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Rafael Soares de Melo


Abstract

In the HBO miniseries Sharp Objects (2018), québécois filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallée continues to work with an editing style where he explores the dimensions of flashbacks. By including this narrative tool in different formats throughout the show, Vallée trusts its ability to represent the thoughts and traumatic memories of the main character and its capacity of bringing the spectator closer to the mind level of the series’ protagonist. This thesis aims to understand the established conventions around the use of flashbacks in cinema history, how Jean-Marc Vallée applies it in his previous works and to create a group of flashback typologies based on the filmmaker’s style on the miniseries. From the observation of some key moments in Sharp Objects, this research develops three types of flashbacks applied on the show: narrative flashbacks , enigmatic flashbacks and state of the mind flashbacks . The purpose in creating these typologies is to understand how each one of them allows the filmmaker to construct his narrative through the thoughts and memories of the main character and the emotional and subjective impact that these different editing techniques give to this project.