Sightlines · a concept

order of time / coexistence

coexisting regions of the past (Bergson's cone); non-chronological leaps.

On screen: the past as an order one moves through non-linearly (not a dated flashback)

Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) — Present Hiroshima and remembered Nevers coexist and press on one another; each lover is an entire region of the past, she carrying his Hiroshima, he triggering her Nevers when his sleeping hand…
The Phantom Carriage (1921) — The recursive flashbacks-within-flashbacks, Georges conducting David down through successive strata of his past — the dying night, the recent past with Edit, the deeper past of the marriage…
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) — the retrospective architecture — a 1943 present opening onto decades one moves back and down through non-linearly, an order of coexisting time rather than a chain of events
A Canterbury Tale (1944) — The landscape is presented as an order of coexisting time — Chaucer's pilgrims underfoot with their modern descendants — that one moves through rather than a dated flashback.
The Killers (1946) — The dossier stresses this is not a Rashomon of rival subjectivities but a mosaic of partial truths — the past as a region assembled non-linearly, not a falsified one
Lola Montès (1955) — The deliberately non-chronological flashback architecture: the ringmaster reaches into coexisting strata of Lola's life rather than moving through a dated sequence
Mr. Arkadin (1955) — Arkadin's past is not recalled in dated flashbacks but distributed across Europe as coexisting regions to be travelled into — Costa Brava, Madrid, Segovia, Munich, Paris, Rome — while Bourgoin's…
Night and Fog (1956) — The structure does not narrate linearly but repeatedly returns to and re-enters the camps, so the past is an order of coexisting layers rather than a dated flashback.
Tokyo Twilight (1957) — The desertion is never dramatized in flashback; the 'buried question of the daughters' parentage and legitimacy' is a past that can be spoken about but never visited, while the mother herself is…
Wild Strawberries (1957) — Five or six time registers woven through a single day's journey, coexisting non-linearly rather than playing back in sequence
Testament of Orpheus (1960) — The Poet, unstuck in his own era, wanders a wasteland populated by Cocteau's earlier films — Cégeste, the reprised motifs and props, the returning Orphée players — moving through a lifework as…
Jules and Jim (1962) — The retrospective chronicle bracketed by Subor's past-tense voice-over, decades collapsing across single cuts, everything suffused with pastness from the first minute; 'Le Tourbillon de la vie' as…
Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962) — Mary's morphine returns her to the convent-school past she relocates into rather than recalls; the family relitigates old wounds until the past consumes the present.
Salvatore Giuliano (1962) — Serandrei interleaves the revolt, the massacre, the band's collapse, the Viterbo trial and Pisciotta's prison death as an undated coexisting order moved through non-linearly.
São Paulo, Incorporated (1965) — Laurelli's prize-winning editing assembles Carlos's flashbacks out of chronological order, 'as fragments recalled under pressure rather than as a life recounted from the beginning' — layers moved…
The Pawnbroker (1965) — Camp memory erupts unbidden and out of the survivor's control rather than as dated testimony — past coexisting with and invading the present.
A Man and a Woman (1966) — Memory is cut in with no dissolve and no optical marker, so Anne's dead husband simply appears inside the present tense and the viewer must sort the strata — the past as a region occupied, not a…
The Saragossa Manuscript (1966) — The grandfather's illustrated tome is not a dated flashback but a region entered and wandered — the Napoleonic present opens onto a coexisting past with its own weather
Two for the Road (1967) — Challis gives each stratum its own light temperature without announcing it — blown-out sunburn for the hitchhiking, warm and close for the MG honeymoon, cold and reflective for the Mercedes present…
Wavelength (1967) — Late superimpositions layer earlier stages of the zoom over later ones so the room haunts itself — the film's own past coexisting inside its present image.
Petulia (1968) — The beating of Petulia revealed incrementally across the film, recurring out of linear order as a past one moves through rather than a dated flashback that explains.
Catch-22 (1970) — The Snowden death returned to again and again in escalating fragments, never filed away as a dated memory but coexisting beneath the present farce
Duck, You Sucker (1971) — Baragli's cross-cutting builds the Ireland material as 'fragmentary, recurring memories' that withhold and gradually complete, so the same region of the past is re-entered repeatedly and its…
The Conformist (1971) — Arcalli's nested, non-chronological analepses that bleed together until Marcello seems to live inside coexisting regions of memory rather than visit dated flashbacks
The Go-Between (1971) — 'The past is a foreign country'; Beck threads undated, cryptic glimpses of old Leo's return into the summer so the past coexists as an order rather than a dated line.
Roma (1972) — Mastroianni cuts between 1939 and 1972 with no dissolves, fades or markers, so the two Romes read as adjacent rooms rather than as past and present; the 1930s underlie 1972 as the villa underlies the…
Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) — The Tralfamadorian doctrine that all moments exist permanently and at once — not dated flashbacks but a single order of time Billy wanders non-linearly, figured aurally by Bach's simultaneous…
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) — The reconstructed cuts open with Garrett's own 1909 murder, bracketing the 1881 pursuit so the whole manhunt unfolds inside a death that has already happened — a fatalistic, predestined order of time.
Sisters (1973) — The black-and-white fisheye clinic sequence, in which the drugged and hypnotized Grace is inserted into Danielle's memory as the missing twin — a past that is not hers, entered as a region rather…
The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973) — Every door in the sanatorium opens onto another layer of memory, history and dream, and the camera glides from one century to the next inside a single ruined house — the past entered by walking…
Lenny (1974) — The film refuses to date its flashbacks; Perrine plays the young stripper and the depleted woman recalling her across two timescales at once, the second constantly shading the first
The Godfather Part II (1974) — the Vito timeline is interwoven not as dated flashback but through thematic resonance and a distinct amber palette — a coexisting region of time, cut against Michael's present for irony, not…
We All Loved Each Other So Much (1974) — Time braided rather than linear: the film opens near its chronological end and repeatedly circles the same shared years, keying each historical layer to its own photographic mode — high-contrast…
Mirror (1975) — The three temporal strands (1930s childhood, wartime printing press, failing present marriage) are woven by association rather than sequenced or dated, so the past is a depth moved through, not a…
The Travelling Players (1975) — The film loops across 1939–1952 with no signposting, returning to the same square as wedding, rally, and execution, layered under the cyclical Oresteian recurrence — the past as a coexisting order…
Cria! (1976) — González del Amo joins present, memory, fantasy and flash-forward with direct cuts and matched actions rather than dated flashbacks, with objects and the repeated record as the connective tissue…
Annie Hall (1977) — Alvy walks into his Brooklyn childhood classroom and family dinners as an adult observer, occupying the past as a region rather than as a dated flashback
Ballad of Tara (1979) — The warrior from a defeated army arrives in the present village as a whole coexisting region of time rather than a dated flashback, visible to Tara and almost no one else, with a claim to make on the…
The Shining (1980) — The closing push into the 1921 photograph with Jack at its center, and Grady's 'you've always been the caretaker' — the past as a layer one walks into, not a dated flashback
Time Bandits (1981) — The map charts holes in the fabric of time; Napoleon, Robin Hood, Agamemnon and the Titanic are reached not as a chronological sequence but as coexisting regions the bandits climb into at will
Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982) — Fragmented, involuntary recollection that recurs and intensifies rather than unfolding: war, schoolroom and failed marriage linked by graphic rhyme, not by dated flashback.
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) — The South African flashback is 'edited as an intrusion rather than a smooth dissolve into memory,' in a wholly different pastoral/choral register, so that 'much of the film's meaning depends on the…
Nostalgia (1983) — Chromatic register-shift (warm Russian memory / cool Italian present) joined by dissolves and fades rather than hard cuts, so temporalities are layered rather than sequenced
Sans Soleil (1983) — The associative, recursive structure in which motifs (cats, owls, sleep, the dead, looking back) recur and accumulate, the past navigated as an order rather than a dated chronology
That Day, on the Beach (1983) — The editing nests flashbacks within flashbacks across thirteen years and repeatedly withholds the orienting cue, so the past is moved through as coexisting regions rather than visited as dated…
The Big Chill (1983) — The Costner flashbacks were shot and cut; the 1960s exist in the film only as talk, songs, and an absent man, with no dated flashback to anchor them — 'a present tense with a hole in it'
Once Upon a Time in America (1984) — The three temporal strata are interleaved by rhyme, not chronology, so 1920s and 1968 coexist rather than sequence
The Element of Crime (1984) — The Cairo hypnosis frame licenses skipping, looping and repetition with nothing dated as flashback; the Europa trilogy extends it to a continent hypnotized and unable to wake from its own history
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) — The black-and-white biographical strand, interwoven with present-tense action rather than presented as dated flashback — the temporal grammar inherited from Hiroshima mon amour's braiding of…
The Time to Live and the Time to Die (1985) — First-person framing with no flashback grammar: the same Fengshan vantage points, doorways and the father's chair are returned to across a decade, so time is read off the room's changes rather than…
Caravaggio (1986) — The deathbed structure summons life fragments out of order; Akers edits 'as associative memory rather than linear biography,' transitions motivated by pose/color/gesture, not chronology or dated…
Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling (1986) — Transitions are motivated by the alter ego's attention — memory arrives when he turns toward it — with Donn Cambern's Easy Rider pre-lap grammar folding fragments of the next scene into the tail of…
When the Wind Blows (1986) — They treat the coming attack as a repeat of the Blitz; their 'romantic memories of World War II' function as a region of past they live inside rather than a dated flashback.
Repentance (1987) — The nested structure (Keti's cakes enclosing the exhumations enclosing the trial enclosing her childhood testimony enclosing Abel's dreams) combined with the film's pointed refusal to date the…
The Dead (1987) — The hotel-room revelation is spoken, not dated or dramatized as flashback, and the film's structure lets it 'retroactively reorganize everything preceding it' — a whole region of Gretta's life that…
The Last Emperor (1987) — the softened dissolves refuse a dated flashback, turning the life into coexisting temporal layers one moves through non-linearly rather than a chronological line
Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) — Insistent slow dissolves bleed a wedding into a funeral, the living into the dead, with no dated markers — the past treated as coexisting layers moved through, not a chronological flashback
Grave of the Fireflies (1988) — The ghost frame in which the dead re-inhabit and relive their decline — not a dated flashback but a past coexisting with the present, dead boy at the station and living boy on the hill at once
Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) — Judah 'walks into' the Seder flashback, standing in the present room as an adult and addressing his relatives while they debate God and justice — the past entered as a region, not retrieved as a…
To Sleep with Anger (1990) — The film is entirely about the Southern past with no flashback: the past arrives embodied in Harry and sits down to dinner, a coexisting region rather than a dated recollection.