I feel I ought to know this already...

[steepholm]

All right, here's a question that's suddenly popped into my head. What is the very first example of a play, film, or TV drama that portrays events in non-chronological sequence - e.g. by using a flashback? And, when it was written, did everyone say 'Wow!'? Or hit the writer over the head with a copy of Aristotle's Poetics?

How far back can we take this? Any offers?

Comments

[fjm.livejournal.com]

DW. Griffiths Birth of a Nation uses flashbacks and flash sides. One of the reasons it's stayed in the film academic's historical cannon. And yes, they went "wow".

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Okay, any advance on 1915?

[mraltariel.livejournal.com]

Hello! You don't know me, but I spotted your question on gair's journal.

There were theatrical adaptations of "A Christmas Carol" performed around the mid-1840s (1844? 1845?) Once you go back "before film", though, I'm not sure it quite counts as "flashback" in the modern, "inserted in the middle of a scene" sense; then again, there's also a grey area between flashback and montage. There were various sorts of film versions of that book pre-1915 (notably 1901 [although this doesn't really count, as it is really a loose set of vingettes], and proper ones in 1908 and 1914)

The film most commonly claimed to have the "first flashback" is "The Yiddisher Boy", also from 1908. This, I suspect, is a popular idea, rather than hugely well researched. And we've just lost too much early film.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

It's true we've not met, but I've heard about you (and your culinary skills) from gair - which is the next best thing.

The 'Christmas Carol' example makes me realise I'm going to have to think harder about defining my terms here. Is it a true flashback if time-travel is involved? In terms of public time, yes; but Scrooge time is still proceeding chronologically - that is, these are things he experiences as happening to him in the order they are shown. Hmm...

[mraltariel.livejournal.com]

That's one of the things I think is interesting about "Christmas Carol". The "view of the past" that Scrooge sees is somewhat transitionary: it has many aspects of the flashback in the modern (viz. cliched) "screen goes wobbly and music goes diddle-diddle-diddle" sense, rather than strictly a time-travel experience, although there are features of both in the narrative.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think you're right about the wobbly screen - and it would be interesting to know how this was staged in those early productions. Did Scrooge and his ghost du jour sit at the side of the stage, like Revenge and Don Andrea in The Spanish Tragedy? My inner fusspot insists that it's still not a 'pure' flashback if it has even that much in the way of a frame, though I agree 'time travel' doesn't quite cover it.

[mraltariel.livejournal.com]

Yes - I think you're right. It definitely comes more into the category of "vision" within the internal time of the protagonist, rather than narrative device.