Lumen Autumn 2025 - Flipbook - Page 38
Movies
Reel time
at the movies
That’s not to say that linear storytelling cannot be highly
effective. Films that follow a chronological sequence, where events
unfold in the order they happen, are the default narrative mode for
a reason: they are easy to follow! A wonderful example of this mode
is The Shawshank Redemption (1994), which follows the life of
Andy Dufresne, a man wrongly imprisoned, over several decades.
The linear progression of time allows us to witness Dufresne’s
transformation and the gradual development of his plan to escape.
By Ben McCann
As a child, I vividly remember watching Superman (1978) and
staring slack jawed as the Man of Steel flew incredibly fast around
the Earth, made it stop spinning forward and jolted it into a
backwards whirl. So distraught was he after discovering Lois Lane
had tragically died in an earthquake that he flew up, up and away,
quite literally turned back time, and brought Lois back from
the dead.
The flipside of the linear narrative are non-linear structures that
present events out of chronological order. Christopher Nolan’s
Memento (2000) tells the story of Leonard Shelby, a man with
short-term memory loss who tries to find his wife’s killer. The
film is structured with two narrative threads: one moving forward
in time and the other moving backward. This unconventional
approach mirrors Leonard’s disoriented mental state, allowing the
audience to experience his confusion and frustration. Memento’s
manipulation of time serves both as a narrative device and as a way
to explore themes of memory, identity, and the subjective nature
of reality.
Fast forward to Back to the Future (1985), Pulp Fiction (1994)
and Dunkirk (2017) - I’ve always been fascinated with how film
treats time. Temporal manipulation can be visually arresting,
beautifully contemplative and sometimes plain bonkers. In a
skilled director’s hands, time becomes malleable, flexible and, on
occasions, illogical. As the great French director Jean-Luc Godard
once famously said: “A film must have a beginning, a middle, and
an end…but not necessarily in that order.”
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