The analysis of film discourse from a multimodal and cognitive perspective has shown in recent years that such an approach to the study of cinema is a very fruitful one. Among the various cinematic techniques that may be analysed as pieces of multimodal discourse, the flashback seems to be particularly appealing because, while being very rich and versatile, it is also a fixed device and common enough in film as to be studied in a systematic way. Given those characteristics - formal variety alongside stability - a relevant question would be: how do spectators make sense of film retrospections? To address this question, this paper suggests an examination of the multimodal cues offered by flashbacks in three different films - Ordinary People (1980), Big Fish (2003) and The Help (2011) - and analyses the cognitive processes that those cues activate and which make the comprehension of the flashback possible. What lies at the basis of the flashback scenes proposed is a joint-attention triangle formed by the viewer and the camera, who look together, first at the character in the present and then at the events taking place in the past. Ultimately, such scenes can only be understood in terms of blended joint attention, and they also reveal the importance of other cognitive processes at work, namely time compression, viewpoint integration, and identity and analogy connections.

In recent years, the study of the conceptualization of time has seen a considerable growth, providing a basis for exploring the cognitive foundation of metaphor. But if metaphorical representations of time are established in the cognitive system, how are they manipulated when humans are engaged in creative expression? This is the question that the present volume addresses, on the assumption that by interrogating creativity, new insights into our understanding of time may be gained. Our view of creativity, which informs the ten chapters that compose this volume, endorses not only the extraordinary instances found in poetry and the arts (cinema, music, graphic novels, etc.), but also its more `mundane¿, everyday manifestations that appear in ordinary language use, political discourse, or TV news. Spanning across modalities (verbal, pictorial, auditory, and gestural), the exemplary expressions herein are intended to reflect the richness and diversity vis-à-vis the creativity of time representations while also pointing to the common underpinnings that motivate and constrain creativity.

Flashbacks in Film examines film flashback as a rich multimodal narrative device, analyzing the cognitive underpinnings of film flashbacks and the mechanisms that lead viewers to successfully comprehend them. Combining a cognitive film theory approach with the theoretical framework proposed by blending theory, which claims that human beings¿ general ability for conceptual integration underlies most of our daily activities, this book argues that flashbacks make sense to the viewer, as they are specifically designed for the viewer¿s cognitive understanding. Through a mixture of analysis and dozens of case studies, this book demonstrates that successful film flashbacks appeal to the spectator¿s natural perceptual and cognitive abilities, which spectators exercise daily. This book will serve as a valuable resource for scholars interested in film studies, media studies, and cognitive linguistics.

Film flashbacks are rich multimodal devices that combine a stable pattern of retrospection with formal versatility that provides filmmakers with much space for being creative (Turim 1989; Gordejuela 2021). This chapter focuses on a particular kind of flashbacks where past and present are rendered simultaneously in two possible ways: either the past gets inserted into the present and is merged with it, or a character from the present appears as such in his or her own memories of the past. Through decompression of identity, these flashbacks simultaneously represent two different perspectives (viewpoint compression) and two separate moments in time (time compression) (cf. Dancygier 2012). The chapter illustrates the creative rendering of narrative time in a number of unconventional flashbacks.