10 great films that cover huge spans of time

There’s no separating the past from the present in Robert Zemeckis’s extraordinary Here (2024). One of the most adventurously experimental studio pictures to emerge this century, the film retains the unique formal gambit of its source material, a 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire. As on the page, a fixed perspective surveys millions of years of history, from the primordial era all the way through to the creation of a suburban home. In lieu of traditional editing methods, panels appear within the main image, creating windows into the past that expand and contract to transport us between different time periods, the camera never moving – until the very end – from its locked position.

You’d have to venture into the work of artist-filmmakers – such as Michael Snow’s icon of structural cinema, Wavelength (1967) – to find a corollary to Here’s formal designs. The meat of the film’s narrative focuses on the family that has inhabited this patch of land for generations, charting the fortunes and frustrations of Tom Hanks’s son and heir. Zemeckis serves up a withering critique of the American dream, of its inherent limitations and compromises, while folding visions of the colonial and Native American past into its historical tapestry as a means of undermining foundational mythologies.

As Here arrives on UK screens, we’ve picked out 10 more films that collapse decades, centuries and millennia of history into a single cinematic moment.

Director: D.W. Griffith

The controversy that surrounded the 1915 release of The Birth of a Nation – a film dubbed “the most reprehensibly racist in American history” – wasn’t lost on its director, D.W. Griffith. Little wonder that his next project would be an apologia of sorts: a millennia-spanning epic that took for its theme “how hatred and intolerance, through all the ages, have battled against love and charity.”

Determined to outdo the extravagance of Cabiria (1914), a vast Italian production that had been a hit with critics and audiences, Griffith conceived a near-three-hour historical odyssey intended to be the last word in cinematic spectacle. Interlacing four episodes from distinct time periods – charting the fall of Babylon, the life and crucifixion of Christ, the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, and a contemporary tale of wrongful conviction – Intolerance was shot on some of the largest sets ever constructed for a film. Initially, Griffith sets a leisurely pace, turning, as the opening title cards tell us, “from one of the four stories to another, as the common theme unfolds in each”. But come the climactic half hour, Griffith ups the intensity of his cross-cutting, obliterating the boundaries of the space-time continuum like a man possessed by God himself.

Directors: John Ford, Henry Hathaway and George Marshall

By the end of the 1950s, it was estimated that 90 per cent of American homes had a television set. With some 30 shows occupying prime time slots, westerns clogged the airwaves. Desperate to drag audiences away from the idiot box and back into cinemas, studio heads began experimenting with all manner of newfangled gimmicks. ‘The bigger, the better’ was their guiding principle, and no film format came bigger than Cinerama.

Shot using a trio of synchronised cameras, and projected (via three projectors) on a curved tripartite screen, only two dramatic features were made using this cumbersome process. Adapted from a series of Life magazine articles, How the West Was Won corralled a rolodex of A-listers to star in a sweeping portrait of the taming of the American frontier. Three directors share five chapters, charting the fortunes of one family across 50 years of 19th-century history. Henry Hathaway – responsible for three of the episodes – has a couple of hours to play with, but can’t touch what John Ford manages in just 22 minutes. With ‘The Civil War’, Ford fashions an archetypal epic in miniature, opening the eyes of a young farmhand disillusioned by combat to the promise of the west.

Director: Andrei Konchalovsky

The images of an oil derrick burning to the ground that open Andrei Konchalovsky’s 275-minute behemoth are lent an otherworldly charge by the synth score that pulses underneath. Such infernal visions would seem like science fiction to the inhabitants of the Siberian village into which we’re swiftly thrust. It’s the turn of the 20th century, and a stranger has emerged from the tundra, philosophising about his dreams of building a utopian city.

The village of Yelan is an unlikely locus from which to survey the relentless pursuit of progress across some 60-plus years of Russian history. World wars are fought and czars are toppled far from this backwoods hamlet, but even communities deep in the Taiga are not immune to the reach of industrialisation. Zeroing in on Alexei (played by filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov), whose father has given his life to building a road without a destination through the forest, Siberiade charts his rise from ambitious prospector to Regional Party Secretary. His aim is to discover oil in the vast Siberian marshlands before the party apparatchiks can build a hydropower plant and flood his forgotten hometown. An elemental epic of foundational mythmaking, Siberiade pits man against nature, and superstition against the forces of modernity, for a microcosmic gaze into the ideological depths of the Soviet soul.

Director: Mel Brooks

“I shall give you my laws, and you shall take them unto the people,” booms the voice of God to Moses atop Mount Sinai. The prophet steps forward to proclaim: “The Lord Jehovah has given unto you these 15…” He drops one of the stone tablets. “…Ten! Ten commandments for all to obey!” 

Mel Brooks takes a whistle-stop tour across millions of years of human evolution in this sketch-based feature narrated by Orson Welles. Beginning with a riff on the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the film’s four main sections take in the Stone Age, ancient Rome – “Columns! Columns! Get yer columns here! Ionic, Doric, Corinthian: put a few columns out front, turn any hovel into a show place!” – the Spanish Inquisition, and the French Revolution.

The gags – and the innuendos – come thick and fast, establishing a pretty good hit rate from the off, particularly in the Roman section, which sees Brooks playing a stand-up philosopher named Comicus. “Did you kill last week? Did you try to kill last week?” asks a functionary of the gladiator in line for unemployment benefits in a section that ends with Brooks working as a waiter at the Last Supper (“does everybody want soup?”). The Inquisition episode takes the form of a spectacular musical number, while the whole shebang ends with a series of coming attractions for Part II that include “Hitler on Ice” and a Star Wars parody called “Jews in Space.”

Director: Manoel de Oliveira

A journey through the military history of Portugal, as told by a serving officer in colonial Angola, Manoel de Oliveira’s centuries-spanning philosophical opus stands among the greatest films about war. It begins in a jeep, with a platoon bemoaning the years of never-ending conflict “with the Russians, Americans, even the Europeans and Chinese”. The soldiers engage each other – and, through direct address to camera, the viewer – in dialectical debate on the needs and reasons for conflict, while their commander invokes a series of historical flashbacks that dramatise Portugal’s imperial legacy.

De Oliveira presents an official, state-sanctioned history, but, with the aesthetic register of the historical interludes pitched at the unlikely intersection of Straub-Huillet and Monty Python, the film enigmatically undermines any nationalist readings. No is a film about loss of empire, a film about defeat. The flashbacks leap from the Roman era to the Crusades – with an eye-popping detour via Vasco de Gama’s mythical voyage to the island of Love – while the soldiers in the modern section smile and banter, joking as they work their way towards a “philosophy of the cosmos”. Until, that is, a skirmish breaks out, and de Oliveira lays bare the hollow futility of everything that came before.

Director: Sally Potter

“Do not fade, do not wither, do not grow old,” asks Queen Elizabeth I of Orlando at the beginning of this time-travelling picaresque, a command the young man is helpless to deny. That the two characters are played respectively by Quentin Crisp and Tilda Swinton is the first hint at what this wildly imaginative film is up to, as writer-director Sally Potter distils the soul of Virginia Woolf’s high-concept novel for a centuries-spanning examination of gender and identity.

As a man, Orlando lives a privileged life, granted fortune and favour across 400 years of English history. His story begins in 1603, with the handsome youth a “mascot” to the Virgin Queen. As decades pass, Orlando retains his youth, until, in 1700, having refused a call to war, he awakes to find he has turned into a woman. If the transformation itself is simply a matter of fact – “Same person, no difference at all. Just a different sex,” she tells her reflection in the mirror – its implications are anything but. Sued for the inheritance bequeathed to her by Elizabeth, Orlando is forced to contend with the loss of her gendered status. Taking in 18th-century literary salons and Victorian society en route to its contemporary epilogue, it’s a swooningly romantic – and drolly satirical – work of adaptation that skips epochs in a blink. Tilda, in perhaps her most iconic role, is magnificent.

Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien

With its trio of chapters respectively set in 1966, 1911 and the present day, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s ravishing Three Times (2005) might be the most obvious contender among the Taiwanese maestro’s work for inclusion on a list of epoch-spanning films. But this lesser-seen wonder – the third, following A City of Sadness (1989) and The Puppetmaster (1993), in his unofficial trilogy chronicling the history of Taiwan – takes for its subject the slipperiness inherent in any attempt to put the past on film.

Good Men, Good Women tells the real-life story of Chiang Bi-yu and Chung Hao-tung, a pair of socialist students who tried to join the anti-Japanese resistance movement during World War II. Chiang is played by Annie Shizuka Inoh, who also plays an actor in the film’s present-day sections – here preparing for a role in an upcoming film about Chiang Bi-yu. Differentiated by black and white, the historical interludes are presumed to be the film the actor is about to make, a picture called Good Men, Good Women – the same as the one we’re watching. Adding a further layer of complication, the modern-day episodes are replete with flashbacks of their own, detailing the actor’s doomed relationship with a small-time gangster, who may or may not be haunting her in the present tense. With his typically unblinking gaze, Hou interrogates the very meaning of filmed reality, offering no easy answers to the impossible question of capturing historical truth.

Director: Terrence Malick

Collapsing the entire history of the universe into a single day, Terrence Malick’s monumental, shape-shifting opus defies any attempts at précis or reduction. The day in question is the anniversary of a young man’s death, an event that triggers an expressionistic vortex of childhood memories in his older brother Jack, played in the film’s contemporary episodes by Sean Penn. Drawing on his own autobiography – he also lost a brother in the 1960s – Malick opens The Tree of Life with this profound moment of loss, introducing us to Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt’s grieving parents in their darkest hour, as a telegram arrives informing them of their son’s death.

If Malick takes for his driving theme the echoes of emotional devastation across time, he doesn’t just look forward, but back. As Chastain directs her lamentations to the skies, Malick cuts to black for a 13-minute sequence that swirls through billions of years of evolution, taking in the creation of the universe and the age of the dinosaurs en route to Jack’s birth in 1950s suburban Texas. Here, the narrative proper kicks in, as Malick forges a microcosm for his cosmic philosophies: a place in which ‘grace’ and ‘nature’, heaven and earth, immanence and transcendence fight for supremacy in Jack’s – and humankind’s – burgeoning moral consciousness.

Director: Bill Wurtz

“Thanks for watching history. I hope I mentioned everything,” reads the title card at the end of this 19-minute dash through billions of years of space and time. Internet personality Bill Wurtz had already had a viral hit in 2016 with his animated short History of Japan, which, as its title suggests, concentrates a potted telling of the nation’s past into just nine psychedelically charged minutes.

This sequel follows the template set by the earlier film, expanding the remit to cover the birth of the universe and all of human history. Using crude Flash animation and musical jingles, Wurtz’s wry narration moves at a breakneck pace, thundering through the evolution of the species and millennia of progress and conflict with twinkling absurdism. Naturally, with 173 million views on YouTube to date, come the plethora of Reddit forums decrying the accuracy of Wurtz’s project, humourlessly throwing an “actually…” at the title’s claims of entirety. Strange hang-ups for a work of such sparkling wit and imagination.

Director: Bertrand Bonello

Paris, 2044. Emotions are strictly regulated by a domineering AI apparatus that sees human feeling as anathema to a productive workforce. With her gallery job at risk, Léa Seydoux’s Gabrielle agrees to a process that will purify her DNA, inadvertently inciting a collision between her past lives – and those of her soul mate, Louis (George MacKay) – in Belle Époque Paris and 2014 Los Angeles.

As in the Henry James novella which writer-director Bertrand Bonello loosely adapts, the eponymous monster is but a haunting premeditation: a feeling that some unknown event in the future will “obliterate” her, and the reason she keeps love at arm’s length. Commingling melodrama, sci-fi and horror into a century-spanning tale of doomed romance, Bonello opens The Beast in a green-screen void, a studio space in which Gabrielle’s LA actor fights off an invisible intruder. It’s an apt metaphor for a film that avoids literalising its impending cataclysms, which take in the Great Flood of 1910 and all manner of contemporary technological anxieties. Instead, Bonello’s film imbues the very fabric of its digital and celluloid mosaic with an ineluctable sense of dread.