A racconto is a retrospective.
Racconto is an Italian word that is not part of the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) , although its use is quite frequent in our language. The notion is used to name a retrospective that is carried out, generally, in an artistic work to summarize or review past events.
When a film or a book develops a story, they refer to the past to narrate events that have already occurred and, little by little, they begin to approach the present until they return to the moment in which the memory began.
An example of racconto is what happens in “Titanic” , the film directed by James Cameron . The film begins with the words of an old woman who, interviewed by a treasure hunter, begins to remember her experiences aboard the famous sunken ship. Immediately afterwards, the present of the narrative becomes the maiden voyage of the Titanic , where you can see what happened to the old woman when she was young. Reaching the end of the film, the story returns to the present.
How to make a racconto
When creating a racconto in an artistic work, writers are recommended to do so by following these steps:
- The first thing is that they must imagine the story chronologically.
- Next, they have to start writing it, taking into account, for example, that the ideal thing is to do it from the middle forward or from the end backwards.
- Then they have to proceed to stop at a specific point to establish the story there, starting from how the main characters arrived up to that moment.
- Once they develop it, they must continue in chronological order until concluding with the outcome .
Raccontos are frequent in books and movies.
Differences with flashback
The raccontos are characterized by their length , usually becoming the main story of the narrative, even when they take place in a different time . When this retrospective is brief, it is called a flashback .
Suppose that the main character of a book tells another character that he will tell him what happened ten years ago in that same place where they are located. From then on, the writer begins to narrate in detail, over dozens of pages, those events, making a racconto. If, on the other hand, you only dedicate a paragraph and then return to the narrative present, you will have made a flashback.
Racconto as title
Within the cinematographic field, we have to highlight the existence of an Argentine film, directed by Ricardo Becher in 1963, which is precisely titled “Racconto” and which features actors of the stature of Anita Larronde , Jardel Filho and Beatriz Matar , among others. .
Likewise, it should not be overlooked that in the theatrical world the famous international company Mayumana , from Iran , carried out the development of a show in 2013 which it called “Racconto” . Thanks to him, what he did was make his own story known during the fifteen years that he had been performing on stages around the world. Specifically, in that work there was a review of the best theatrical numbers and shows of the works he had performed up to that point during his career, such as “Momentum” , “Adrabá” , “Bejuntos” and “Mayumana” .