Reverse chronology
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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In a story employing this technique, the first scene shown is actually the conclusion to the plot. Once that scene ends, the penultimate scene is shown, and so on, so that the final scene the viewer sees is the first chronologically.
Many stories employ flashback, showing prior events, but whereas the scene order of most conventional films is A-B-C-etc, a film in reverse chronology goes Z-Y-X-etc.
As a hypothetical example, if the fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk were told using reverse chronology, the opening scene would depict Jack chopping the beanstalk down and killing the giant. The next scene would feature Jack being discovered by the giant and climbing down the beanstalk in fear of his life. Later, we would see Jack running into the man with the infamous magic beans, then, at the end of the film, being sent off by his mother to sell the cow.
While the 1991 Time's Arrow is the best-known example of reverse chronology literature, the idea had been explored previously by Philip K. Dick's 1967 Counter-Clock World.
Examples
- Time's Arrow (1991) - Martin Amis
- Irréversible (2002) - Gaspar Noé
- The House in Paris the female flâneur of modernism wrote The House in Paris in reverse chronology from the middle onwards.
See also
