Information retention

Information withholding, a narrative technique that deliberately hides information known to the characters but not to the audience, creates tension and curiosity that drives us to piece together the story, raising ethical questions about the manipulation of the audience.

A Recurring Narrative Trick

Information withholding is a trick often used in films. It involves cutting a scene precisely at the moment when we would have received information that the characters already know. Then, a time jump occurs, and we find ourselves later in the story without knowing what the characters know. For example: a car accident. Then, after the jump, we find one of the characters involved in the accident in the hospital, but we don’t know if the others are alive or dead. And we will discover this gradually.

This information withholding creates heightened curiosity in the audience for all the details of the story being presented. They will search for fragments of information that allow them to piece together what they don’t know. And of course, the characters are not at all surprised when we discover the information, because they already knew it. This puts us in a position of informational inferiority. We feel left behind and want to catch up.

The Effectiveness of Dependency

I don’t deny the great effectiveness of this technique, but personally, I find it to be a form of manipulation by the author toward the audience. The film deliberately hides information from us, just to sharpen our appetite for discovering it. The film creates a void in us, almost a dependency on information. It would even be interesting to study the chemical or neurological effects of different narrative techniques. I believe that information withholding has more to do with creating dependency than with empowering and enabling the audience, and thus with their freedom.

What Ethics for Film?

I believe that just because something is very effective doesn’t mean we should necessarily use it, because effectiveness doesn’t always align with ethics. And this is precisely what has led our industrial societies to cause such harm to our environment. Even if it’s more complicated, it seems more interesting, from a human perspective, to try to build the audience’s interest in the film through means other than manipulation. But we also have the right to play with the audience, as long as the rules of the game are stated, shared, and agreed upon.