A flashback, more formally known as analepsis, is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point in the story. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story's primary sequence of events to fill in crucial backstory. In the opposite direction, a flashforward (or prolepsis) reveals events that will occur in the future. Both flashback and flashforward are used to cohere a story, develop a character, or add structure to the narrative. In literature, internal analepsis is a flashback to an earlier point in the narrative; external analepsis is a flashback to a time before the narrative started.
In film, flashbacks depict the subjective experience of a character by showing a memory of a previous event and they are often used to "resolve an enigma". Flashbacks are important in film noir and melodrama films. In films and television, several camera techniques, editing approaches and special effects have evolved to alert the viewer that the action shown is a flashback or flashforward; for example, the edges of the picture may be deliberately blurred, photography may be jarring or choppy, or unusual coloration or sepia tone, or monochrome when most of the story is in full color, may be used. The scene may fade or dissolve, often with the camera focused on the face of the character and there is typically a voice-over by a narrator (who is often the character who is experiencing the memory).
The psychological phenomenon has also frequently been portrayed narratively in film and television. Some of the most accurate media portrayals of psychological flashbacks have been those related to wartime, and the association to PTSD caused by the traumas and stresses of war. One of the earliest screen portrayals of this is in the 1945 film Mildred Pierce.
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Notable examples
Literature
An early example of analepsis is in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, where the main story is narrated through a frame story set at a later time. Another early use of this device in a murder mystery was in "The Three Apples", an Arabian Nights tale. The story begins with the discovery of a young woman's dead body. After the murderer later reveals himself, he narrates his reasons for the murder in a series of flashbacks leading up to the discovery of her dead body at the beginning of the story. Flashbacks are also employed in several other Arabian Nights tales, such as "Sinbad the Sailor" and "The City of Brass".
Analepsis was used extensively by author Ford Madox Ford, and by poet, author, historian and mythologist Robert Graves. 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 of events leading up to the disaster. Analepsis is also used in Night by Elie Wiesel. If flashbacks are extensive and in chronological order, one can say that these form the present of the story, while the rest of the story consists of flashforwards. If flashbacks are presented in non-chronological order, the time at which the story takes place can be ambiguous: One such work is Slaughterhouse-Five, in which the narrative jumps back and forth in time, so there is no actual present time line. Os Lusíadas is a story about a voyage of Vasco da Gama to India and back. The narration starts when they were arriving in Africa but it quickly flashes back to the beginning of the story, which is when they were leaving Portugal.
The Harry Potter series employs a magical device called a Pensieve, which changes the nature of flashbacks from a mere narrative device to an event directly experienced by the characters, who are thus able to provide commentary.
Film
The creator of the flashback technique in cinema was Histoire d'un crime directed by Ferdinand Zecca in 1901. An early flashback in cinema occurs throughout D.W. Griffith's film Hearts of the World (1918): for example, during the wall scene with the Boy at 1:33. Flashbacks were first employed during the sound era in Rouben Mamoulian's 1931 film City Streets, but were rare until about 1939 when, in William Wyler's Wuthering Heights as in Emily Brontë's original novel, the housekeeper Ellen narrates the main story to overnight visitor Mr. Lockwood, who has witnessed Heathcliff's frantic pursuit of what is apparently a ghost. More famously, also in 1939, Marcel Carné's film Le Jour Se Lève is told almost entirely through flashback: the story starts with the murder of a man in a hotel. While the murderer, played by Jean Gabin, is surrounded by the police, several flashbacks tell the story of why he killed the man at the beginning of the film.
One of the most famous flashbacks is in the Orson Welles film Citizen Kane (1941). The protagonist, Charles Foster Kane, dies at the beginning, uttering the word Rosebud. The remainder of the film is framed by a reporter's interviewing Kane's friends and associates, in a futile effort to discover what the word meant to Kane. As the interviews proceed, pieces of Kane's life unfold in flashback, but Welles' use of such unconventional flashbacks was thought to have been influenced by William K. Howard's The Power and the Glory. Lubitsch used a flashback in Heaven Can Wait (1943), which tells the story of Henry Van Cleve. Though usually used to clarify plot or backstory, flashbacks can also act as an unreliable narrator. The multiple and contradictory staged reconstructions of a crime in Errol Morris's 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line are presented as flashbacks based on divergent testimony. Akira Kurosawa's 1950 Rashomon does this in the most celebrated fictional use of contested multiple testimonies.
Sometimes a flashback is inserted into a film even though there was none in the original source from which the film was adapted. The 1956 film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's stage musical Carousel used a flashback device which somewhat takes the impact away from a very dramatic plot development later in the film. This was done because the plot of Carousel was then considered unusually strong for a film musical. In the film version of Camelot (1967), according to Alan Jay Lerner, a flashback was added not to soften the blow of a later plot development but because the stage show had been criticized for shifting too abruptly in tone from near-comedy to tragedy.
Television
The television series Quantico, Kung Fu, Psych, How I Met Your Mother, Grounded for Life, Once Upon a Time, and I Didn't Do It use flashbacks in every episode. Flashbacks were a predominant feature of the television shows Lost, Arrow, Phineas and Ferb, Orange Is the New Black, 13 Reasons Why, Elite and Quicksand. Many detective shows routinely use flashback in the last act to illustrate the detective's reconstruction of the culprit's plot, e.g. Murder, She Wrote, Banacek, Columbo. The television show Leverage uses a flashback at the end of each episode to show how the protagonists successfully carried out their confidence trick on the episode's antagonist.
The anime Inuyasha flashes backs to half a century earlier in the two-part episode "The Tragic Love Song of Destiny" (episodes 147 and 148, in the sixth season), narrated by the elderly younger sister of Lady Kikyo, Lady Kaede.
In Princess Half-Demon, the spinoff to the aforementioned anime, the premiere flashes back eighteen years, to five months since the conclusion of the original series' seventh season. Episode fifteen, "Farewell Under the Lunar Eclipse", is narrated by Riku, who explains what had happened before and right after the Half-Demon Princesses were born; namely where Inuyasha and nineteen-year-old Kagome Higurashi had ended up, trapped within the Black Pearl at the border of the Afterlife for fourteen years. Some months later, there are flashbacks of memories belonging to Jaken ("The Silver-Scale Curse") and Hachimon ("Battle of the Moon, Part 1").
The Disney Channel series Phineas and Ferb has many flashbacks and flashforwards. In several episodes, the main antagonist, Dr. Doofenshmirtz, uses flashbacks to explain his past. A gag in the episode "Doof Dynasty" notes that, when a character explains their past, their body ripples (referencing the "ripple effect" which starts a flashback in other media). The whole episode "Act Your Age" is a flashforward of the characters as teenagers. Several other episodes also feature flashbacks of the main characters' ancestors who, as a running gag, always seem to look like the main characters with slight variations in clothing, but the same mannerisms and voices.
(Northern Exposure episode "Cicely" used a similar device, with the main cast playing unrelated characters of 84 years before, at the founding of the village.)