“Amer­i­ca has only three great cities: New York, San Fran­cis­co, and New Orleans. Every­where else is Cleve­land.” This quo­ta­tion has been repeat­ed for decades — not least, unsur­pris­ing­ly, in New Orleans. I saw and heard it often on my last trip there, and though attri­bu­tions var­ied, most cred­it­ed the remark to either Mark Twain or Ten­nessee Williams. Accord­ing to Quote Inves­ti­ga­tor, no his­tor­i­cal evi­dence points to either man as the line’s orig­i­na­tor, though “the notion that only three cities in the U.S. were com­mend­able or dis­tinc­tive has a very long his­to­ry.”

In 1895, for instance, the then-pop­u­lar come­di­enne Ver­nona Jar­beau said that “there are only three cities in the Unit­ed States that I would care to live in, and one of them is San Fran­cis­co.” But she said it, one should note, to a San Fran­cis­co news­pa­per; who’s to say the crowd-pleas­ing instinct would­n’t have moti­vat­ed a trans­po­si­tion of her pref­er­ence else­where in Amer­i­ca? New Orleans, then in exis­tence for more than half a cen­tu­ry, pos­sessed an even longer-estab­lished dis­tinc­tive­ness. The embell­ished gal­leries of the French Colo­nial build­ings in the 1898 film clip above, iden­ti­fy the city at a glance.

Even more New Orlean­ian, of course, is what’s going on in the street: the city’s sig­na­ture fes­tiv­i­ty, the Mar­di Gras parade. “The film is not only the old­est mov­ing pic­ture of a New Orleans Mar­di Gras; it’s the old­est film of New Orleans,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Jane Reck­er. Recent­ly redis­cov­ered in Ams­ter­dam’s Eye Film­mu­se­um, the two-minute clip shows us — on detail-absorb­ing 68-mil­lime­ter film — that “one float is pineap­ple-themed, with rid­ers wear­ing hats shaped like pieces of pineap­ple and vests resem­bling pineap­ple skin. Anoth­er fea­tures the Rex, the ‘King of the Car­ni­val,’ sit­ting atop a float dec­o­rat­ed with tas­seled globes.”

“Con­tem­po­rary view­ers will sure­ly rec­og­nize the film’s parade as a Mar­di Gras cel­e­bra­tion, though the event fea­tures some dis­tinct dif­fer­ences from the one that takes over the Big Easy’s streets today,” writes Art­net’s Sarah Cas­cone. “There are, for exam­ple, no beads, no bar­ri­cades, no police. Onlook­ers don suits and top hats and para­sols, a far more for­mal approach than that tak­en by 21st-cen­tu­ry rev­el­ers.” Here in the 2020s their rev­el­ry has been inter­rupt­ed by the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, and only this year did New Orleans’ Mar­di Gras parade tra­di­tion resume. Per­haps it’s too much to hope that the dress sense of spec­ta­tors 124 years ago will make a come­back as well.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Only Known Footage of Louis Arm­strong in a Record­ing Stu­dio: Watch the Recent­ly Dis­cov­ered Film (1959)

Some Joy for Your Ears: New Orleans Brass Band Plays Life-Affirm­ing Cov­er of Mar­vin Gaye’s “Sex­u­al Heal­ing”

Louis Arm­strong Remem­bers How He Sur­vived the 1918 Flu Epi­dem­ic in New Orleans

When Jazz Leg­end Ornette Cole­man Joined the Grate­ful Dead Onstage for Some Epic Impro­vi­sa­tion­al Jams: Hear a 1993 Record­ing

The Ser­i­al Killer Who Loved Jazz: The Infa­mous Sto­ry of the Axe­man of New Orleans (1919)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

We all learned a bit about the Sec­ond World War in school, or per­haps more than a bit. But for a great many of us, what we know of that peri­od of his­to­ry comes less from teach­ers and text­books than it does from movies. World War II as a cin­e­mat­ic genre has exist­ed since the ear­ly years of World War II itself, and at this point it has pro­duced so many films that not even the most avid his­tor­i­cal­ly-mind­ed cinephile could watch them all. Many such pic­tures, of course, take enor­mous lib­er­ties with their source mate­r­i­al. But if you con­cen­trate on just the most accu­rate parts of the most acclaimed movies about World War II, you can piece togeth­er a rea­son­ably truth­ful por­tray­al of its events.

Such is the premise, at any rate, of the video above, “Time­line of WW2 in Films.” Cre­at­ed by Youtu­ber Salokin, it arranges clips from dozens of films released over the past half-cen­tu­ry — Pat­ton, Tora! Tora! Tora!, Bat­tle of Britain, Dunkirk — in his­tor­i­cal order.

Open­ing with footage from Roman Polan­ski’s The Pianist refer­ring to the inva­sion of Poland in Sep­tem­ber 1939, it goes on to cov­er that year by draw­ing from the depic­tion of Sovi­et-Japan­ese bor­der con­flicts like the Bat­tles of Khalkhin Go and Nomon­han in Kang Je-gyu’s My Way, then from the depic­tion of the tit­u­lar fights on the Kare­lian Isth­mus in Pekka Parikka’s The Win­ter War.

As Kore­an and Finnish pro­duc­tions, respec­tive­ly, My Way and The Win­ter War offer per­spec­tives on World War II dif­fer­ent from the Amer­i­can one tak­en by Hol­ly­wood movies — Hol­ly­wood hav­ing once been the only motion-pic­ture indus­try with the resources to re-cre­ate the war in a con­vinc­ing man­ner. But the devel­op­ment of glob­al film pro­duc­tion in recent decades has also giv­en rise to wide­ly seen World War II movies from coun­tries like Aus­tralia, Ger­many, Den­mark, and Rus­sia, to name a few coun­tries whose films appear in this video. Not all of them agree per­fect­ly with his­to­ry as taught in the Unit­ed States, but then, Amer­i­can World War II movie enthu­si­asts have unre­solv­able con­flicts of their own: do you pre­fer Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan, for instance, or The Thin Red Line?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Inno­v­a­tive Film Visu­al­izes the Destruc­tion of World War II: Now Avail­able in 7 Lan­guages

Watch World War II Rage Across Europe in a 7 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1939 to 1945

Watch Footage of the Allies Rolling Through a Defeat­ed Ger­man Town in April, 1945: Restored & Col­orized with AI

Time Trav­el Back to Tokyo After World War II, and See the City in Remark­ably High-Qual­i­ty 1940s Video

Jean-Luc Godard’s Breath­less: How World War II Changed Cin­e­ma & Helped Cre­ate the French New Wave

Quentin Tarantino’s World War II Read­ing List

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

When it launched fif­teen years ago, the movie pod­cast Bat­tle­ship Pre­ten­sion took its name from two well-known sources: an atti­tude pop­u­lar­ly asso­ci­at­ed with cinephiles, and a 1925 motion pic­ture by Sergei Eisen­stein. To some, mere­ly ref­er­enc­ing a silent film made by a Sovi­et auteur in 1925 con­sti­tutes suf­fi­cient evi­dence of pre­ten­sion in and of itself. But most, even those who’ve nev­er seen a frame of Eisen­stein’s work, do rec­og­nize that Bat­tle­ship Potemkin has an impor­tant place in cin­e­ma his­to­ry — and if they actu­al­ly watch the movie, which is embed­ded just above, they’ll find that it looks and feels more famil­iar than they’d expect­ed.

Like any work of wide and deep influ­ence, Bat­tle­ship Potemkin has often been par­o­died over its near­ly 100 years of exis­tence. But none of its scenes has been paid as much homage, tongue in cheek or else­where, than the mas­sacre on the Odessa Steps, the sym­bol­ic entry­way to that city in what’s now Ukraine.

“Czarist troops march down a long flight of steps, fir­ing on the cit­i­zens who flee before them in a ter­ri­fied tide,” as Roger Ebert describes it. “Count­less inno­cents are killed, and the mas­sacre is summed up in the image of a woman shot dead try­ing to pro­tect her baby in a car­riage — which then bounces down the steps, out of con­trol.”

The con­tent of this sequence is as har­row­ing as its form is rev­o­lu­tion­ary. That’s true in the pro­pa­gan­dis­tic sense, but even more so in the artis­tic one: the Odessa Steps mas­sacre, like the whole of Bat­tle­ship Potemkin, func­tions as a proof-of-con­cept for Eisen­stein’s the­o­ries of mon­tage. Today we take for grant­ed — and in some cas­es have even come to resent — that movies so expert­ly jux­ta­pose their images so as to pro­voke the most intense emo­tion­al response pos­si­ble with­in us. That was­n’t so much the case a cen­tu­ry ago, when most exam­ples of the still-nov­el art form of cin­e­ma used their visu­als sim­ply to make their nar­ra­tives leg­i­ble.

Eisen­stein, how­ev­er, under­stood cin­e­ma’s true poten­tial. He explored it in a range of pic­tures that also includ­ed Ten Days That Shook the World, a drama­ti­za­tion of the 1917 Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion; Alexan­der Nevsky, on the repul­sion of invaders by the epony­mous thir­teenth-cen­tu­ry prince; and the epic his­tor­i­cal dra­ma Ivan the Ter­ri­ble, the sto­ry of the first tsar of all Rus­sia (and idol of Stal­in, who com­mis­sioned the project).

You can watch these films, as well as Eisen­stein’s unfin­ished trib­ute to the Mex­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion ¡Que viva Méx­i­co!, free on the Youtube chan­nel of Mos­film, the pre­em­i­nent stu­dio in the Sovi­et era. That Eisen­stein’s tech­niques have sur­vived not just him but the Sovi­et Union itself under­scores a truth he might have sus­pect­ed, but nev­er admit­ted: cin­e­ma is more pow­er­ful than pol­i­tics.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Sergei Eisenstein’s Ten Days That Shook the World (1928)

A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Sovi­et Mon­tage The­o­ry: A Rev­o­lu­tion in Film­mak­ing

Sergei Eisenstein’s Sem­i­nal Bat­tle­ship Potemkin Gets a Sound­track by Pet Shop Boys

Watch 70 Movies in HD from Famed Russ­ian Stu­dio Mos­film: Clas­sic Films, Beloved Come­dies, Tarkovsky, Kuro­sawa & More

James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Gets Turned into an Inter­ac­tive Web Film, the Medi­um It Was Des­tined For

101 Free Silent Films: The Great Clas­sics

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.