Powers of Ten (1977) by Charles and Ray Eames

In 1977, Charles and Ray Eames completed the film Powers of Ten, having first produced a prototype in 1968, inspired by Kees Boeke's essay "Cosmic View". It is subtitled "A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero", and for 9 minutes that's exactly what we are shown. It starts 1 meter above a man and woman having a picnic in Chicago, but immediately our point of view starts changing as we move up and away. Every 10 seconds we are 10 times more distant from the couple laying on the grass, our outlook continuously enlarging. We eventually see the complete United States, the whole of Earth, the entire Solar System, the full Milky Way and everything in the observable Universe, when we get to 100 million light-years away (in meters, the number one followed by 24 zeros). Suddenly the direction reverses until we are back at the starting point, and then we just keeps going closer, seeing the skin of the man in detail, red and white blood cells, a DNA structure, an atom, electrons, neutrons and protons in a carbon nuclei, and finally quarks, at a distance of 0,000001 ångströms (in meters, one preceded by 16 zeroes). During the journey we are guided by Philip Morrison (an MIT professor who had worked in the Manhattan Project), his voiceover coming to us over the music of Elmer Bernstein (composer for The Magnificent Seven and To Kill a Mockingbird, among others). You can watch it above.

If you like it, "Cosmic Voyage" (1996) by Bayley Silleck, and narrated by Morgan Freeman, is an half-hour long IMAX documentary based on the same book, but also containing a bit of astrophysics and history of the Universe. As for the Eames, husband and wife who were first and foremost designers and architects, by 1977 they had already created their iconic Lounge Chair and their beautiful home-studio in Los Angeles. They were also present in the groundbreaking American National Exhibition in Moscow (the first cultural exchange between the USA and USSR, used as a propaganda vehicle by the capitalists) with the montage "Glimpses of the USA" (1959), displayed over seven screens.