Last night I watched an old Humphrey Bogart movie called “Passage To Marseille”. The movie starts out in WWII with a war reporter visiting an outpost of the Free French Air Force, who are preparing for a bombing run that night against the Germans.
The reporter asks the Liaison Officer (Claude Rains) about one of the airmen (a man named Matrac, played by Bogart) after he sees the L.O. talking to him prior to takeoff. The L.O. begins to tell the reporter a story. (Flashback #1) A few years back he was on a merchant freighter bound from South America to Marseille when they came across a group of castaways in a small boat. They rescue the men and start asking questions about their background. Turns out they are escapees from Devil’s Island on their way back to France to fight in the war. One of the men they rescue starts to tell Rains about their escape from Devil’s Island. (Flashback #2)
In the prison colony, there is an old man who has saved up some money and is trying to organize an escape. He gets a group together but one of them insists they need Matrac, who is in solitary, as part of the group. And he starts to tell the old man about Matrac and how he wound up at Devil’s Island. (Flashback #3)
By this point I felt like I was watching Inception and losing track of how many levels deep the plot had gone.
It was an interesting narrative device and I’m curious what other movies or books have used multi-layered flashbacks to drive the plot.
Surprisingly good flashback-within-flashback-within-flashback filled story of klepto-girl (Laraine Day) ruining the lives of various men.
Korean-made fantasy opens with a flashback-within-flashback-within-flashback recounting of quest by evil serpent for the something-or-other power to transform into a dragon.
The popularized math book Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Douglass Hofstadter, has a narrative that works somewhat like this, except the characters never actually return to the outermost story.
Not flashbacks, but abridgers notes in The Princess Bride book. William Goldman, the abridger of the modern version of the book writes comments in his own voice throughout the book. But the original author, S Morgenstern, also voiced his own asides that are part of the original text. At one point, Goldman has his own comments inside of Morgenstern’s comments, resulting in confusion and hilarity.
I tried reading that many years ago, but didn’t get more than about halfway through before I had to take it back to the library. I always wondered if I should try reading it again.
Cloud Atlas is the story of a teenage boy in post-apocalyptic Hawaii, who watches an old recording of an interview with a synthetic humanoid created in Korea a few decades before the collapse of society, who watches a comedy movie from 2012 based on an autobiographical novel by a British literary agent who gets trapped in a mental hospital, who published a detective novel based on a true story that happened in California in the early '70s, in which a minor character re-reads the old love letters sent to him by his male lover who lived in Belgium in the '20s, who reads the autobiography of an American lawyer on a sea voyage in the south Pacific in the 1840s.
The place to go for flashback-within-flashbacks-within-etc is the Alf Layla wa Layla, the Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, better known as 1001 Nights or The Arabian Night’s Entertainment. You get a set of nested stories that goes at least four deep, with side stories off some of those within the first several nights.
How I Met Your Mother. The whole series is a flashback of Ted talking to his children about his earlier life. And there are many times within single episodes where characters have flashbacks to some earlier scene in their lives.