Lee Chang-dong
In 1927, Jean Epstein's "La glace à trois faces" ("The Three Sided Mirror") features a sequence where the events happen in reverse, beginning with the protagonist's exit from a room until the viewer sees the entrance. The Czech comedy "Happy End" (1966) is a farce which starts with a guillotined man finding his head popped back on his shoulders and ends with him as a new-born being pushed back into his mother's womb. Atom Egoyan, influenced by Pinter's plays, tells the story of "The Sweet Hereafter" (1997) in reverse chronology, with the first scene of the film set in 1977 and the last in 1968. The technique was later employed in "Peppermint Candy" (2000), by South Korean director Lee Chang-dong; in "Memento" (2000), a mystery directed by Christopher Nolan about short term memory loss; and in Jean-Luc Godard's short film "De l'origine du XXIe siècle pour moi" (2000). In "Irréversible" (2002), the technique is used so thoroughly that the end credits are not only shown at the beginning of the movie, but they roll "down" the screen, rather than upwards as is familiar.