Non Linear Narrative

Nonlinear narrative, disjointed narrative or disrupted narrative is a narrative technique, sometimes used in literature, film, hypertext websites and other narratives, where events are portrayed, for example out of chronological order, or in other ways where the narrative does not follow the direct causality pattern of the events featured, such as parallel distinctive plot lines, dream immersions or narrating another story inside the main plot-line. It is often used to mimic the structure and recall of human memory, but has been applied for other reasons as well.
This tendency towards the elliptical and the inconclusive is not limited to the visual arts.It can be observed in cinema, where even Hollywood, that bastion of conventional narrative is occasionally infiltrated by strangely disjunctive films in which time runs backwards as well as forwards, narrators prove totally unreliable and normal cause and effect no longer apply.Pulp Fiction(1984) in which the scenes were scrambled chronologically,Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), which progresses backward in time to reverse the process by which the protagonist's memory has been erased, or Fight Club (1999), in which it is revealed at the end of the movie that the narrator and his antagonist are one and the same.

In contemporary visual art events in the mind are indistinguishable from events in the outside world, for instance   Eija-Lisa Ahtila's film"The House ", 2002, begins with a woman driving to a secluded house, and as events continue they take on a dreamlike state. The sounds become disorienting and the images begin to combine: the woman can see the car on the walls of the house; and a cow saunters into the living room,she hears boat horns that make no sense. The film is meant to be presented in an exhibit that displays each of the three screens on separate walls, making the viewer feel as if they are actually in the house where the project was filmed.Similarly in The Wind, 2002, a tearful female protagonist  recounts her self loathing while visitors who might be real or just figments appear in her house to torment her.Soon, a cyclone sweeps through her home,upending everything and leaving the place in a chaos.Is this a symbol of the external forces that are driving her mad, or does it come from within, representing a release of her anguished spirit?

Despite the psychological nature of the trauma presented in Ahtila's films ,there is nothing clinical or deeply distressing about them.This is due to the way the events are presented-the fracturing effect of the multiple screens reflects the characters' crazy logic that events become almost plausible to the viewer,alleviating rather than creating disorientation.
Eijah Lisa's work is an intersection between film and theatre, art history and poetry , philosophy and biology and the miraculous and the everyday.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg9IEa9uNGU