copen wrote:The first scene of the movie is the last scene of the movie, just shown beforehand.
Knowing this, the real first scene chronologically is when he wakes up in the Gorfeins and the cat escapes. At the end of the movie when he wakes up at the Gorfeins and stops the cat, it's a separate instance that only mirrors the first instance.
So there's no separate incidents in the alley...Yes, that must be the explanation. The fade out/in after the first beat down suggests a jump in time, at least subtly. The added effect of the cat being overlaid with the guy in the alley for a fleeting moment is nice, btw: The guy is walking away from Llewyn and the cat is walking towards him, which is our first intimation of a kind of circularity and of something being communicated to Llewyn that he doesn't take heed of.
Moreover, Bob Dylan actually comes on stage in the first Gaslight scene if you watch carefully and you can hear him tuning his guitar. I can't see the film taking place anywhere else than something like a week in early 1961. Thematically it makes a whole lot more sense too to show us Dylan's arrival in Greenwich Village (that is, rather than the ending taking place in 1963) because his style is the final nail in the coffin for Llewyn's ambitions. Unlike Dylan, he's not the harbinger of anything: he sings beautifully but out of tune with the times. But crucially, this irony of fate is not available to Llewyn at the end, only to us. He's still in the dark.