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Time Representations in the Perspective of Human Creativity
Edited by Anna Piata, Adriana Gordejuela and Daniel Alcaraz Carrión
[Human Cognitive Processing 75] 2022
► pp. 147–162

Chapter 7
Beyond the limits

Merging past and present in film flashbacks

 | Institute for Culture and Society, University of Navarra
Film flashbacks are rich multimodal devices that combine a stable pattern of retrospection with formal versatility that provides filmmakers with much space for being creative (Turim 1989; Gordejuela 2021). This chapter focuses on a particular kind of flashbacks where past and present are rendered simultaneously in two possible ways: either the past gets inserted into the present and is merged with it, or a character from the present appears as such in his or her own memories of the past. Through decompression of identity, these flashbacks simultaneously represent two different perspectives (viewpoint compression) and two separate moments in time (time compression) (cf. Dancygier 2012). The chapter illustrates the creative rendering of narrative time in a number of unconventional flashbacks.
Keywords: conceptual integration, decompression of identity, film discourse, time compression, viewpoint compression
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Flashbacks in film: Tradition and innovation
  • 3.Creative techniques in film flashbacks
    • 3.1Embedding the past in the present
    • 3.2Decompression of identity for viewpoint compression
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
  • Films
Published online: 10 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.75.07gor
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