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.

The above footage of Paris’ lib­er­a­tion in August 1944 looks and feels not dis­sim­i­lar to a Hol­ly­wood movie. Part of its pow­er owes to its being in col­or, a van­ish­ing­ly rare qual­i­ty in real film of World War II. But we must also cred­it its hav­ing been shot by a gen­uine Hol­ly­wood film­mak­er, George Stevens. Hav­ing got his start in pic­tures as a teenag­er in the ear­ly nine­teen-twen­ties (not long before mak­ing the cin­e­mat­ic-his­tor­i­cal accom­plish­ment of fig­ur­ing out how to get Stan Lau­rel’s light-col­ored eyes to show up on film), Stevens became a respect­ed direc­tor in the fol­low­ing decade. Swing Time, Gun­ga Din, The More the Mer­ri­er: with hits like that, he would seem to have had it made.

But it was just then, as F. X. Feeney tells it in the DGA Quar­ter­ly, that the war became unig­nor­able. “The dan­ger­ous artistry of Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 valen­tine to Adolf Hitler, Tri­umph of the Will, moved Stevens to vol­un­teer for front­line ser­vice in World War II despite his being old enough to dodge a uni­form and sit things out.”

In vivid col­or, Stevens and his U.S. Army Sig­nal Corps crew shot “the D‑Day land­ings, where he was one of the first ashore; the lib­er­a­tion of Paris; the snowy ruins of bombed-out vil­lages en route to the Bat­tle of the Bulge; and, most unfor­get­tably, the lib­er­a­tion of the death camp at Dachau.” (Even the cel­e­bra­to­ry events in Paris had their har­row­ing moments, such as the sniper attack cap­tured at 11:54.)

Stevens went to war a film­mak­er and came home a film­mak­er. The long post­war act of his career opened with no less acclaimed a pic­ture than I Remem­ber Mama, and went on to include the likes of A Place in the Sun, Shane, and The Diary of Anne Frank, whose mate­r­i­al no doubt res­onat­ed even more with Stevens giv­en what he’d seen in Europe. Not all of it, of course, was the after­math of death and destruc­tion. These Paris lib­er­a­tion clips alone offer glimpses of such admirable fig­ures as resis­tance fight­er Simone Segouin, Gen­er­als de Gaulle and Leclerc, and even Lieu­tenant Colonel Stevens him­self. He appears pre­sid­ing over the shoot just as he must once have done back in Cal­i­for­nia — and, with the war’s end in sight, as he must have known he would do again.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Albert Camus, Edi­tor of the French Resis­tance News­pa­per Com­bat, Writes Mov­ing­ly About Life, Pol­i­tics & War (1944–47)

How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Oth­er Lou­vre Mas­ter­pieces Dur­ing World War II

See Berlin Before and After World War II in Star­tling Col­or Video

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

31 Rolls of Film Tak­en by a World War II Sol­dier Get Dis­cov­ered & Devel­oped Before Your Eyes

The Gestapo Points to Guer­ni­ca and Asks Picas­so, “Did You Do This?;” Picas­so Replies “No, You Did!”

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.