A flashback (sometimes called an 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, but not always, the character who is experiencing the memory).
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 flash forwards. If flashbacks are presented in non-chronological order, the time at which the story takes place can be ambiguous: An example of such an occurrence is in Slaughterhouse-Five where the narrative jumps back and forth in time, so there is no actual present time line. Os Lusíadas is a story about 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 use of the flashback technique 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.