ABSTRACT
Why a study devoted to the flashback in film? Why single out one narrative device and trace its use over eighty years of cinematic expression? The selective focus on the trope of the flashback is a way of slicing through the enormity of film history, a method for considering the aesthetic history of film as just such a diverse composite of the history of filmic forms. We will ask what role the flashback played in the history of film, in the life of various film aesthetics and particularly in the development in cinematic modernism. As complex as these issues are, the goal of this book is not simply that of a focused aesthetic history.
