Chronology
The order of telling versus the order of events: flashback, ellipsis, and time folded on purpose.
- story conventions
- reference
- story-convention
The relationship between story time (when events happen) and plot time (when the film shows them): linear telling, flashback, flash-forward, ellipsis, compression, repetition. Every reordering is an argument about what causes what.
What to look for
What is skipped, and what does the skip protect? When the film leaps, who is trusted to bridge the gap — a caption, a cut, the audience?
Canonical cases
The largest ellipsis in this wiki: Alice — the prologue jumps 27 years in a single cut, and everything the film has to say lives inside that omission — see You'll Never Know, then Mott the Hoople. For compression rather than leap: Psycho's search montage folds an evening into 41 seconds (Playback ↗).
Sources
Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art on plot/story time (their syuzhet/fabula distinction, translated into classroom English).