or not they are out of the game. It also becomes a prominent element of Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (2008). More recent instances can be found in the films Inland Empire (2007) and Inception (2010). Classic filmic examples include the snow globe in Citizen Kane (1941) which provides a clue to the film's core mystery, and the discussion of Edgar Allan Poe's written works (particularly "The Purloined Letter") in the Jean-Luc Godard film Band of Outsiders (1964). In literary criticism, mise en abyme is a type of frame story, in which the core narrative may be used to illuminate some aspect of the framing story. The term is used in deconstruction and deconstructive literary criticism as a paradigm of the intertextual nature of language, that is, of the way language never quite reaches the foundation of reality because it refers in a frame-within-a-frame way, to other language, which refers to other language, and so forth. In comedy, Mise en abyme can be seen with The Harold, an improvisation cycle with reoccurring themes, popularized by Del Close in his book "Truth in Comedy." See also References Artistic techniques Metafictional techniques Heraldry Art history Composition in visual art