Most film narratives move in one direction. A character wants something, obstacles appear, time passes, and eventually they – and we – arrive at an ending.
This is narrative linearity, and it has been the default mode of cinematic storytelling for more than a century.
Think of the classic 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption, which follows Andy Dufresne, a man wrongly imprisoned, over several decades. The linear progression of time allows us to witness the gradual development of Dufresne’s plan to escape from the Shawshank state prison.
Films that use this default narrative mode are successful for a reason: they’re easy to follow.
But what happens when timelines get fractured and a film suddenly becomes a series of fragmented scenes?
As the great French director Jean-Luc Godard once said:
A film must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But not necessarily in that order.
Early experiments
Non-linear narrative structure appeared remarkably early in film history. American director D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) inter-cut four separate storylines set thousands of years apart, in ancient Babylon, Judea, 16th-century France and modern-day United States.
Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) opens with Kane’s death and the mystery of his final word (“Rosebud”), before piecing his life together through the contradictory memories of the people who knew him.
Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa took a similar approach in Rashomon (1950), presenting a killing in a forest through four unreliable eyewitness accounts – never resolving which version, if any, is true.
Arthouse time fractures
Storytelling techniques such as analepsis and prolepsis (flashbacks and flash-forwards) became increasingly common in European films, as did converging timelines and circular structures.
French New Wave filmmakers were especially drawn to such innovations. Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) knitted together a present-day love affair in Hiroshima with fragmented memories of wartime trauma in France.
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Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961) went further, presenting a story so confusing that critics still debate over what is memory, fantasy and real in the film.
This kind of experimentation remained largely confined to arthouse and <a href="https://cinemamix360.com/2026/10/13/green-bay-film-festival-returns-to-tarlton-theatre/” title=”Green Bay Film Festival returns to Tarlton Theatre”>festival cinema – admired by critics, but generally considered too demanding or “difficult” for regular filmgoers.
The postmodern explosion
That assumption collapsed in the 1990s. Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) took the non-linear structure of art cinema and married it to pulpy, crowd-pleasing genre beats.
Tarantino’s story of hitmen, boxers and a mysterious briefcase scrambled the chronology of three interlocking stories. John Travolta’s character – shot dead partway through the film – reappears very much alive later on, as we’re watching an earlier point in the timeline.
Pulp Fiction proved decisively that mainstream audiences could tolerate non-linear structure.
A wave of what film scholars termed “puzzle films” ensued, in which the central pleasure lay in decoding a deliberately obscured or fragmented narrative structure. Famous examples include Go (1999), 21 Grams (2003), Primer (2004) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004).
Loops and repetitions can also be used comically, such as in Groundhog Day (1993), or exhilaratingly, such as in Run Lola Run (1998).
In the more recent sci-fi film Arrival (2016), the non-linear structure changes the entire meaning of earlier scenes.
From experimental to fashionable
Perhaps most famous of all is Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000). In it, Leonard Shelby, a man with short-term memory loss, tries to find his wife’s killer.
Nolan tells Leonard’s story through black-and-white scenes that move forward in chronological order, and colour scenes that move backward, each one starting where the previous (later) scene began. The two timelines converge at the film’s midpoint, meeting to solve the mystery.
Memento’s structure is no gimmick. We experience something analogous to Leonard’s own memory disorder – arriving in each scene without knowing quite how we got there, forced to reconstruct context after the fact, just as he does.
Nolan’s subsequent films have also played with time in ultra-creative ways, revealing information at strategic moments to enhance the story’s impact.
Inception (2010), Tenet (2020), Oppenheimer (2023) and The Odyssey (2026) all use non-linearity to create suspense and actively engage the audience.
The enduring sway of non-linearity
Why does this mode of storytelling continue to fascinate?
Early Russian Formalist theorists drew a useful distinction between the fabula (the raw chronological events of a story) and the syuzhet (the order and manner in which those events are actually presented to us).
We watch films such as Manchester By The Sea (2016), (500) Days of Summer (2009) and Mulholland Drive (2001) as a detective would, piecing together the fabula from the twisted syuzhet.
Non-linear structure is particularly suited to stories about trauma and grief. Watching the reverse chronology of Gaspar Noé’s harrowing 2002 Irréversible forces audiences to know a devastating outcome before understanding its causes, inverting our usual relationship to story and plot.
Television series such as Lost (2004–10), Westworld (2016–22) and True Detective (2014–) built entire seasons around scrambled or dual timelines, routinely using flashback-heavy, achronological structures once considered strictly arthouse.
Non-linearity can be visually arresting, or beautifully contemplative. Sometimes it can be plain bonkers, demonstrating the endless flexibility within film narrative.
