Wanted: 5 best examples of flashbacks

On Monday, I presented this conundrum: Hollywood conventional wisdom is that voice-over narration and flashbacks are a no-no, yet some of the greatest movies ever produced use these narrative devices including The Shawshank Redemption, Fight Club, Goodfellas, The Silence of the Lambs, and Rashomon.

My conclusion: Voice-over narration and flashbacks are not inherently bad, rather they are tainted by how poorly they get executed by inexperienced writers.

Goal: Find five movies in which each is used well, then analyze those movies to come up with — hopefully — guidelines on how best to handle this pair of narrative devices.

Today let’s see if we can lock down five movies that are great examples of flashbacks.

Here is a list of notable movies in the IMDB Top 250 list that use flashbacks:

Inception [#14]
Casablanca [#25]
The Usual Suspects [#26]
Memento [#33]
Gladiator [#63]
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind [#76]
Rashomon [#91]

As I did yesterday in putting forward The Shawshank Redemption as one of the five movies for voice-over narration, today I recommend we include The Silence of the Lambs, notable for two important flashbacks… and a third that was scripted, but never shot. And as per what I did with Shawshank, here is Siskel & Ebert’s review of The Silence of the Lambs:

Yeah, such a crap movie, it’s one of only three films to win the top 5 Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Actor, and Best Screenplay.

What other movies can you recommend that feature flashbacks used in an especially effective way? See you in comments with your suggestions!

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