Time series in movies

As the name implies, time series is the order in which the storyteller arranges events. As we know, the events in stories are always multidimensional and * * * temporal. Some things happen at the same time, some things are different in the same place, and some things are intertwined. But narratives can only be told one by one along the time flow. So the storyteller's arrangement and combination of events appeared. It should be noted that this arrangement is not completely random, but has certain cultural and thematic purposes. Generally speaking, the best effect can be achieved by arranging and organizing the sequence of events, which can better highlight the theme that the author wants to express.

Generally speaking, the arrangement and organization of events can be roughly divided into sequence and pre-flashback, flashback and flashback, insertion and pre-narration. Let's talk about the time sequence in the film from these aspects.

I. Preface and Flashback

Sequential narrative means that the narrator tells the story in strict accordance with the order of time development, and the time sequence of events in the narrative is the same as that of real events in the story, which is the most common way of film narrative. The sequence strictly follows the natural flow of time, and the events are connected in series in chronological order. Its characteristic is that time is clear before and after, and the story is presented to the receiver in the flow of time. It is often the most classic "beginning-development-climax-ending" mode, and the time sequence narrative only strictly follows the realistic time dimension. If the location and events are highly unified, it will basically return to the "three unifications" of drama art, that is, the high unity of time, place and events. 12 angry man (1957) can be regarded as the perfect application of "three unifications" in the film. In a limited time, a jury of *** 12 focused on whether the juvenile was guilty in the meeting room, completely following the linear law of classical narratology.

China's earliest systematic and representative narrative works can be traced back to Zuo Zhuan. Taking historical events as the center and time as the clue, it created a new narrative method-chronological narrative, which had an immeasurable influence on traditional China narrative works. Since then, chronological narration has become an iron law of China's literary works.

But it must be clear that we have specially discussed the basic principles of film narrative structure-linearity, nonlinearity and anti-linearity. This is viewed from the overall concept of narrative structure, and this division can be said to be a result of multiple causes. The definition of linear narrative concept includes not only time-series narrative, but also the audience's acceptance, and time-series narrative is only from the perspective of story narrator.

Xu Shun's general expressions in film works are subtitles "10 years later" and "20 years later", which can highlight the protagonist's fate change and some unshakable personality in a long time, such as Yu Gong moving mountains, ten years of cold window and so on.

Similar to Xu Shun, it is a kind of forward flash, which can be regarded as a variant of Xu Shun, and also shows the passage of time, but the jump of time is more abrupt and internalized, as can be seen from several examples:

Kubrick's 200 1 A Space Odyssey began in ancient times. Blackstone inspired the intellectual field of orangutans, and then a bone was thrown into the sky and flew all the way to the Milky Way, becoming a modern satellite. This shot is classic enough even in the history of movies. Millions of years have passed since human society.

Once upon a time in America. At new york Railway Station, the escaped noodles stood in front of the mirror, watching Byakki Smoker become himself after 35 years.

In the beautiful life, my father took my relatives in public on a white horse and returned to his home with his wife. After a few seconds, my father shouted something. After a child came out from home, the audience reported that it had been several years since he got married and he had a son.

In Citizen Kane, three pieces of board games between Kane and his wife show the changes of their feelings over time. As a pioneering work of modern film, it was studied by the Film Academy as a textbook model.

All the above are examples of foreign films, because domestic films are really conservative in narrative techniques, which is also a basic law of narrative works that have been determined since the beginning of Left Turn. However, in recent years, some directors have successfully used narrative techniques such as pre-flashing.

On sunny days, the protagonist who threw his schoolbag into the sky in primary school has grown into a teenager.

The Grand Master is about 1 hour and 20 minutes. Ip Man and his wife went to the photo studio to take a family photo (this family photo composition is perfect! A flower on the left, a flower on the right), then turn the real scene into a photo and put it on the table, and then suddenly the bomb exploded! The Japanese invaded China. The idea of Sunglasses King is really wonderful!

The above example can basically be regarded as the application of forward flash in movies. It can be seen that compared with the slow and stylized narrative of the era, the pre-flashback is more abrupt and internalized, the techniques are more diverse, the lens transition is not exposed, and it is more artistic and harmonious.

Second, flashback and flashback.

Flashback is to tell the result or other key plot of the story first, and then tell the reason or beginning of the story in turn. Compared with China's narrative works' preference for direct narrative, western narrative has a tradition of flashback since ancient times, and many western epics use flashback. The most famous is Dante's famous saying "An arrow hits the bull's-eye and leaves the string" in The Divine Comedy. In addition, the narrative of Odyssey begins in the middle of the story, 20 years after the outbreak of the Trojan War, and then goes back to the previous history. In the18th century, novelists began to consciously use flashback to achieve the best effect of the story. Modernist novelists believe that you should never start from the beginning of a story. More than a dozen types of stories that have been developed for thousands of years are almost exhausted by their predecessors, and straightforward narration will directly let readers guess the ending without suspense.

On the contrary, in China's literary works, even in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, some chapter-by-chapter novels appeared, and this flashback technique was occasionally used, but it was not popularized. After the development of China's films in the 1920s and 1930s, literary techniques will inevitably affect the films, and some predecessors even warned: "Never use all flashbacks and other techniques known only to intellectuals or people who are used to watching movies". Nevertheless, due to the need of narration, many movies still use flashback cautiously.

With the development of modern movies, flashback has been regarded as a common technique, and a reasonable combination of flashback in movies can often achieve special narrative effects.

Some classic flashback movies such as American Beauty and Sunset Boulevard. In addition, it is worth mentioning that this film with post-modern transcendental characteristics adopts a step-by-step story way, which breaks down the complete story into paragraphs and then flashbacks. For example, "Irrevocable", the story is divided into six or seven paragraphs, and ABCDE starts from the last paragraph and becomes EDCBA, and the camera rotates to the black screen overhead as the tangent point;

Nolan's souvenirs may be a little more complicated. The direct narrative and flashback structures are replaced by letters and numbers, that is, direct narrative ABCDE and flashback 5432 1, and then these two structures are put together to form a more subtle narrative structure:

a，5，B，4，C，3，D，2，E， 1

Flashback can be regarded as a variant of flashback, similar to the comparison before flashback. Flashback is more abrupt and internalized. In the use of flashbacks, the director will tell the audience "I'm going to flashback next, please pay attention" through various means such as characters fading in, fading out and voiceover. In literary writing, there are traditional writers like Balzac, who like to remind readers that he was flashing back just now with a restorative sign like "This is why" to avoid confusion. But modern writers like Proust are not. They "deliberately avoid cohesion and don't remind readers of the whole story, but jump in time and space at any time with the author's own hobbies, and even deliberately cause readers' time confusion, so modern novels are born here."

Flashback and flashback are mainly used for the following purposes:

1. Dramatically express past events or supplement background materials to introduce stories.

2. Meet the emotional needs of the characters in the story and insert important scenes from the past into the picture.

3. The need of form makes the narrative itself more abrupt and tortuous.

Flashback has obvious suggestibility and relative integrity, and can also exist in other narrative styles, and flashback is a more dexterous and completely cinematic technique.

When we analyze the dialogue polyphony of a movie, we use Citizen Kane, Rashomon and Social Network as examples. In Citizen Kane, five characters flash back five times. In Rashomon, five memories tell the story of murder and five flash back to the past. Flashback is also mentioned in What is Montage. Speaking of narrative montage, take The Master as an example, there is a picture in which Gong Er looks back with a low eyebrow, and then the story jumps back to the past.

It can be seen that flashback is an irrational and illogical narrative way that completely follows the psychology of characters and does not follow the realistic logic. Therefore, movies with flashbacks can be classified as nonlinear narratives. Flashback is relatively complete and organized, which can be accepted by the audience and can be classified as linear narrative. Proper flashback is to better serve the linear narrative of time sequence. Of course, although flashbacks are used in Nolan's Memento, there are still flashbacks and collages, which naturally do not belong to the traditional linearity.

Three. Insert text

The difference between interpolation method and flashback method is that there is no direct time and causal relationship between the scene or event inserted in interpolation method and the central event, while flashback belongs to the central event, but the causal time relationship before and after is reversed. There are generally two kinds of narratives. The first kind of scenes and shots inserted by the narrator to expand the meaning of the film are born out of the main plot, self-contained and detached from the central plot. The narrative in this interlude is often paused.

Common as China's traditional novels with chapters and sentences, the story goes smoothly. Suddenly, the author says "What is poetry as evidence", and the main plot stops here. To borrow Milan Kundera's words is to digress, that is to say, to get rid of the story of the novel for a while.

At this time, the story of the novel paused and turned into a semi-lyric and semi-discussion of the characters.

The other is to introduce the background material of the central event and insert the description of another event or scene. For example, in Casablanca, ingrid bergman and her husband fled to North Africa. "Of all the cities and pubs in the world, she just walked into Bogart's pub." Then she began to interpolate the central event, and the film began to introduce the past between them, but this past event did not belong to the central event, but was only the background material inserted for the better progress of the central event.

Fourth, preview.

"Many years later, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia will recall the distant afternoon when his father took him to see the ice."

If you have seen One Hundred Years of Solitude, you will be deeply impressed by the opening sentence. At that time, this technique had not yet arisen in the domestic literary world. Since the translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude in the last century, it has instantly set off the whole literary world. In the 1980s, literature was still an outstanding school. At that time, everyone wrote a book "One Hundred Years of Solitude", and Marquez kept his mouth shut about magical reality. Yu Hua imitated and wrote a book "Brothers", which began like this:

"Li Guangtou sat on his famous gold-plated toilet, closed his eyes and began to imagine his wandering life in space orbit. The silence around him is unfathomable. Li Guangtou looked down at how the magnificent earth unfolded slowly and could not help crying. Only then did he realize that he had no friends on earth. "

The story is narrated from the middle, which indicates the subsequent plot development from the beginning of the work. Originally, this technique was quite rare, but after Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, even third-rate online literature now uses this technique. "Many years later, when Dewey became the real behind-the-scenes manipulator of the Shanghai underground organization, he still remembered what Zhou Qun said to him on the truck that night."

As can be seen from the above example, preview is "preparing for a rainy day". But it should be noted that this must happen, that is to say, Colonel Aureliano Buendia will definitely face the firing squad many years later; Li Guang will sit on his gold-plated toilet many years later and realize that he has no friends. Many years later, Dewey will definitely become the real behind-the-scenes manipulator of the underground organization in Shanghai. Like Jiang Wen's Sunny Days, Ma Xiaojun imagined how he fought Liu Yiyingyong at the birthday party, but Guido's rambling imagination in Eight and a Half didn't come true, so it can't be regarded as a rehearsal.

Preview this technique, in Wong Kar-wai's film "The Ashes of Time", there was such a voice-over from the beginning:

"Many years later, I got a nickname, Xi Du."

Ouyang Feng didn't call this passage Du when he said it, and the story didn't happen, but the narrator predicted the ending of the story. At the end of the film, Ouyang Feng returned to white camel mountain. As shown at the beginning, his nickname is "Du". Preview has been created.