A scene in a narrative is called a flashback if it depicts a set of events that occurred before the scenes immediately proceding it. The closely related term flashforward is used to indicate scenes that depict events taking place after the scenes immediately flowing it. Flashbacks and flash forwards are used frequently in literature, tv, and movies for foreshadowing and stronger dramatic effect.

Film

Sometimes a flashback is inserted into a film even though there was none in the original source from which the film was adapted. The 1956 film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's stage musical Carousel used a flashback device which somewhat takes the impact away from a very dramatic plot development later in the film. This was done because the plot of Carousel was then considered unusually strong for a film musical. The 1967 film version of Camelot also uses this technique, but in the case of Camelot, according to Alan Jay Lerner, it was not done to soften the blow of a later plot development but because the show had been criticized onstage as taking a too abrupt shift in tone from near-comedy to tragedy.

A good example of both analepsis and prolepsis is the first scene of La Jetée. As we learn a few minutes later, what we are seeing in that scene is a flashback to the past, since the present of the film's diegesis is a time directly following World War III. However, as we learn at the very end of the film, that scene also doubles as a prolepsis, since the dying man the boy is seeing is, in fact, himself. In other words, he is proleptically seeing his own death. We thus have an analepsis and prolepsis in the very same scene.

One of the first films to use a flashback technique was the 1939 Wuthering Heights, in which, as in Emily Brontë's original novel, the housekeeper Ellen narrates the main story to overnight visitor Mr. Lockwood, who has witnessed Heathcliff's frantic pursuit of what is apparently a ghost. More famously, also in 1939, Marcel Carne's movie Le jour se lève is told entirely through flashback: the story starts with the murder of a man in a hotel. While the murderer, played by Jean Gabin, is surrounded by the police, several flashbacks tell the story of why he killed the man at the beginning of the movie.

One of the most famous examples of non-chronological flashback is in the 1941 Orson Welles film Citizen Kane. The protagonist, Charles Foster Kane, dies at the beginning, uttering the word "Rosebud". A reporter spends the rest of the film interviewing Kane's friends and associates, in an effort to discover what Kane meant by uttering the word. As the interviews proceed, pieces of Kane's life unfold in flashback, but not always chronologically.

Occasionally, a story may contain a flashback within a flashback: one example of this is the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: the main action of the film is told in flashback, with the scene of Liberty Valance's murder occurring as a flashback within that flashback. An extremely convoluted story may contain flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks: examples of this are the movies Six Degrees of Separation, Passage to Marseille, and The Locket.