random) strangers through the streets of London. If interpreted as a noun, however, the title could be presciently referencing the massive body of admirers Nolan will accrue in subsequent years thanks to the directorial trademarks first introduced in his debut. Most prominent among these include a brooding antihero driven to action by an idée fixe and, even more iconically, non-linear storytelling whose temporal fragmentation turns plot into a puzzle to be solved.
In the end, the coming-together of this, Nolan’s first conundrum, satisfies but feels a tad shallow, not least because the non-linearity on display is pure surface, an exercise in audience manipulation that lacks any clear narrative or thematic justification. Whereas a film like (500) Days of Summer chops up linearity to evoke the erratic movement of memory, and Nolan’s own Memento (released in 2000, only two years after Following) explicitly orients its non-chronological structure vis-à-vis the amnesiac hero’s fractured sense of time, Following would have been more or less the same movie had its story been told straight. The only missing thing would’ve been the fleeting, primordial pleasure of seeing the narrative gaps, forcibly generated by Nolan’s slice-n-dice storytelling, filled in—of seeing the incomplete made whole.
Still, the hop-scotch-like structure of Following’s story has significant resonance with the rest of Nolan’s work. In addition to being a lot of fun, it represents the beginnings of the director’s career-long experimentation with cinematic temporality, and, more specifically, with introducing a progressively wider gulf between the fabula (a term, originating in Russian formalism, that describes the chronological order of events within a story) and the syuzhet (how these events are presented to the viewer/reader). Through increasing the distance between a movie’s timeline and the viewer’s experience of it, Nolan has, over the years, expanded the possibilities of cinematic storytelling, an endeavor that began with his very first film.