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DRAMATURGY 69
Flash backs make money. There are concrete reasons why producers use the flash-back device so often. It has audience-acceptance value. Pictures in which it is featured make money despite the shortcomings of the technique. But the producers realize that they would make money even if they were to return to title cards. For picture makers have created a hunger for motion pictures that cannot be put off by inferior quality. The "B" picture has thrived because audiences demand pictures— any pictures— as long as they can relieve the tedium of humdrum life and furnish a colorful vehicle of vicarious escape. Popular success, therefore, should be no criterion for quality. What is more, the flash-back picture is easier to write than one using normal techniques. For cutbacks to the narrator serve as transition devices to connect the component flash-back sequences that go to make up the picture as a whole. And fresh, effective transitions are not easy to come by.
Flash-back transitions. But there is the root of the flash-back error. The reorienting cutback to the storyteller more often serves as a transition device for the flash back, instead of for the original and main story line. In other words, smooth transitions between the important story-line sequences— the heart of the matter— are sacrificed in order to carry the flash backs, which are an artificial form, to make them work satisfactorily. Transitions are made not because the story itself calls for them, but only because the form makes it necessary to cut back to the storyteller in order to reorient the audience to the device.
It can be stated categorically that no picture told wholly in flashback style could not have been told just as well, and even better, were a simple beginning, middle, and ending technique to have been used. But the flash back is flashy. So it attracts screen-play writers and producers who see in it only a tricky, novel manner of presenting mediocrity. Perhaps their reason for resorting to the flash back is that it gives them an opportunity of dressing up in novel attire what is actually threadbare.
Flash back uses limited. Under certain conditions, though, the flash back may have its legitimate uses, and then only in a limited way. It may be necessary in some stories, for example, to withhold