Nonlinear narrative a linear storyline, while nonlinear films often contain linear sequences. Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" (1941)—influenced structurally by "The Power and the Glory" (1933)—and Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon" (1950) use a non-chronological flashback narrative that is often labeled nonlinear. Experimentation with nonlinear structure in film dates back to the silent film era, including D. W. Griffith's "Intolerance" (1916) and Abel Gance's "Napoléon" (1927). Nonlinear film emerged from the French avant-garde[5] in 1924 with René Clair’s "Entr'acte", Dadaïst film and then in 1929 with Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's "Un Chien Andalou" (English: "An Andalusian Dog"). The surrealist film jumps into fantasy and
The Big Swallow "makes imaginative use of an extreme close-up to create one of the seminal images of early British (and world) cinema, as effective in its way as the slashed eyeball of "Un Chien Andalou" (1929), and of just as much appeal to the Surrealist movement." The film, however, "might have been still more effective if Williamson had omitted the second and third shots," in which he, "cuts to the photographer apparently disappearing into a black void, and then back to the man who retires munching him up and expressing great satisfaction, "since they detract from the logical purity of the first,