Recently, two fields of study have become increasingly prominent in film and media studies. The first field is cognitive film studies, which emerged in the 1980s as an alternative research tradition to the then-dominant paradigm of Saussurian semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Althusserian Marxism, and Barthesian (SLAB) textual theory, a patchwork of various theoretical frameworks. Rather than attempting to fit every piece of film into an all-encompassing interpretive framework (a ‘Grand theory’), cognitive film theory seeks to value bottom-up inquiry and scientific explanation. Drawing upon a diverse array of fields and disciplines, it focuses on the mental processes that operate within the audience’s brain to answer theoretical questions about the film experience. The second is the field of multimodality, the impetus for which came from linguistics and discourse analysis rather than from psychology (van Leeuwen, Reference van Leeuwen and Simpson2011). Once linguists started to examine texts and communicative events rather than isolated sentences, they understood that spoken language cannot be adequately apprehended unless other communicative modes are taken into consideration as well. Hence, the field of multimodality seeks to investigate the integration of different communicative resources such as language, image, sound, and music in multimodal texts and communicative events. This necessarily also involves the study of film, perhaps the multimodal medium par excellence (e.g., Bateman & Schmidt, Reference Bateman and Schmidt2013).

In Flashbacks in Film: A Cognitive and Multimodal Analysis Adriano Gordejuela takes up the challenge of incorporating both dimensions into a coherent theoretical framework in an attempt to explain how film viewers are able to understand movie flashbacks. This question, as the author argues in the introduction, presents us with an intriguing paradox: as viewers, we seem to be able to comprehend flashbacks as effortlessly and naturally as we read words in a text, yet upon reflection, flashbacks are far from anything that might be called ‘natural’ as they disrupt a narrative’s spatial and temporal continuity. The cognitivist framework that Gordejuela adopts to tackle this issue is Blending or Conceptual Integration Theory (Fauconnier & Turner, Reference Fauconnier and Turner2002). Rooted in the field of cognitive linguistics, this theory attempts to investigate the dynamic nature of mappings in thought and language. According to this approach, mental spaces are conceptual structures that people construct as they think and use language. Fauconnier and Turner (Reference Fauconnier and Turner2002) dubbed these general cognitive processes as ‘blending’ and the mental spaces on which they operate as ‘input spaces’. From this blending, a new meaning structure emerges that is to some extent novel or distinct from the meanings yielded by each of the individual input spaces. Since conceptual integration is presented as a basic mental operation of human beings that is believed to govern almost everything we think, say, and do non-consciously, it is plausible to assume, as the author does, that this cognitive operation also plays an important role in our non-conscious comprehension of flashbacks. To test the validity of this claim, Gordejuela seeks to explore the workings of three mental processes in our apprehension of retrospection scenes: blended joint attention, viewpoint compression, and time compression; three concepts that also constitute the titles for Chapters 3–5.

Before exploring how these cognitive tools operate in our successful understanding of movie flashbacks, however, one needs to establish a rudimentary understanding of the narratological origins and theoretical evolution of flashbacks. This background is given in the first chapter after the introduction (Chapter 2) in which the author, in a clear and well-referenced manner, elaborates on the definition of the term flashback, while also pointing to some useful typologies for classifying it including some well-known distinctions made by David Bordwell and Seymour Chatman, among others. This allows the author to delineate more clearly the focus of her own research which she clearly and unambiguously centres at “scenes or shots that display some ‘actual’ past events in the story, which may pertain to a character’s memories or not” (p. 16). At the same time, she is keen to situate her own approach within the cognitive turn in film studies as laid out in the introductory chapter.

Chapter 3 then delves into the first mental activity of blended joint attention. To this aim the author first reviews some of the explanatory frameworks that have been proposed in the cognitive film theory to analyse questions regarding perception, attention, and continuity in the film. Chief among them is the question how viewers are able to construe continuity out of spatiotemporally discontinuous units? This is especially relevant for flashbacks which unavoidably imply a temporal discontinuity. The author, engages, among others, with Tim Smith’s Attentional Theory of Cinematic Continuity (AToCC) to illustrate how certain attentional cues such as the eye-line match in point-of-view editing play an important role in bridging past and present. More importantly, however, the author makes the claim that these film strategies, along with the narrative context, work in a conceptual integration network that involves the mental operation of combining different sets of meanings (cf. input spaces) in order to come up progressively with the new blended narrative space of the past. This prompts the author to further explore the multimodal means by which the three central actors of the joint-attention triangle (the viewer, the camera, and the character) are incited to turn their attention from the present narrative space to the past space being activated. This is clearly demonstrated through a discussion of flashbacks from various films [e.g., The Shawshank Redemption (1994); Ray (2004); and Saving Mr. Banks (2013)] that clearly show that the past is not only set up by means of textual space builders, but also by visual cues and auditory ones.

Whereas Chapter 3 focuses on how the past is set up, Chapter 4 shifts the attention towards the myriad of viewpoints that are involved in a flashback. More specifically, it explores how this complex interplay is made accessible to the viewer by means of the cognitive process of compression. As in the previous chapter, the author does an excellent job in first reviewing the existing literature. This brings her to the field of narratology where the topic of viewpoint has long occupied a central place, along with such classical dichotomies as ‘telling’ versus ‘showing’, ‘narration’ versus ‘focalisation’, and ‘ocularization’ versus ‘auricularization’. After having exposed a variety of terms, types, and concepts for classifying such topics as narrative voices, point of view and subjectivity in film, the author is fully informed to analyse its functioning in the multimodal set-up of flashbacks. This multiplicity is further exposed through a discussion of compression in two types of flashbacks: memory flashbacks that involve a character recalling an event of the past, and replay flashbacks that revisit an episode already narrated. Exemplary cases of the former type can be found in, among others, Casablanca (1942) and Forrest Gump (1994), while films such as Vertigo (1958) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962) offer interesting instances of the latter type. Through close analysis of these and other retrospective scenes, the author shows how they are not merely seen from a single viewpoint. Due to processes of compression viewers are able to fully understand them because different viewpoints are blended in a single mental space, thus creating the impression as if multiple perspectives are rendered at the same time.

Flashbacks do not only involve the compression of viewpoints, but also of time relations. This issue is further explored in Chapter 5 in which the author shows how the temporal relation that exists between present and past narrative mental spaces is compressed by means of two cognitive processes: scaling and syncopation. Scaling involves the process in which the time elapsed between present and past is scaled down, and rendered as a simple switch, which usually takes no more than a few seconds, or even less. This leap to the past can be signalled either very clearly through the use of a voice-over or any other narrative cue, or it may be communicated completely unclear, that is without cues. Syncopation occurs when only certain points of an interval or string of time is activated. In flashbacks, this process is usually activated through narrative ellipses and montage sequences where a significant period of storytime is compressed into a few minutes of screen time. Examples that the author cites are, among others, the famous breakfast scene in Citizen Kane (1941) or the Parisian love affair in Casablanca. Besides time connections, the author also touches upon connections of identity. This occurs, for instance, when some of the characters involved in a flashback do not only take part in the present, but also in the past such as is the case with many memory flashbacks.

After having discussed and illustrated a number of cognitive operations in isolation, the author is set to present the proposed theoretical framework as a whole. This is established in Chapter 6 in which the author concludes her study by showing, through an analysis of two flashbacks from two different films, The Bourne Identity (2002) and Jane Eyre (2011), how all these operations work together and in relation to each other.

Flashbacks in Film is a prime example of thorough and detailed scholarship that excels in both theorization and application. It does not pretend to offer new ‘readings’ of classical flashbacks. Adhering to the explanatory spirit of cognitive film studies, it offers a well-thought-out theoretical framework for explaining how film viewers might understand movie flashbacks naturally and seemingly without effort. Not only is the book presented in a structured and well-defined way, with the literature overviews providing very valuable and concise sources of secondary literature, but the concepts are also illustrated (and thus made relevant) by an impressive corpus of case examples. At the same time, however, one cannot get rid of the impression that some of the terminology and mechanisms put forward by blending theory are layered with unnecessary complexity (thus contradicting in a way the seemingly ease by which we apprehend flashbacks). While considerable credit goes to the author for mastering its language so well, it also raises questions of empirical falsification and alternative hypotheses (see also Gibbs, Reference Gibbs2000). One may wonder, for example, why references to the intuitively more approachable Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, Reference Lakoff and Johnson1999) and the broader experientialist research programme of embodiment are only briefly touched upon in the book. Like Blending Theory, Conceptual Metaphor Theory has its roots in cognitive linguistics and, perhaps even more so than the former framework, has elevated the topic of time to the forefront of embodied conceptual analysis by turning it into one of those fundamental concepts of the human mind that we can only grasp (and thus also express multimodally) through our concrete bodily knowledge (e.g., Boroditsky, Reference Boroditsky2000; Gentner, Reference Gentner and Gattis2001). Hence, it would be worthwhile to explore the possibilities of theoretical integration along this avenue, especially now that cognitive film studies have switched its initial focus from ‘cold’ cognition to ‘hot’ cognition (Nannicelli & Taberham, Reference Nannicelli and Taberham2014, p. 5). Along those lines, one should also mention the growing influence of neuroscientific findings on our understanding of film experience (e.g., Gallese & Guerra, Reference Gallese and Guerra2019). The author is well aware of these trends as she briefly raises this point herself in the book’s conclusion (p. 163). This general reflection, however, does not outweigh the academic merits of this intellectually stimulating book, which should appeal to anyone with an interest in the narrative workings of cinema. Adriana Gordejuela’s book may well be the most profound contribution to the subject of flashbacks in cinema since Turim’s (Reference Turim1989) reference publication on the subject.