Sightlines · Technique course
The Broken Clock: A Hundred Years of Movies Told Out of Order
Film is the only art form that had to invent the past tense. A painting simply is; a novel can say "years earlier" and be done with it; but a movie is a machine that runs forward at twenty-four frames a second, and every time a filmmaker wants to leap backward, sideways, or into a moment that may never have happened, they have to build the grammar for it from scratch. This course follows that invention across a century — from a silent epic that dared to braid four millennia together, through noir's fractured clocks and the European art film's dissolving ones, to the moment when scrambled time stopped being an experiment and became a pleasure the whole multiplex understood. The arc is real and traceable: each of these films learned from the ones before it, and several of them are openly, gratefully in each other's debt.
Everything starts here, with a woman rocking a cradle. Griffith returns to that single image again and again, and each time it releases the film into a different century — Babylon, Judea, sixteenth-century Paris, a modern American tenement — four stories running not one after another but at the same time, cut against each other so that a chariot ride in the ancient world and a speeding car in the modern one become one accelerating rhythm. No one had asked an audience to hold four separate clocks in their head before, and Griffith bet an enormous production (with his great cameraman Billy Bitzer, and tracking shots gliding through colossal three-dimensional sets) that they could. He'd developed the trick of cutting between simultaneous actions in his earlier work; here he scaled it up into an argument, letting the editing itself say that these four eras rhyme. Watch for how the cradle shot works as a hinge: it's the first great demonstration that a cut can be a statement about time rather than just a change of location — the seed of everything else in this course.
Twenty-five years later, Welles made disorder itself the story. Kane assembles a man's life from the recollections of the people who knew him, told out of sequence, overlapping, contradicting each other in emphasis — a biography built like an investigation, where the same life looks different depending on who's remembering it. Where Griffith cut between four objective histories, Welles fractured a single history into partial, personal accounts, which is a genuinely different idea: time filtered through witnesses. The famous craft here is Gregg Toland's deep focus — watch the scene where a boy plays in the snow outside a window while adults settle his future indoors, every plane of the image equally sharp, so that past-in-the-making and present decision share one frame with nothing telling you where to look. That image of layered, simultaneous time is one the whole rest of this course keeps rebuilding.
Kubrick took Kane's fragmented-account structure and bolted it to a genre engine: the heist picture. The Killing follows a racetrack robbery by rewinding the same afternoon over and over, once per participant — a deadpan narrator announces the hour, the film backs up, and we watch the day again from a new man's angle until the pieces interlock like watch gears. It's the crucial translation step in this story: the moment nonlinear time left the prestige picture and entered the crime movie, where it would live happily for the next half-century. Notice how Lucien Ballard's wide-angle tracking shots slide laterally through apartment walls as if the sets were cutaway diagrams — space made as legible as the timeline is scrambled. Tarantino has been perfectly open that Pulp Fiction's architecture starts here.
Then Europe removed the safety net. In Kubrick, the shuffled pieces snap together; in Marienbad, they never do. A man insists to a woman, in an enormous baroque hotel, that they met last year; she doesn't remember; and the film obliges his descriptions with images that then quietly betray him — a gown changes color mid-conversation, a room repeats with the furniture rearranged, figures in a formal garden cast no shadows while the sculpted hedges around them do. Resnais and cinematographer Sacha Vierny built the disorientation physically: endless gliding tracking shots down corridors that never map onto a floor plan you could draw. This is the course's hinge film — the discovery that a movie doesn't have to scramble a true timeline; it can present memory, desire, and invention as images of equal weight and let the viewer live inside the uncertainty. Everything from Annie Hall to Eternal Sunshine drinks from this well.
Coppola brought the doubled timeline back to Hollywood at full symphonic scale. The film interleaves two stories separated by half a century — a young Sicilian immigrant's rise in the tenements of early-1900s New York, and his son's consolidation of power in the postwar decades — cutting between them not for suspense, as Griffith did, but for comparison, so that each era becomes a silent commentary on the other. Gordon Willis shoots the two periods in different registers: the past in warm, burnished amber, the present in colder, darker tones, so you feel the timeline in your eyes before any title card confirms it. This is nonlinearity as moral counterpoint — the cut backward asking what a family gained and what it cost. It's the mainstream descendant of Intolerance's era-braiding, made intimate instead of monumental.
Three years later, cinematographer Gordon Willis shot the same idea as a comedy. Annie Hall opens with a man talking straight into the camera, telling us up front that the love affair is already over — and then the film sifts the relationship the way an actual mind does, by association rather than calendar, a present-day remark snapping us back to a Brooklyn classroom where the adult narrator stands inside his own childhood memory, kibitzing. The invention is tonal: nonlinear time had been epic, noir-fatalistic, or austere; Allen made it warm, fast, and funny, proving the scrambled timeline could carry jokes. Watch how casually the film breaks its own surface — split screens, a memory revisited with commentary, scenes replayed from a rueful distance — all of it in Willis's muted autumnal light, the "Prince of Darkness" of The Godfather lending a comedy real visual gravity. After this, out-of-order storytelling belonged to everybody.
This is the film that made the broken clock a pop thrill. Tarantino chops a Los Angeles crime story into titled chapters, deals them out of sequence, and brackets the whole thing inside a single diner scene that opens the film and waits patiently to be completed — so that the movie's shape is a loop, and characters cross scenes at moments the story has, elsewhere, already moved past. He took the structure openly from The Killing — the same event revisited from different participants' timelines — but swapped Kubrick's grim precision for hangout pleasure: long takes, unhurried medium shots, conversations about breakfast between catastrophes. The astonishing thing is how little the audience minds; by 1994, eighty years after Intolerance, viewers reassembled the chronology instinctively, the way you recognize a song from its chorus. Watch for how the chapter titles do the narrator's work from The Killing — signposts that make disorientation feel like a game you're winning.
Nolan's contribution is to weld the scrambled timeline to a damaged mind, so that the structure isn't a storyteller's flourish — it's a symptom you're forced to share. The hero cannot form new memories; his life resets every few minutes, and he navigates by Polaroids, notes, and tattoos. So the film's color sequences run in reverse order, each scene ending where the previous one began, meaning you enter every scene knowing as little about what just happened as he does — while a second strand, in black and white, runs forward to meet it. Wally Pfister shoots it all with deliberate clarity, because the structure supplies all the vertigo a viewer can carry. Where Marienbad made uncertainty an atmosphere, Memento makes it a machine: the first film in this course whose backward mechanism you could diagram on a napkin — and still feel in your stomach.
The same year, on the other side of the world, Lee Chang-dong ran a timeline backward for entirely different stakes: not a puzzle, but a nation's conscience. The film moves in seven episodes from 1999 back to 1979, walking one ordinary Korean man's life in reverse through twenty years of his country's history — financial crisis, boom years, authoritarian machinery, and the wounds beneath them. Between each chapter, Lee inserts footage shot from the back of a moving train and run in reverse, so rails and rice fields pour backward toward a past you can watch approaching but never reach — time made visible as a substance flowing the wrong way. Kim Hyung-koo's camera holds in long, sober takes, refusing the flash of the Western puzzle film; the reversal here isn't clever, it's mournful. Set beside Memento, it shows how the identical formal device can be a thriller mechanism in one industry and an act of historical grieving in another.
Noé pushed reverse chronology to its physical extreme: a dozen long, unbroken sequences arranged strictly last-to-first — even the opening credits scroll the wrong way. The film's French title card motto translates as "time destroys everything," and the structure is built to make you feel it: because we move backward, tenderness arrives after catastrophe, and every gentle image is shadowed by what we already know follows it. Benoît Debie's camera enacts the idea — in the early (chronologically late) sequences it corkscrews and tumbles through space, unmoored from any human viewpoint, then grows steadier and calmer the further back we travel, as if the film itself were unwinding toward peace. Fair warning: this is by far the most brutal film in the course, and the reversal is what makes the brutality mean something rather than merely assault you. It's Peppermint Candy's structure at the pitch of a scream.
Gondry and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman found the tender register the backward film had been missing. The premise: a man has his memories of a failed relationship clinically erased, and the film spends much of its length inside those memories as they're deleted — traveling backward from the bitter end toward the first meeting, which means the relationship sweetens as it disappears. Gondry, coming from music videos and a handmade-surrealist sensibility, renders the erasure with in-camera magic rather than digital gloss: in a remembered bookstore, signs go blank and titles slide off spines while the man watches his own past lose its nouns; faces blur, rooms crumple, one set becomes another mid-walk. Ellen Kuras shoots it handheld and wintry, so the impossible feels documentary. This is Marienbad's unstable remembered romance and Memento's dissolving mind, rebuilt as a love story — the course's proof that nonlinear time can break your heart.
The course ends with the device turned philosophical — and turned on the audience. A linguist is summoned to communicate with visitors whose written language is circular: each sentence a single inky ring in which beginning and end coexist, meaning present all at once rather than delivered in sequence. As she learns it, the film's own editing begins to behave like that language, slipping between the fogged encounter chamber and luminous fragments of a mother and daughter — and Villeneuve is quietly betting on a reflex that every film in this course helped train: a century of cinema has taught us exactly what a cut to another time means, and Arrival asks whether we're sure. Bradford Young shoots it in grey-green half-light, faces emerging from darkness, with Max Richter's strings carrying the emotion the images withhold. Say no more than this: watch how the film uses the oldest editing convention in the book — the one Griffith standardized — and trust nothing you assume about it.
Line the twelve up and the through-line is unmistakable. Griffith proved a cut could leap across time and audiences would follow; Welles bent time through memory and testimony; Kubrick smuggled the fractured clock into genre, where Tarantino found it forty years later and made it irresistible. Resnais dissolved the ground truth entirely, and his uncertainty flows into Allen's comedy, Gondry's romance, and Nolan's engineered amnesia; Coppola, Lee, and Noé showed that the direction and braiding of time could carry moral and historical weight, not just intrigue. What stuck is now everywhere: chaptered and looped structures, backward reveals, dual timelines in prestige television, the audience's easy fluency with all of it. That fluency is the real ending of this story — and Arrival is its punchline, a film that works only because a hundred years of broken clocks taught us to read time in pieces, and then asks us to imagine reading it whole.