For this exercise I chose Alejandro González Iñárritu’s ‘Babel’ because it has four stories that run through the film. Each of these stories are related to each other, however the order in which each story is told is not linear which makes some of the scenes confusing. At the end of the film, the sequence of events becomes evident. I must admit though that I had to watch the film a few times before the I could match up the events and work out the timeline.
The four storylines are:
- Susan and Richard on holiday in Morocco attempting to recover from the loss of their baby to SIDS. Susan gets shot while on a tour bus.
- Abdullah and his sons Ahmed and Yussuf who are goat herders in the mountains in Morocco. They acquire a rifle and Yussuf accidently shoots Susan.
- Chieko, a deaf-mute teenager living in Japan whose father originally owned the rifle that Yussuf ends up with.
- Amelia, the nanny who is looking after Susan and Richard’s children but who needs to get to Mexico to attend her son’s wedding.
In trying to find a way to represent the time frames, I produced a diagram with the four storylines one on top of each other so that it is possible to see each individual story. The number of the scene shows the sequence of events as shown in the film.
To show the actual time that the events occurred, I made a second diagram that took the scene numbers and put them in their correct sequence. From this diagram it is possible to see how the director reorganized the presentation of information.
