1896 Georges Méliès begins creating films with discrete fictional stories as opposed to the Lumière brothers' actualités. Méliès's work marks the beginning of the development of form and narrative as we define them today. As you can see in the timeline for chapter 1, "What Is a Movie?", this development continues in the work of Edwin S. Porter and D. W. Griffith.

1920 D. W. Griffith's Way Down East provides an early example of parallel editing and cinematic patterns. To heighten the drama in the climactic ice-break sequence, Griffith cuts between three different shots (the hero, the damsel in distress, and the peril) in an A B C A C B C A B C A C B C pattern.

1925 Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin) uses stretch relationships between screen and story durations. The massacre sequence, for example, lasts longer onscreen than it would have taken in real life.

1927 Abel Gance introduces Polyvision, a process that uses three cameras and three projectors to display an ultrawide composition across three screens (or show up to three events at the same time). This technique, which predates widescreen by more than twenty-five years, is pioneered in his film Napoléon.

1939 Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz takes place largely in a fantasy world.

1941 Orson Welles breaks numerous cinematic conventions regarding plot order in Citizen Kane. Much of the movie consists of flashbacks, nonchronological sequences, and several chronological accounts of Charles Foster Kane's life.

1944 Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat is set entirely in one very small location: a lifeboat.

1948 Hitchcock's Rope raises the long take to a new level; the film is a series of ten shots (the average shot runs 8.13 minutes) and is edited unobtrusively to give the appearance of almost seamless continuity.

1950 In Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, the story of a horrible crime is told by four people, each with a different recollection of what really happened.

1954 Hitchcock's Rear Window tells a story about point of view. Confined to a wheelchair, the main character spies on his neighbors across a courtyard, sometimes with binoculars or with a telephoto lens.

1960 Hitchcock employs his concept of the MacGuffin in Psycho; the $40,000 that one character steals, though important to a handful of the characters, has relatively little importance in the overall narrative. The murders of a psychopath have nothing to do with the money.

The temporal scope of George Pal's The Time Machine spans hundreds of thousands of years, while spatially the scope is very small; since the time machine moves through time alone, the only spatial movement is within walking distance from the machine.

1964 Andy Warhol's Empire makes bold use of pure real time; a static movie camera records the Empire State Building for eight continuous hours.

1975 While most Hollywood stories focus on a few characters, Robert Altman's Nashville follows a large number of people, whose paths cross.

1985 Robert Zemeckis's Back to the Future is one of the first movies to set itself up for a sequel (or series) from the beginning. That is, although the film can be viewed independently, it is intended as part of a larger narrative that spans three movies.

1989 Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing focuses on the theme of power. Rosie Perez dances furiously to the song "Fight the Power" during the opening credits, and the rest of the movie echoes that theme by way of its conflicting opposites.

1993 Harold Ramis's Groundhog Day has a unique structure; the majority of the plot occurs within one day that day is repeated over and over. The traditional three-act format is filtered through a videogamelike narrative.

1995 Hal Hartley's Flirt tells the same story—indeed, realizes the same screenplay—three times with different actors and settings (New York, Berlin, Tokyo), creating a new type of story repetition.

1996 Steven Soderbergh's Schizopolis, called the first truly postmodern film, has an almost incomprehensible narrative, with key actors suddenly switching roles and similar scenes played with different dialogue or even in different languages.

1998 Like Groundhog Day, Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run (Lola rennt) employs the concept of resetting time, but its bold use of elements such as color, sound track, and a more quantifiable goal ($100,000 within twenty minutes) makes the film even more akin to a videogame.

2000 Structured antichronologically (essentially backwards), Christopher Nolan's Memento plays with the ideas of order and progression. The audience receives information in a way contrary to experience, at once both forcing identification with the amnesiac main character and making one of the chief sources of enjoyment figuring out the story.

2001 David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. thwarts attempts at finding coherence in the film by using a surreal, dreamlike structure, multiple realities, and nonchronological order. The questions "What's going on?" and "What is it about?" are the topics of much debate after the film's release.