In describing Happy Endings, Quart considers captions acting as footnotes and split screen as elements of hyperlink cinema and notes the influence of the World Wide Web and multitasking.
[3][4] Quart suggests that director Robert Altman created the structure for the genre and demonstrated its usefulness for combining interlocking stories in his films Nashville (1975) and Short Cuts (1993).
[5] However, his work was predated by several films, including Satyajit Ray's Kanchenjunga (1962),[6] Federico Fellini's Amarcord (1973),[7] and Ritwik Ghatak's Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (1973),[8] all of which use a narrative structure based on multiple characters.
One of the 2017 Tamil language action thriller films Maanagaram involves an everyman who moves to the Indian megacity Chennai, where he gets intertwined with four other lives as they strive to achieve success in the city when a vicious gangster threatens them.
Narine's study examines the films Traffic (2000), Amores perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003), Beyond Borders (2003), Crash (2004; released 2005), Syriana (2005), Babel (2006) and others, citing network theorist Manuel Castells and philosophers Michel Foucault and Slavoj Žižek.