Foreshadowing and temporal disruptions through filmic techniques in Primer

      In the movie Primer, director Shaun Carrath discusses the implications of time travel and temporal disruption, as well as human actions and morality when confronted with a power over others.  In the narrative of the film, competing inventors Abe and Arron both use the time machine to their own ends to accomplish different goals.  Abe uses a fail-safe time machine that he built in secret to try to prevent Arron from messing with time, while Arron discovers the Fail-safe machine and uses it to bring a portable time-machine back before Abe arrives, and uses it to ensure that their past selves will finish the invention.  This is all foreshadowed throughout the film through the use of quick, disjointed cuts, frame skipping and rewinding, and displaced narrative and video.  The first time that this happens is on the day that Abe first uses the time machine and subsequently tells Arron about it, and foreshadows Abe's attempt in the same timeline to stop Arron from learning of the time machine..  From the moment that he wakes up, the process of him waking up and going from the floor where he is sleeping to out the door is full of disjointed cuts and skipped frames, with Abe jumping forward and backward in frame, and repeated delayed audio along with audio that is ahead of the video or source.  Each of these jumps and discontinuities acts as a kind of oscillation between the two timelines, with the disjointed cuts and audio showing the slight disparities between the timelines, and jumping between the original and changed timeline.  This kind of foreshadowing is also evident when Arron gets an ear-bleed after the first trip in the machine.  During this scene as well, the cuts jump constantly with frames missing in-between, only to go back to those frames later, creating jerky, disjointed movements.  Again, this is foreshadowing the fact that there is an alternate timeline of this scene, where Abe gets an ear-bleed instead of Arron, and the jerky jump-cut nature of the scene serves to metaphorically show the disparities of the two timelines.