Loops, flashbacks and fractured narratives: why filmmakers love to play with time

Most film narratives move in one direction. A character wants something, obstacles appear, time passes, and eventually they – and we – arrive at an ending.

This is narrative linearity, and it has been the default mode of cinematic storytelling for more than a century.

Think of the classic 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption, which follows Andy Dufresne, a man wrongly imprisoned, over several decades. The linear progression of time allows us to witness the gradual development of Dufresne’s plan to escape from the Shawshank state prison.

Films that use this default narrative mode are successful for a reason: they’re easy to follow.

But what happens when timelines get fractured and a film suddenly becomes a series of fragmented scenes?

A film must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But not necessarily in that order.

Non-linear narrative structure appeared remarkably early in film history. American director D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) inter-cut four separate storylines set thousands of years apart, in ancient Babylon, Judea, 16th-century France and modern-day United States.

Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) opens with Kane’s death and the mystery of his final word (“Rosebud”), before piecing his life together through the contradictory memories of the people who knew him.

Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa took a similar approach in Rashomon (1950), presenting a killing in a forest through four unreliable eyewitness accounts – never resolving which version, if any, is true.

By the 1960s, non-linear narratives had become synonymous with non-Hollywood, non-English-language cinema.

Storytelling techniques such as analepsis and prolepsis (flashbacks and flash-forwards) became increasingly common in European films, as did converging timelines and circular structures.

French New Wave filmmakers were especially drawn to such innovations. Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) knitted together a present-day love affair in Hiroshima with fragmented memories of wartime trauma in France.