Flashbacks were first employed during the sound era in Rouben Mamoulian's 1931 film City Streets, but were rare until about 1939 when, in William Wyler's Wuthering Heights 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 Carné's film Le Jour Se Lève is told almost 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 film.
The multiple and contradictory staged reconstructions of a crime in Errol Morris's 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line are presented as flashbacks based on divergent testimony.
In the film version of Camelot (1967), according to Alan Jay Lerner, a flashback was added not to soften the blow of a later plot development but because the stage show had been criticized for shifting too abruptly in tone from near-comedy to tragedy.
In Billy Wilder's film noir Double Indemnity (1944), a flashback from the main character is used to provide a confession to his fraudulent and criminal activities.
He has employed this technique in his movies – Om (1995), A (1998) and the futuristic flick Super (2010) – set in 2030 containing multiple flashbacks ranging from 2010 to 2015 depicting a Utopian India.
In fact, in Nayak, the entire film proceeds in a non linear narrative which explores the Hero (Arindam's) past through seven flashbacks and two dreams.
In Reservoir Dogs (1992), for example, scenes of the story present are intercut with various flashbacks to give each character's backstory and motivation additional context.
The television series Quantico, Kung Fu, Psych, How I Met Your Mother, Grounded for Life, Once Upon a Time, and I Didn't Do It use flashbacks in every episode.
Flashbacks were also a predominant feature of the television shows Lost, Arrow, Phineas and Ferb, Orange Is the New Black, 13 Reasons Why, Elite and Quicksand.
In Princess Half-Demon, the ongoing spinoff to the anime stated above, the premiere takes us back eighteen years ago, five months since the conclusion of the original series' seventh season.
Episode Fifteen "Farewell Under the Lunar Eclipse" is narrated by Riku that explains what had happened before and right after the Half-Demon Princesses were born; namely where Inuyasha and nineteen-year-old Kagome Higurashi had ended up, trapped within the Black Pearl at the border of the Afterlife for fourteen long years.
(Northern Exposure episode "Cicely" used a similar device, with the main cast playing unrelated characters of 84 years before, at the founding of the village.)
The final three episodes of Better Call Saul, set in the post-Breaking Bad timeline, also include flashbacks taking place both between and during the two series' time frames.
The 2D hand-drawn animated show Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure (known as Tangled: The Series during its first season) began showing flashbacks set a quarter of a century ago in the Dark Kingdom, where the heavenly Moonstone resides within for hundreds of years in the second season's premiere "Beyond the Walls of Corona", "Rapunzel and the Great Tree" and the finale "Destinies Collide."