Blog Post #16- Flashbacks

A flashback is when you go back to the past to show a former memory that has to do with the plot. Flashbacks provide important information to help the audience members better understand the storyline and how it became that way. Flashbacks are mainly placed into two different categories, occasional flashbacks and structural flashbacks. 

Occasional flashbacks are when flashbacks occur about once or twice throughout the movie, but they are not a consistent thing. For example, the movie "Despicable Me". 

The movie "Despicable Me" is not surrounded around a flashback. Every once and a while they give us a flashback of the protagonist (Gru) as a kid and how he begun to be interested in space. Throughout the movie they occasionally flashback to Gru as a kid to show his childhood and how that has affected him as a person, but the movie is not based around the flashbacks. That makes this movie an example of Occasional flashbacks. 

Structural flashbacks are critical to the plot of the film. This is when the whole plot of the movie is surrounded around a flashback. A good example of this is the movie "The Notebook."

In "The Notebook" we start off the movie with this older man reading a story to this older woman. Then, it flashbacks to them when they were younger and that is the plot. The older couple is the younger couple several years later. The Protagonist of the movie is Noah while the love interest is Allie. Allie was diagnosed with Alzheimer and had a diary about their story and their love, for Noah to read whenever Allie forgot. In the beginning Noah begins to read the story and that is where the movie flashbacks to when they were young and takes up the rest of the movie. With the plot revolving around a flashback, that makes the movie an example of a structural flashback. 

In my opening film, if I want to give an example of something that happened in the past, I will use an occasional flashback. This way I can flashback, give a point of view and then get back to the main plot of the film. When it comes to my opening scene and the intended plot of my potential movie, I do not want to base it all around a flashback. Hence the reason I would only include a tiny section as a flashback.