Flashbacks in Film

Memory & History

Maureen Turim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317916666
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Film et vidéo

The flashback is a crucial moment in a film narrative, one that captures the cinematic expression of memory, and history. This author's wide-ranging account of this single device reveals it to be an important way of creating cinematic meaning.

Taking as her subject all of film history, the author traces out the history of the flashback, illuminating that history through structuralist narrative theory, psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity, and theories of ideology.

From the American silent film era and the European and Japanese avant-garde of the twenties, from film noir and the psychological melodrama of the forties and fifties to 1980s art and Third World cinema, the flashback has interrogated time and memory, making it a nexus for ideology, representations of the psyche, and shifting cultural attitudes.

1

Definition and Theory of the Flashback

Why a study devoted to the flashback in film? Why single out one narrative device and trace its use over eighty years of cinematic expression? The selective focus on the trope of the flashback is a way of slicing through the enormity of film history, a method for considering the aesthetic history of film as just such a diverse composite of the history of filmic forms. We will ask what role the flashback played in the history of film, in the life of various film aesthetics and particularly in the development in cinematic modernism. As complex as these issues are, the goal of this book is not simply that of a focused aesthetic history.

The flashback is particularly interesting to theoretical conceptualization of film. The flashback is a privileged moment in unfolding that juxtaposes different moments of temporal reference. A juncture is wrought between present and past and two concepts are implied in this juncture: memory and history. Studying the flashback is not only a way of studying the development of filmic form, it is a way of seeing how filmic forms engage concepts and represent ideas.

Most readers are probably familiar with what we mean by a flashback in film. For many, Hollywood classics have defined this familiarity with the flashback technique including such famous examples in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, (1941), cited in virtually every dictionary of film that attempts a definition of the flashback.¹ A body of literature discussing the flashback exists, ranging from scriptwriting manuals to introductory books on film study.² In its classic form, the flashback is introduced when the image in the present dissolves to an image in the past, understood either as a story-being-told or a subjective memory. Dialogue, voice-over, or intertitles that mark anteriority through language often reinforce the visual cues representing a return to the past. Both earlier and later in film history, other forms of flashbacks occur that are less obviously marked. We therefore need a more general definition for the flashback that includes all types of flashbacks. In its most general sense, a flashback is simply an image or a filmic segment that is understood as representing temporal occurrences anterior to those in the images that preceded it. The flashback concerns a representation of the past that intervenes within the present flow of film narrative. As we shall see shortly, there is a great deal more to be said about the definition of the flashback and the implications of this term.

Memory, in its psychoanalytic and philosophical dimensions, is one of the concepts inscribed in flashbacks. Memory surges forth, it strengthens or protects or it repeats and haunts. A plethora of depicted memories are offered across the history of flashback use, each slightly different in form, ideology, tone. Some are subjective, interiorized; others represent a telling-in-language whose degree of subjectivity might be considerably less. To analyze this constant play of difference, the films need be examined as fragments of a cinematic discourse on the mind’s relationship to the past and on the subject’s relationship to telling his or her past.

The cinematic presentation of memory in these films can be compared with the knowledge proposed by various disciplines that research and speculation on memory processes. We shall find that this comparison shows some mirroring and some fascinating discrepancies, some anticipations of the future of science by art and some anachronisms used blithely because they correspond to some dramatic imperative of a given mode of fiction.

If flashbacks give us images of memory, the personal archives of the past, they also give us images of history, the shared and recorded past. In fact, flashbacks in film often merge the two levels of remembering the past, giving large-scale social and political history the subjective mode of a single, fictional individual’s remembered experience. This process can be called the “subjective memory,” which here has the double sense of the rendering of history as a subjective experience of a character in the fiction, and the formation of the Subject in history as the viewer of the film identifying with fictional character’s positioned in a Active social reality. The play of different voices within film narration, however, implies certain departures or divisions within this formation of subjectivity. Even flashbacks that are themselves marked by subjectivity or the single focalization of a character may engender a representation of history not so subjectively circumscribed, or so unified. The telling or remembering of the past within a film can be self-conscious, contradictory, or ironic. Some flashback narratives actually take as their project the questioning of the reconstruction of the historical. A close study of the variations in flashbacks is actually a means of questioning the conceptual foundations of history in its relationship to narrative and narrative in its relationship to history.

The goal of this study is to produce a multidimensional overview of the functioning of flashback. Multidimensional because film history, film theory, film analysis merge in the investigation of the flashback and open to the issues of social history and philosophy. Multidimensional also due to the manner in which the analysis of the films themselves is considered a project of multiple perspectives. This first chapter aims to define these goals, as emblemized by five words—form, image, voice, memory, and history.

Etymology of the term “Flashback”

One aspect of a definition and theory of the flashback as a cinematic device is the etymology of the term itself. The term “flashback” is a marvelously appropriate turn-of-the-century coinage, sparked with the modern notions of speed, movement, energy, of the relativity of spatio-temporal relationships and the vicissitudes of mental processes. How did these connotations come to reside in this particular word, and how did it come to be used as a cinematic term?

We know for certain that the term flashback is highly derivative of certain uses of the verbal and nominative form of “flash,” but other aspects of the etymology are more speculative and arbitrary. The term “flashback,” probably came to its cinematic context in a migration from mechanics and physics, where the term “flash” and the phrase “to flash back” were in general usage at the turn of the twentieth century. “Flash,” long used to describe a brief interval of light, as in “lightning flashes,” had come to be used to describe the brief and violent consequences of combustion. Flash was therefore applied to explosions and the firing of engines. “To flash back” evolved to indicate a kind of misfiring, as in the example from the Encylopaedia Britanica of 1902 cited in the O.E.D.: “A still further addition of air causes the mixture to become so highly charged that it flashes back into the tube of the burner.”³ This evolved, according to the O.E.D., into the nominative form, at first hyphenated: “the highly flammable vapor of petrol and a ‘flash-back’ resulted in the total destruction of the car” (Motoring Annual).⁴

Beginning around the mid-nineteenth century, “flash” comes to mean a quick glance, as in the following examples the O.E.D. cites from literature: “Cyril flashed upon him one of his droll glances, and laughed” (M. Gray, Silence of DeanMaitland, 1844); “The young man flashed his insolent eyes at her,” (R. Langbridge, Flame & Flood, 1903). “Flash” becomes connected to vision, paving the way for the figuration of memory inherent in the cinematic flashback.

This combination of brief instances of light, of explosive power, and of the change in direction and quality of a glance, are appropriate antecedents to the term flashback in its cinematic sense. The O.E.D. gives the cinematic definition as follows:

flashback, sb. [f. the verbal phr.*to flash back],…2. Cinema: A scene which is a return to a previous action in the film, a * CUT-BACK; hence a revival of the memory of past events, as iii a pictorial or written presentation, …

1916 Variety, 13 Oct. 28/4 In other words the whole thing is a flash-back of the episodes leading up to her marriage. 1928 J. Gallishaw Only two ways to write a story I. vii. 177 With Sunk the method of presentation was chronological … In the case of Paradise Island the method is reversed. The order instead of being chronological is anti-chronological: It is the flash-back method. 1934 H.G. Wells Exper. Autobiogr. II. vii. 486 When goddesses and Sea Ladies vanish and a flash back to the ancestral chimpanzee abolishes the magic caverns of Venus, human beings arrive. 1947 Times I Nov. 6/4 The film relates, in a prolonged flash-back how the innocent Indian became corrupted by bewildering contact with those supposed to be his superiors in civilization. 1957 Times Lit. Suppl. 26 July 453/2 In his new novel … [he] uses with enviable ease a complicated system of flash-backs (p. 1099).

The O.E.D. definition seems to confirm the hypothesis that the term flashback was first used in its sense of narrative returns to the past in reference to film, rather than other forms of storytelling. Literature and theater certainly used techniques similar to the flashback before cinema, but the etymology of this term for a return to a narrative past inserted in a narrative present is apparently derived from the speed with which cinematic editing was able to cut decisively to another space and time. Flash—the audience was transported in the movie’s time machine—back in time. It is my sense that only after the term “flashback” was accepted in film criticism and screenwriting did it attain a more general application to literature and theater, both to describe contemporaneous works, and to be retrospectively applied to similar techniques of narration in earlier poems, novels, and plays.

Eventually “flashback” becomes incorporated into literary terminology, and its probable etymology as a cinematic term is not necessarily noted, as is indicated by the “plot” entry in M.H. Abrams’s A Glossary of Literary Terms:

In the novel, the modern drama, and especially the motion picture, exposition is sometimes managed by flashbacks: interpolated narratives or scenes (which may be justified as a memory or a revery, or as a confession by one of the characters) which represent events that happened before the point at which the work opened. Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman and Ingmar Bergman’s film Wild Strawberries make persistent and skillful use of this device.⁵

Abrams’s definition, in merely describing the “flashback” as occurring in the novel, the modern drama, and the motion picture gives us no sense that whatever literary and theatrical precedents there were for the concept, the term “flashback” was not apparently used until the advent of cinema and then only ten or fifteen years after the first filmic flashbacks appeared.

A more detailed look at the filmmakers’ introduction of the technique and the critics’ introduction of the term “flashback” will occur in chapter two, where it will be treated as a part of the historical development of the technique rather than as the specific etymology of the term. We will also examine the interplay between film and literature later in this chapter, as well as the next one. Suffice it to say for now that except for the earliest period of flashback films (before 1915), films of the avant-garde, and more recent modernist films, the “flash” presented in films is often a rather slow dissolve and that the audience is offered explanatory intertitles or verbal support to smooth the time travel. Still, the term “flashback” that gained currency in the late teens and early twenties marks a recognition that something particularly transformative and jarring occurred in cinema’s montage of disparate temporalities in disjunct order.

The etymology of the term “flashback” includes a fascinating migration into our language beyond its original reference to narrative technique. It has now been adopted by psychology to refer to the spontaneous recall of a memory image, especially in the context of a war trauma, in which former soldiers are said to have “battlefield flashbacks.” “Drug flashback” may have started as a counter-culture slang term, but it is now used by the medical profession to describe recurring effects of drug experiences. The phrase even has a more general colloquial use to describe an individual’s personal memories, often shortened as the phrase “I just flashed on” (“… what we were doing last year at this time” or “… the last time I was in Y’s house,” etc.). This colloquial use of the term indicates how movies as popular culture begin to affect the way people think about their own experience. Cinematic renderings of storytelling and memory processes may have borrowed from literature and sought to reproduce human memory mimetically, but ironically, the cinematic presentation of the flashback affects not only how modern literature is organized and how plays are staged, but perhaps also how audiences remember and how we describe those memories.

The Question of Formalism and the Device

The analysis of flashbacks in film is first of all a history of formal changes in storytelling techniques. As such, this study owes much to Russian formalist methodology in establishing a theory and method for analyzing the permutations of form found in flashback films. The formalists introduced the basic distinction in terminology between story and plot.⁶ The term “story” refers to narrative events as understood in a “real” temporality, a logic of linearity and causality that refers to the ordering of time in the “natural” world. Plot is the inscription of events in their actual presentation in the narrative (the book as read or film as viewed). Thus plot order can vary from story order to various effects, and story order is often left for the reader/viewer to conceptualize according to different cues of dating and reference.

Another concept Russian formalism introduced was the notion of a “device,” a construct within form that complicates the formal patterning of the textual object, providing form with variations. The flashback can be seen as one such device, as it rearranges plot order. In some ways the device is similar to the notion of the figure within earlier rhetorical theory, but it is at once a larger category and one which has a different status. Rhetoric in the earlier tradition saw figures as creating meanings that the reader/analyst’s job was to explicate and evaluate. The formalists inverted the device/signification relationship previously assumed in explanations of how texts functioned. Content exists to naturalize or justify the device, except in cases where the device is bared in displays of narrative reflexivity.⁷ The great contribution of early formalism was to accentuate another history of textual development by inverting the value assigned to content over form.

Recently, a “neo-formalism” has been introduced into American film theory by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson which makes much use of this story/plot distinction and its theoretical consequences, as well as the theory of fictional devices.⁸ Their work demonstrates the continued significance of these principles as fundamental to the theory of narration.

Returning to Abrams’s gloss of the term “flashback,” we can see how his treatment of flashbacks as a device of narrative exposition subscribes to the formalist inversion. According to his view of narrative construction, such expository devices must be naturalized or as he says, “justified” somehow.⁹ Flashbacks typically hide their formal function, he says, by being presented as memories, dreams, or confessions. This formalist explanation only begins to suggest the complex weave of factors that are at play in the evolution of narrative structures.

While acknowledging the debt to formalist theory, let me also suggest that the formalism that informs this study is not a formalism conceived of as separate from or in opposition to a larger sense of historical development; quite the contrary. My premise is rather that the history of the flashback from 1902 through 1985 is also a complex fragment of more general developments within film history and social history. By slicing through film history focusing on a single narrative technique we can examine important changes in cinematic representation and ideology, not always discussed in formalist studies as such.

We can easily suggest that the flashback developed as a means of mimetic representation of memory, dreams, or confession, and in so doing we are not necessarily returning to an outmoded thematic treatment of technique. We can instead see flashbacks simultaneously as both devices to be covered with referential and narrative justification and as a means of portraying thought processes or circuitous investigations of enigmas. We can see that it is this weave of motivation that makes the inscription of flashbacks in fact so fascinating.

We might also extrapolate a complex pattern of evolution and influence among novel, play, and film. Film influences the modern novel to duplicate a cinematic sense of the flashback mimetically, while the traditional novel, especially the 19th-century novel, can be seen as already containing the literary equivalent of a filmic flashback, though “naturalized” in language.¹⁰

The history of the flashback device is not linear, however, and formalist method can help overcome a tendency to make history into a linear or developmental progression. The chronological organization of this study, in fact, serves to point out the asynchronous an...