Flashbacks

What are flashbacks?

A flashback, or involuntary recurrent memory, is a psychological phenomenon in which an individual has a sudden, usually powerful, re-experiencing of a past experience or elements of a past experience. These experiences can be happy, sad, exciting, or any other emotion one can consider. They can be used in films to show events that took place to help the audience gain a better understanding of how the plot in the story occurred in the first place. 

One of the most famous examples of a flashback is in the Orson Well's 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. From this, I have identified that flashbacks have been used for quite some time. They are extremely effective to use because the flashback can fill in the banks for the audience when they begin to wonder e.g. why conflict between characters have started. 


A good example of a flashback used would be in the film UP: 




This flashback is used at the start of the film to give the audience information about the past life of the character to help them gain an understanding of his behavior and the way he acts in the present. This flashback contains a montage because the editor is squeezing in information about the character into a short amount of time so the film time can focus more of the action within the present. Without a flashback, the audience would be distracted from the film due to wondering about why the character makes the choices that he does.