Quentin Tarantino is well known for his complex style of
filmmaking,
Pulp Fiction or
Reservoir Dogs, that
uses flashbacks and flash forwards and a technique of
interweaving of story lines. However, this is not a novelty, it's
merely a fresh look at a previously done and redone method that
has finally found a niche in the broader audiences. Alain
Resnais, one of the great results of the French wave, reused
this "broken technique" in such masterpieces as
Mon Uncle
D'Amerique and
Last Year in Marienbad.
There are a few films in the history of cinema that one could say
have truly set a milestone and an example for thousands of other
films to follow and learn from. "The Searchers" was the first
film by John Ford to set an example in unconventional narrative
in a film. Another such film is "The Godfather II" that continued
that tradition of broken narrative by going back and forth in
time.
Rashomon used the back and forth in an ingenious way to
recount events that appear differently every time told by a
different person. The whole film revolved around one scene that
continuously changed as it was filtered through different
perspectives and recounted in a new way. The Sixth Sense also did
this nicely by utilizing the "flashback flashforward" and broken
time frame technique in a very interesting manner considering
that it is all done in the audience's head. At the end of the
film, when the twist is revealed, the audience flashes back in
their own heads and references the key clues that were left
behind.
Memento broke the narrative conventions by completely flipping
the A-Z narrative upside down and starting at the end and making
it way to the beginning. The most recent innovation that will
begin a new trend of filmmaker is used in the new "Quentin
Tarantino-esque" film The
Machiavelli Hangman.
So many of these structural techniques have been used over and
over that one would wonder just how original this new filmmaking
technique would be. The Machiavelli Hangman's ingenious...
Machiavelli Hangman could only be described as a Rubik's Cube
that weaves in and out of 3 time frames and 4 locations and in
the end, manages to connect all the same colors together and make
perfect sense.
Machiavelli Hangman's original approach is not so much in its
ability to weave in and out of time frames, but the fact that it
does so without the audience realizing that there has been a
change of location and time half the time. This misleads the
audience until they are surprised by the fact that they didn't
see it coming. It's a lot like closing your eyes while you're
inside your room, and opening them again to find that you're
standing near the ocean.
And the fact that it has comedic elements would also appear to
the larger audiences, rather than just the art crowds. Finally,
audiences are growing more intelligent and there are products out
there to satisfy those hungry minds.