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Revision as of 17:11, 4 October 2006 by Anonymous 57 (talk | contribs) (moved from Flashback (narrative technique))(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff) For other uses, see Flashback (narrative) (disambiguation).In literature, film, television and other media, a flashback (also called analepsis) is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point the story has reached. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened prior to the story's primary sequence of events or to fill in crucial backstory. In the opposite direction, a flashforward (or prolepsis) reveals events that will occur in the future.
A variation of prolepsis is prophecy, as when Oedipus is told that he will sleep with his mother and kill his father. As we learn later in Sophocles' play, he does both despite his efforts to evade his fate.
A good example of both analepsis and prolepsis is the first scene of La Jetée. As we learn a few minutes later, what we are seeing in that scene is a flashback to the past, since the present of the film's diegesis is a time directly following World War III. However, as we learn at the very end of the film, that scene also doubles as a prolepsis, since the dying man the boy is seeing is, in fact, himself. In other words, he is proleptically seeing his own death. We thus have an analepsis and prolepsis in the very same scene.
Analepsis was used extensively by author Ford Madox Ford.
The 1927 book The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder is the progenitor of the modern disaster epic in literature and film-making, where a single disaster intertwines the victims, whose lives are then explored by means of flashbacks to events leading up to the disaster.
In the world of television flashbacks are also very common. They are sometimes incorporated into episodes, but often whole episodes are devoted to them. One recent show which is well-known for this is Lost (TV series) which utilises flashbacks in almost every episode.
In a story if flashbacks are presented non-chronologically it can be ambiguous what is the present of the story: if flashbacks are extensive and in chronological order, one can also say that these form the present of the story, while the rest of the story consists of flash forwards.