Complete Name of the Professor
Temporal ellipsis is a film editing technique used to show that the series of events are taking place faster than they would have happened in real life. It may be inserted between the gaps of different scenes which means it does not adhere to the real sequence of events. It may start from the ending, then jump to the beginning, then to the part where the conflict occurs, and then to the resolution.
The film Polytechnique (2009) is a dramatization of the Montreal Massacre in 1989 in Montreal, Quebec. The story revolved around an armed young man who entered a classroom and ordered the men to leave and the women to stay. He then told the women that he hates feminists and then started shooting leaving some dead and others injured.
One of the film techniques used in the movie was the temporal ellipsis which the film jumps back and forth in different times in order to provide viewers sufficient information to comprehend the storyline without it being a drag as well as to create an element of excitement to the viewers.
Boyhood (2014), on the other hand, was a film that depicts the adolescence of Mason Evans Jr. from when he was six up until he was eighteen. Mason grew up in Texas along with her older sister and divorced parents. The production began filming annually starting in 2002 and ending in 2013. The director of the film wanted to tell a story of a parent-child relationship in real time—which made the shooting period last for 12 years.
Polytechnique and Boyhood depict timeline-based narrative stories. Both used time as an element of storytelling. However, they had differences in approach. Boyhood’s technique of storytelling was linear, whereas it was narrated in such a way that it started from the early stage of the child into his adolescence. The strategy that was used was rather continuous, in contrast to that of Polytechnique’s. The approach used in narration travels back and forth in time—it can be from past to future or future to present.
