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By Ben McCann

As a child, I vividly remember watching Superman (1978) and staring slack jawed as the Man of Steel flew incredibly fast around the Earth, made it stop spinning forward and jolted it into a backwards whirl. So distraught was he after discovering Lois Lane had tragically died in an earthquake that he flew up, up and away, quite literally turned back time, and brought Lois back from the dead. 

Fast forward to Back to the Future (1985), Pulp Fiction (1994) and Dunkirk (2017) - I’ve always been fascinated with how film treats time. Temporal manipulation can be visually arresting, beautifully contemplative and sometimes plain bonkers. In a skilled director’s hands, time becomes malleable, flexible and, on occasions, illogical. As the great French director Jean-Luc Godard once famously said: “A film must have a beginning, a middle, and an end…but not necessarily in that order.” 

That’s not to say that linear storytelling cannot be highly effective. Films that follow a chronological sequence, where events unfold in the order they happen, are the default narrative mode for a reason: they are easy to follow! A wonderful example of this mode is The Shawshank Redemption (1994), which follows the life of Andy Dufresne, a man wrongly imprisoned, over several decades. The linear progression of time allows us to witness Dufresne’s transformation and the gradual development of his plan to escape. 

The flipside of the linear narrative are non-linear structures that present events out of chronological order. Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) tells the story of Leonard Shelby, a man with short-term memory loss who tries to find his wife’s killer. The film is structured with two narrative threads: one moving forward in time and the other moving backward. This unconventional approach mirrors Leonard’s disoriented mental state, allowing the audience to experience his confusion and frustration. �ѱ𳾱�Գٴ�’s manipulation of time serves both as a narrative device and as a way to explore themes of memory, identity, and the subjective nature of reality. 

A film must have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order

Some directors have made their reputation on using “real time” storytelling – that is, a sequence presented exactly as it occurs, without any edits or jumps in time. Think of the opening moments of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958) or Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), or the ‘Copacabana’ scene in Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas (1990) - all employ long, continuous shots, with no cuts. 

One of Alfred Hitchcock’s most memorable films was Rope (1948), which unfolds entirely in “real time” (he shot in continuous, unedited 10-minute takes). Another example is High Noon (1952), in which a town marshal prepares for a showdown with a group of outlaws set to arrive on the noon train. As the clock ticks closer to midday, the tension rises. It’s a fabulous “race-against-the-clock” film that reminds us that Hollywood has often used time creatively to evoke heightened emotional responses. 

Slow cinema evokes emotion in a very different way. Once a decade since 1952, the British Film Institute’s in-house magazine, Sight and Sound, has polled film makers, critics, curators and programmers from around the world, asking them to name their 10 best films ever made. In 2022, the winner was Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Its plot? A mother performing domestic chores in microscopic detail, including peeling potatoes for 20 minutes. 

Jeanne Dielman is a perfect example of ‘slow cinema’ – a filmmaking style known for its deliberate pacing and minimalistic storytelling. These films are not afraid to take their time. But they use “real time” in a different way to Hitchcock – they are not thrilling or exciting; rather, they showcase the mundane and the ordinary and ask us to contemplate the world in newer, slower ways. 

Science fiction films have traditionally been the genre best adapted to temporal distortions: Star Trek (1966) used warp speed and Star Wars (1977) used light speed. These films often transport