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DRAMATURGY 67
Flash backs impede movement. For one thing, the flash back definitely impedes the forward flow of a picture's action. Because it is retrogressive, it halts progression. That in itself defeats the primary rule of motion-picture making— the picture must move.
Flash backs fritter suspense. Flash backs also tend to destroy attention-getting and attention-holding suspense. To be most effective, suspense should build to a climax. Anything that interferes with that important gradual build-up saps suspense and fritters away audience interest.
The audience always wants to know "What happens next?" That is what makes for a suspenseful, attention-compelling flow of continuity. But in a flash back the audience is given, not what happens next, but what happened some time ago.
Newspaper editors recognize the fact that "nothing is so dead as yesterday's news." The same applies to yesterday's events in a motion picture. For it is the motion picture's task to create a sense of immediacy that will create the illusion in the audience that the shadows they see cavorting on the screen are real people undergoing real experiences, in the immediate present, at the time the audience is viewing the picture. A picture which can accomplish that has most of the ingredients of success.
Flash backs lose immediacy. More often than not, the flash back destroys that sense of immediacy. Because, unless it is actually told by a narrator and in the form of a story, the flash back does not happen in real life. Life is a continual flow of events that begin and end without going back in time. Unless the flash back is sufficiently motivated in a picture, the continual flow of events which the picture must try to represent in its delineation of life will be interrupted unnaturally.
When an entire picture is written as a flash back it is necessary that the story be told, either by one of the principal characters, by a minor character, or even by someone who has no part in the story line itself.
Thus, in Wuthering Heights, the picture we saw was actually a series of flash backs constituting the story told by the old housekeeper. Now in order to keep this fact in focus, it was necessary to