The sequences ordered and located in the very rhythm of reality of a fiction are often the majority against the chaotic and irrational thoughts that assault in real life
The mind often plays tricks order is not exactly his forte, with thoughts that can often be a chaotic rain and move away from a purely rational process. In the audiovisual the flashbacksthose resources that are used to show the viewer something that has not been seen on screen or to refresh the memory of a previously told event, often play the role of visual responsible for exposing the journey through the past of a certain character.
With a memory centering the action of the flashback, sometimes much more confusing images emerge rather than the ordered sequence that the viewer’s eye has become more accustomed to generically.
By definition, the moment in which a flashback becomes a reality on screen is usually characterized by the usual rhythm of scenes that are happening in real time in the fictional universe, although the truth is that if you talk about memories or the past from the perspective of a character, these images are little or nothing defined by what is perceived in the present tense, but are rather blurs.
Is anyone able to remember what they experienced in a year when they were, say, 10 years old? 12 or 14 years? Probably, what comes to mind for the majority will be ‘flashes’ of punctual images and small details, like a succession of very fast moments that just as they come, they go.
Thus, trips to the past are full of a certain sweet chaos if they are about beautiful memories or of a tumultuous disorder if they are more in line with a traumatic experience, both without a precise chronology to show off. Two visual examples as far as films are concerned can be the recent biopic of ‘Elvis’ directed by Baz Luhrmann and which has recently been released on streaming, or, in a totally opposite pole, the political ‘thriller’ about the murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1963 by Oliver Stone, ‘JFK: open case’which has had a kind of continuation in this 2022 with the documentary ‘JFK: case reviewed’.
In the case of the portrait of the king of rock, which has already been widely discussed for its visual potential and its continuous games and changes at the montage level, it can be seen before the singer is going to climb for the first time with his band on stage he is assailed by images of when he was a child and sneaked into all those nooks and crannies where soul music made its way in MemphisTennessee, the city where he lived for much of his childhood.
This trip to the past is a delight of images arranged almost like an unlived dream, with scenes connected to each other in a vertiginous way with circular sweeps. This structure gives the viewer the sensation of having installed himself right in the character’s train of thoughtwhich involves the ‘flashback’ of a special aspect.
For its part, the theory of the assassination of former US President Kennedy exposed by Oliver Stone in the 90s takes advantage of the very context of the time of the action to give a greater packaging to the memories of the witnesses with whom the character of Kevin Costner, the District Attorney of New Orleans, speaks.
The timeline of the alleged conspiracy against Kennedy is basically nourished by images distorted by the need to also feed the puzzle of the mystery. Even so, the film gives space to the vision of the characters, without losing the stylistic format of the image, memories that some would like to erase or of moments that will never be forgotten for having been manipulated.
There are also stories that show with similar confusion how the human mind remembers, for example, a deceased person when several years have passed, of which his voice may have been lost even along the way, becoming an effort to remember the tone with which that person spoke. Normally, there are few daily memories that manage to resist the passage of time of the life shared with that person who is no longer there, and it is more feasible to stay in common with the most important experiences lived with that person or with the great difficulties that They also meet along the way.
Still, just as on any given day the mind remembers those favorite ice creams that were eaten during childhood or the dance that was rehearsed in high school, they can assault insignificant details of that past life. In ‘The Tree of Life‘the Terrence Malick film starring Jessica Chastain, Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, are precisely the moments that go unnoticed the ones that alternately link the line of the present with that of the pastsometimes confusing the viewer with a timeline as disjointed and full of isolated moments as the mental one.
Irrational calls of the mind, film format
When a character’s journey is revealed as a mental plane more than a route stuck to the external look of your life The viewer is also given the opportunity to visually see the most illogical and irrational desires that can be had. The last film released by French director Céline Sciamma, ‘petite mom‘is quickly discovered as a good example of this.
Before talking more in depth about this tape, Beware of the spoiler if you do not want to know anything about her!
The fact is that Sciamma, after having shown in ‘Portrait of a woman on fire‘ like the painter Marianne his vision haunts him of Héloïse, with whom she is in love, dressed as a bride before her immediate wedding, creates in ‘Petit maman’ a kind of story in which an 8-year-old girl, Nelly, ends up meeting and becoming friends with the girl who was her mother in her childhood. All this after (and at the same time) that her current mother, the adult, distances herself from her and hardly speak to him after the death of her mother, the girl’s grandmother.
The film ends up being, in short, a game at the service of the girl protagonist, as if the public were inside her head in which nothing makes sense and it is not known for sure what is happening. Beyond large plots structured in this way, it is nice to find a mental image in a movie when you least expect it, just as it happens in reality while you are doing something and suddenly a thought strikes.
This is what happens, for example, in ‘the worst person in the world‘by Joachim Trier, when Julie, the protagonistmentally runs out of his routine with the simple gesture of flipping a switch in his kitchen. All this to make what you really want come true, at least in one dimension. Isn’t that something we all think about on a daily basis? Escape to the dream world?