Filmmakers have been making films about past events, dead individuals and bygone ages since the invention of the moving image. Before the First World War these films were nearly all little more than a series of very short dramas interspersed with onscreen captions. Typical was the 1912 French film, La Reine Élisabeth, which starred the stage actress Sarah Bernhardt towards the end of her illustrious career playing the English queen. As early as 1915, however, our modern concept of the history feature film had come into being with the release of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of the Nation, a three-and-a-half hour epic account of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras which is infamous today for its positive view of the Old South and its negative portrayal of the emancipated black population. Thereafter the history feature film went from strength to strength and has remained an important and popular part of the output of the movie industry ever since. Top of the global box office charts in 2020 was the Chinese film, The Eight Hundred, about a last ditch stand in 1937 of China’s National Revolutionary Army in the Sino-Japanese War, which grossed over $450 million. In the early twenty-first century, moreover, films about the past are more readily available than ever before. History feature films and documentaries have been a staple of television since the 1960s. More recently, with the advent of the streaming channels, like Netflix and Amazon, their number and variety have grown tremendously. From the 1980s with the advent of VHS and then DVD, it has become possible to see many of these films at any time one chooses and over and over again.