The storytelling of the Silmarillion is not chronological. It jumps forwards and backwards in time, focusing on different parts of the story as needed without too much concern for what happened first. The organization is much more thematic and topic-based.
Granted, there are clues to alert the reader to these time skips, so there is some sense of chronology as the story unfolds. It's just not told in a strictly chronological manner.
This style of storytelling is extremely difficult to pull off well on film, but there are good examples, of course.
Quentin Tarantino is infamous for this. All of his films are about different groups of people, and their stories unfold and overlap. I imagine Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill are the two best-known examples, but seriously, pick any film with his name on it and you'll see this storytelling style. There is even an episode of the original CSI that he guest-directed that uses this style -- all the bodies in the morgue at the same time tell each other their stories of how they got there.(Well...with the usual Tarantino weirdness)
Pulp Fiction opens with a scene we will see again at the end (the cafe robbery), but by the time we get to the end of the film, we're seeing it from a different perspective. Certain characters appear in multiple storylines, linking them together, and thematic repeats (such as one character always being in the bathroom during important moments) help to tie the disparate threads together. The audience may be confused by the back-and-forth whiplash, but there's enough cohesion to make it all make sense. It's basically just telling multiple stories at once, out of order.
Opening, cut off (language warning):
Finale, finishing the scene:
Another film with a very similar style to Pulp Fiction is Trick 'r Treat. Again, there are multiple storylines, they overlap, they aren't told in chronological order, and sometimes we see the same scene from a different perspective later. A first time viewer might miss some of the connections between the storylines (for instance, not recognizing the unmasked vampire as a character we'd met earlier), or not following the cause-and-effect because of the disjointed time frames. While most of the story takes place over the course of a single Halloween night, one of the storylines is a '30 years ago' retelling that impacts two of the other storylines.
Trailer:
(As an aside, this film is *very* good at making you feel like the victim characters are getting what they deserve. Sometimes, that's valid. Other times...not so much. Respect the traditions, y'all!)
I haven't seen Love Actually, but it's my understanding that it also uses multiple overlapping stories and out-of-order storytelling.
It is possible to do this out-of-order storytelling with a more linear story...if you have different perspectives. So, for instance, in Boondock Saints, you have the detective trying to figure out what happened based on the crime scenes, and then you have the real-time version of what happened from the main characters' perspective. This eventually culminates in the detective narrating the crime scene while the audience sees it in real time, showing that his investment has merged their stories together so that he is now part of it. It's a little weird, but it does serve a purpose in the film.
'There was a firefight!' scene:
(Note: I realize this scene makes no sense - even if you know what's going on, it's extremely weird to have a point blank shoot-out without cover where no one shoots anyone lethally. Like, what?)
And of course, there's the Firefly episode "Out of Gas," which uses 3 different timelines to tell its story. One is the 'real time' of the opener - Mal is alone on his ship, trying to fix a serious problem. Two is the immediate backstory of how that happened, so we keep flashing back to the events that led up to him being there alone in the 'near history' storyline. And the third is the backstory of how each member of the crew came to join Serenity's crew in the first place. The first episode showed how Book and Simon came aboard, but this (episode 8) showed how the rest of them who were already in place when the show opened came to join the crew. They had to use rather clever choices of lighting and other clues to allow the audience to know which of the three storylines we're revisiting in each scene. The audience quickly realizes that how they came together as a crew is relevant to how they function as a crew now, and how the episode ends. The final scene of the episode is Mal's memory of the first time he ever saw the ship.
The Usual Suspects is told entirely in flashback. The framing device is an interrogation, and the entire story until the end of the film is a long tale of the deeds of Kaiser Soze. It isn't until the end of the film, when the interrogation is over, that the film returns to real-time storytelling for its climatic reveal.
The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix tells its entire story with out-of-order storytelling. There are two main timelines. One, is the events that occurred when the five children were living with their parents in an old house that they were fixing up (spoiler alert: the creepy old house is seriously haunted). The second is fast-forwarded to a time when all five children are adults, still dealing with the trauma they experienced as kids. Each episode focuses on a different child as the main character, so you get to know more about them growing up and where they are now. There is a 'now', though, focusing on the night Nellie returned to the house. So, some of the adult scenes are still told in flashback (the oldest publishing his book, Nellie's wedding, Luke entering rehab, etc) with timestamps to let you know how long ago that was. And the 'then' story is also told out-of-order, bringing up scenes as they are significant, not in the order they happened. So, you see the last night in the haunted house early on, but from the perspective of the person who knew the least about what was happening. It's really interesting how well they blend the concepts of horror with mental health, and the family dynamics that have developed between the adult children. I haven't finished watching it yet, but I'm way too invested not to finish it. It helps that I grew up in a 200-year-old house with my two sisters and two brothers, and that the kid who plays young!Luke looks *just* like my nephew. Even so...this style of storytelling lends itself well to getting to know each individual character. And because they're all so closely interconnected and already *know* everything, it's easy to make a bunch of allusions to things the audience is only gradually learning about. It's a great way to build suspense and draw the audience in. [But I can't binge watch it, because scary shows scare me and give me weird dreams.]
Trailer:
There is a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode [Trials and Tribble-ations] that involves time travel and reuses footage from a Star Trek: The Original Series episode [The Trouble with Tribbles], thus showing the same thing, but from a different perspective.
(I'm sure they were exceedingly pleased with themselves to have created this!)
I have not seen Memento, but I know enough about it to know it deserves a place on this list!
Lots of movies do the 'three months later' epilogue or throw a timestamp up before a backstory interlude, or have an out-of-order opener. But you have to go out of your way to show an audience what's happening with the timeline, and most shows don't just jump all around with it, because that's confusing. Every once in awhile, someones tries to write a 'Tarantino-esque' script and it may or may not turn out well.
I bring this all up here as food for thought, as we are obviously adapting the non-linear format of the Silmarillion to a (mostly) linear telling of the story in TV format. Personally, I love out-of-order storytelling, and it increases my interest in the story to learn about things when they are *significant*, not just when they happen chronologically. And I'm not overly concerned with 'spoilers' ruining anything. In the hands of a good storyteller, knowing the bald facts of the ending is meaningless. The Princess Bride seemingly spoils itself right in the middle when the kid demands to know 'who kills Humperdink?' and the grandfather reading to him says, 'Nobody. He lives.' The kid interprets that to mean that he wins, and is upset...but obviously Humperdink's survival is *not* synonymous with his success. Likewise, Tolkien casually drops a reference of the Battle of Five Armies into the Hobbit when they're with Beorn.
But we made the decision from the very beginning of this project to make it linear - we're pretty strongly dedicated to making the events of each episode unfold in chronological order, and the frame also moves chronologically (though, obviously, along a separate timeline). The existence of the frame is one reason we don't want to mess with the timelines within the story - we already have a parallel structure going on. There is strong resistance to the use of flashback anywhere in this project.
So...what exceptions do we want to make? What stories do we want to tell in flashback or out-of-order in some way?
So far, we have done this in very modest ways. When we planned the opening for Season 2, we stepped back in time to *before* the climatic battle at the end of Season 1, but this time watched the events play out from the perspective of the elves, not the Valar. During the Frame in Season 2, we flashed back to the attack on Celebrían. For episode 3 of Season 3, we stepped back in time with our 'Meanwhile, in Beleriand' episode, catching that story up to 'real time' by the end of the episode. And while the Noldor were traveling through Araman, Finrod had a flashback vision/memory of his parting from Amarië which happened during the rebellion of the Noldor (prior to the Kinslaying). Any I'm forgetting?
I know that for Season 4, we've had a few suggestions of items that we might want to consider telling out-of-order. One is Eöl's story - to do it in a single Eöl-centric episode, showing his history from the end of the great debate at Cuivienen until the arrival of the Noldor. The other suggestion has been how to handle the story of Men being corrupted at Hildorien. I know there is some hesitance about showing the details of a story that Tolkien himself mostly hinted at rather than told...and to avoid retelling the Garden of Eden story. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't at least consider a way to do this.
Any thoughts on this as it relates to Silm Film?
Granted, there are clues to alert the reader to these time skips, so there is some sense of chronology as the story unfolds. It's just not told in a strictly chronological manner.
This style of storytelling is extremely difficult to pull off well on film, but there are good examples, of course.
Quentin Tarantino is infamous for this. All of his films are about different groups of people, and their stories unfold and overlap. I imagine Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill are the two best-known examples, but seriously, pick any film with his name on it and you'll see this storytelling style. There is even an episode of the original CSI that he guest-directed that uses this style -- all the bodies in the morgue at the same time tell each other their stories of how they got there.(Well...with the usual Tarantino weirdness)
Pulp Fiction opens with a scene we will see again at the end (the cafe robbery), but by the time we get to the end of the film, we're seeing it from a different perspective. Certain characters appear in multiple storylines, linking them together, and thematic repeats (such as one character always being in the bathroom during important moments) help to tie the disparate threads together. The audience may be confused by the back-and-forth whiplash, but there's enough cohesion to make it all make sense. It's basically just telling multiple stories at once, out of order.
Opening, cut off (language warning):
Another film with a very similar style to Pulp Fiction is Trick 'r Treat. Again, there are multiple storylines, they overlap, they aren't told in chronological order, and sometimes we see the same scene from a different perspective later. A first time viewer might miss some of the connections between the storylines (for instance, not recognizing the unmasked vampire as a character we'd met earlier), or not following the cause-and-effect because of the disjointed time frames. While most of the story takes place over the course of a single Halloween night, one of the storylines is a '30 years ago' retelling that impacts two of the other storylines.
Trailer:
I haven't seen Love Actually, but it's my understanding that it also uses multiple overlapping stories and out-of-order storytelling.
It is possible to do this out-of-order storytelling with a more linear story...if you have different perspectives. So, for instance, in Boondock Saints, you have the detective trying to figure out what happened based on the crime scenes, and then you have the real-time version of what happened from the main characters' perspective. This eventually culminates in the detective narrating the crime scene while the audience sees it in real time, showing that his investment has merged their stories together so that he is now part of it. It's a little weird, but it does serve a purpose in the film.
'There was a firefight!' scene:
And of course, there's the Firefly episode "Out of Gas," which uses 3 different timelines to tell its story. One is the 'real time' of the opener - Mal is alone on his ship, trying to fix a serious problem. Two is the immediate backstory of how that happened, so we keep flashing back to the events that led up to him being there alone in the 'near history' storyline. And the third is the backstory of how each member of the crew came to join Serenity's crew in the first place. The first episode showed how Book and Simon came aboard, but this (episode 8) showed how the rest of them who were already in place when the show opened came to join the crew. They had to use rather clever choices of lighting and other clues to allow the audience to know which of the three storylines we're revisiting in each scene. The audience quickly realizes that how they came together as a crew is relevant to how they function as a crew now, and how the episode ends. The final scene of the episode is Mal's memory of the first time he ever saw the ship.
The Usual Suspects is told entirely in flashback. The framing device is an interrogation, and the entire story until the end of the film is a long tale of the deeds of Kaiser Soze. It isn't until the end of the film, when the interrogation is over, that the film returns to real-time storytelling for its climatic reveal.
The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix tells its entire story with out-of-order storytelling. There are two main timelines. One, is the events that occurred when the five children were living with their parents in an old house that they were fixing up (spoiler alert: the creepy old house is seriously haunted). The second is fast-forwarded to a time when all five children are adults, still dealing with the trauma they experienced as kids. Each episode focuses on a different child as the main character, so you get to know more about them growing up and where they are now. There is a 'now', though, focusing on the night Nellie returned to the house. So, some of the adult scenes are still told in flashback (the oldest publishing his book, Nellie's wedding, Luke entering rehab, etc) with timestamps to let you know how long ago that was. And the 'then' story is also told out-of-order, bringing up scenes as they are significant, not in the order they happened. So, you see the last night in the haunted house early on, but from the perspective of the person who knew the least about what was happening. It's really interesting how well they blend the concepts of horror with mental health, and the family dynamics that have developed between the adult children. I haven't finished watching it yet, but I'm way too invested not to finish it. It helps that I grew up in a 200-year-old house with my two sisters and two brothers, and that the kid who plays young!Luke looks *just* like my nephew. Even so...this style of storytelling lends itself well to getting to know each individual character. And because they're all so closely interconnected and already *know* everything, it's easy to make a bunch of allusions to things the audience is only gradually learning about. It's a great way to build suspense and draw the audience in. [But I can't binge watch it, because scary shows scare me and give me weird dreams.]
Trailer:
There is a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode [Trials and Tribble-ations] that involves time travel and reuses footage from a Star Trek: The Original Series episode [The Trouble with Tribbles], thus showing the same thing, but from a different perspective.
I have not seen Memento, but I know enough about it to know it deserves a place on this list!
Lots of movies do the 'three months later' epilogue or throw a timestamp up before a backstory interlude, or have an out-of-order opener. But you have to go out of your way to show an audience what's happening with the timeline, and most shows don't just jump all around with it, because that's confusing. Every once in awhile, someones tries to write a 'Tarantino-esque' script and it may or may not turn out well.
I bring this all up here as food for thought, as we are obviously adapting the non-linear format of the Silmarillion to a (mostly) linear telling of the story in TV format. Personally, I love out-of-order storytelling, and it increases my interest in the story to learn about things when they are *significant*, not just when they happen chronologically. And I'm not overly concerned with 'spoilers' ruining anything. In the hands of a good storyteller, knowing the bald facts of the ending is meaningless. The Princess Bride seemingly spoils itself right in the middle when the kid demands to know 'who kills Humperdink?' and the grandfather reading to him says, 'Nobody. He lives.' The kid interprets that to mean that he wins, and is upset...but obviously Humperdink's survival is *not* synonymous with his success. Likewise, Tolkien casually drops a reference of the Battle of Five Armies into the Hobbit when they're with Beorn.
But we made the decision from the very beginning of this project to make it linear - we're pretty strongly dedicated to making the events of each episode unfold in chronological order, and the frame also moves chronologically (though, obviously, along a separate timeline). The existence of the frame is one reason we don't want to mess with the timelines within the story - we already have a parallel structure going on. There is strong resistance to the use of flashback anywhere in this project.
So...what exceptions do we want to make? What stories do we want to tell in flashback or out-of-order in some way?
So far, we have done this in very modest ways. When we planned the opening for Season 2, we stepped back in time to *before* the climatic battle at the end of Season 1, but this time watched the events play out from the perspective of the elves, not the Valar. During the Frame in Season 2, we flashed back to the attack on Celebrían. For episode 3 of Season 3, we stepped back in time with our 'Meanwhile, in Beleriand' episode, catching that story up to 'real time' by the end of the episode. And while the Noldor were traveling through Araman, Finrod had a flashback vision/memory of his parting from Amarië which happened during the rebellion of the Noldor (prior to the Kinslaying). Any I'm forgetting?
I know that for Season 4, we've had a few suggestions of items that we might want to consider telling out-of-order. One is Eöl's story - to do it in a single Eöl-centric episode, showing his history from the end of the great debate at Cuivienen until the arrival of the Noldor. The other suggestion has been how to handle the story of Men being corrupted at Hildorien. I know there is some hesitance about showing the details of a story that Tolkien himself mostly hinted at rather than told...and to avoid retelling the Garden of Eden story. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't at least consider a way to do this.
Any thoughts on this as it relates to Silm Film?
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