Critical Reflection

Critical Reflection

Memory and narrative form: The flashback as a narrative tool

In literature and film alike, flashbacks are used as a tool with which to present memories usually exclusive to a single character within the story. Memory, in relation to contemporary cinema, can be divided into two categories; public and private.

Cameron says that 'flashbacks are conventionally used as a representation of human pyschological processes' within the medium of the film (81). In the Creative Task the images and text that compose the flashback are juxtaposed with the narrative of the present day, and with the news story images. The flashback consists of a recollection of events and drawings to illustrate it. The images that accompany the flashback are hand drawn to indicate that they are personal and emotive ways of recalling the memory, as opposed to the photos that factually document the events in history. The narrative of the flashback is not totally chronological, but skips to different images and moments in time just like the human mind does when a person remembers an event. The brain does not remember everything perfectly, but jumps from moment to moment. The focus is not on the chronological, but rather key personal memories. Among these memories are the unseen forgotten moments , represented by the missing images that would other wise complete the recollection.


Turim writes that in a classic film flashback the 'image in present form dissolves to an image of the past.' (1) This acts as a way of connecting the present narrative with that of the past. The Creative Task begins with the narrator reading a newspaper article that makes them think of a similar event that happened to them. The focus of the story goes from a present day event to the personal recollection of an event that happened years earlier.





References:
Cameron, Allan. "Navigating Memory: Temporal Anchoring and the Modular Subject." Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 79-112.

Turim, Maureen. "Definition and Theory of the Flashback." Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History. London: Routledge, 1989.




Bibliography:
Cameron, Allan. "Navigating Memory: Temporal Anchoring and the Modular Subject." Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 79-112.

Turim, Maureen. "Definition and Theory of the Flashback." Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History. London: Routledge, 1989.

Turim, Maureen. "Flashbacks and the Psyche in Melodrama and Film Noir." Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History. New York: Routledge, 1989.