Discover the First Depiction of Santa Claus (and Its Origins in Civil War Propaganda)

in Art, History | December 25th, 2025

It will no doubt come as a relief to many read­ers that San­ta Claus appears to have been a Union sup­port­er. We know this because he appears dis­trib­ut­ing gifts to sol­diers from that side of the Mason-Dixon in one of his ear­li­est depic­tions. That illus­tra­tion, “San­ta Claus in Camp” (above), first appeared in the Harper’s Week­ly Christ­mas issue of 1862, when the Amer­i­can Civ­il War was still tear­ing its way through the coun­try. Its artist, a Bavar­i­an immi­grant named Thomas Nast, is now remem­bered for hav­ing first drawn the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty as a don­key and the Repub­li­can Par­ty as an ele­phant, but he also did more than any­one else to cre­ate the image of San­ta Claus rec­og­nized around the world today: more than Nor­man Rock­well, and more, even, than the Coca-Cola Com­pa­ny.

San­ta Claus is an Angli­ciza­tion of Sin­terk­laas, a Dutch name for Saint Nicholas, who lived and died in what’s now Turkey in the third and fourth cen­turies, and who’s been remem­bered since for his kind­ness to chil­dren. Few of us would rec­og­nize him in his por­trait from 1294 that is includ­ed in the Pub­lic Domain Review’s pic­to­r­i­al his­to­ry of San­ta Claus, but with the pass­ing of the cen­turies, his images became mixed with those of oth­er fly­ing, win­ter-asso­ci­at­ed char­ac­ters from Ger­man­ic and Norse myth. In 1822, Clement Moore per­formed a defin­ing act of rhyming syn­the­sis with his poem “A Vis­it from St. Nicholas” (often called “ ‘Twas the Night Before Christ­mas”): in its vers­es we find the bun­dle of toys, the rosy cheeks, the white beard, the bel­ly shak­ing like a bowl full of jel­ly.

Nast clear­ly under­stood not just the appeal of Moore’s descrip­tion, but also the char­ac­ter’s pro­pa­gan­da val­ue. His very first ren­di­tions of San­ta Claus appear in the upper cor­ners of an 1862 Harper’s Week­ly illus­tra­tion of a pray­ing wife and her Yan­kee sol­dier hus­band. Near­ly two decades lat­er, Nast drew the car­toon “Mer­ry Old San­ta Claus” (imme­di­ate­ly above), whose cen­tral fig­ure remains imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able to us today, even as its moti­vat­ing polit­i­cal cause of high­er wages for the mil­i­tary has become obscure. In the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, the icon­ic Father Christ­mas would be enlist­ed again to lend pub­lic sup­port to U.S. efforts in World War I and II, in the very decades when Rock­well was fur­ther refin­ing and cement­ing his image in pop­u­lar cul­ture. The once-unlike­ly result was an Amer­i­can San­ta Claus: “the sym­bol of our empire,” in the words of The New York­er’s Adam Gop­nik, “as much as Apol­lo was of the Hel­lenic one.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch San­ta Claus, the Ear­li­est Movie About San­ta in Exis­tence (1898)

Did San­ta Claus & His Rein­deers Begin with a Mush­room Trip?: Dis­cov­er the Psy­che­del­ic, Shaman­is­tic Side of Christ­mas

Hear “Twas The Night Before Christ­mas” Read by Stephen Fry & John Cleese

J. R. R. Tolkien Sent Illus­trat­ed Let­ters from Father Christ­mas to His Kids Every Year (1920–1943)

Bob Dylan Reads “ ‘Twas the Night Before Christ­mas” On His Hol­i­day Radio Show (2006)

Slavoj Žižek Answers the Ques­tion “Should We Teach Chil­dren to Believe in San­ta Claus?”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Discover 20 Historical Christmas Recipes: Fruitcake, Gingerbread, Figgy Pudding & More

in Food & Drink, History | December 24th, 2025

One can hard­ly con­sid­er the Christ­mas sea­son for long, at least in the Eng­lish-speak­ing world, with­out the work of Charles Dick­ens com­ing to mind. That owes for the most part, of course, to A Christ­mas Car­ol, the novel­la that revived the pub­lic cul­ture of a hol­i­day that had been falling into desue­tude by the mid-nine­teenth cen­tu­ry. What­ev­er its lit­er­ary short­com­ings, the book offers a host of mem­o­rable images, not least culi­nary ones: Mrs. Cratchit’s pud­ding, for instance, which Dick­ens likens to “a speck­led can­non-ball, so hard and firm, blaz­ing in half or half-a-quar­tern of ignit­ed brandy, and bedight with Christ­mas hol­ly stuck into the top.”

In the Tast­ing His­to­ry video at the top of the post, host Max Miller teach­es you how to make just such a hol­i­day pud­ding — and indeed a fig­gy one, a con­fec­tion whose name we all rec­og­nize from no less a stan­dard car­ol than “We Wish You a Mer­ry Christ­mas,” even if we don’t know that pud­ding, in the Vic­to­ri­an sense, refers to a kind of cake.

The fig­gy pud­ding Miller makes from an orig­i­nal 1845 recipe looks, and seems to taste, more like an alco­hol-soaked ver­sion of the fruit­cakes many of us still receive come Christ­mas­time. Despite its rep­u­ta­tion for lead­en unde­sir­abil­i­ty, rein­forced by decade after decade of John­ny Car­son gags, the fruit­cake has a rich his­to­ry, which Miller reveals in the video just above, and culi­nary strengths beyond its extreme shelf life.

This playlist of 20 Christ­mas-themed videos offers many more such delights: Turk­ish delight, for instance, as well as Vic­to­ri­an sug­ar plums, medieval gin­ger­bread, and his­tor­i­cal ver­sions of such still-com­mon com­forts and joys as eggnog and pump­kin pie. And if you’ve ever won­dered to what was­sail — as a noun or a verb — actu­al­ly refers, have a look at the video above, in which Miller explains it all while mak­ing a pot of the stuff, which turns out to be a kind of apple­sauce-enriched ale. Was­sail, too, is a favorite Dick­ens ref­er­ence, and not just in A Christ­mas Car­ol. His first nov­el The Pick­wick Papers includes a Christ­mas feast with “a mighty bowl of was­sail, some­thing small­er than an ordi­nary wash-house cop­per, in which the hot apples were hiss­ing and bub­bling with a rich look, and a jol­ly sound, that were per­fect­ly irre­sistible”: the kind of image that, near­ly two cen­turies lat­er, still makes read­ers want to go a‑wassailing.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Eudo­ra Welty’s Hand­writ­ten Eggnog Recipe, and Charles Dick­ens’ Recipe for Hol­i­day Punch

Try George Orwell’s Recipe for Christ­mas Pud­ding, from His Essay “British Cook­ery” (1945)

Charles Min­gus’ “Top Secret” Eggnog Recipe Con­tains “Enough Alco­hol to Put Down an Ele­phant”

How Eat­ing Ken­tucky Fried Chick­en Became a Christ­mas Tra­di­tion in Japan

Tast­ing His­to­ry: A Hit YouTube Series Shows How to Cook the Foods of Ancient Greece & Rome, Medieval Europe, and Oth­er Places & Peri­ods

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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The Life and Work of Afrobeat Creator Fela Kuti Explored by Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad

in History, Music, Podcasts | December 23rd, 2025

When dis­cussing a musi­cian like Fela Kuti, many of our usu­al terms fail us. They fail us, that is, if we came of age in a musi­cal cul­ture in which artists and bands put out an album of ten or so lyrics-for­ward songs every two or three years, pro­mot­ing it on tour while also play­ing their biggest hits. Fela — as all his fans refer to him — could put out six or sev­en albums in a sin­gle year, and refused to play live any mate­r­i­al he’d already record­ed. Even the word song, as we know it, does­n’t quite reflect the nature of his com­po­si­tions, which got expan­sive enough that two or three of them (or just one, half of it on each side) could fill a long-play­ing record.

Wal­ter Ben­jamin said of great lit­er­ary works that they either dis­solve a genre or invent one, and Fela’s musi­cal works invent­ed the genre of Afrobeat. The sound of that genre, as explained by Noah Lefevre in the Poly­phon­ic video above, reflects the dis­tinc­tive for­ma­tion of Fela him­self, who was born and raised in Nige­ria, stud­ied at the Trin­i­ty Col­lege of Music in Lon­don, and came of age dur­ing the end of Africa’s era of decol­o­niza­tion. To a lis­ten­er reared on Anglo-Amer­i­can pop­u­lar music, his sig­na­ture mix­ture of West African rhythms with jazz and funk tex­tures sounds famil­iar enough — at least for the first ten or fif­teen min­utes, after which time the lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence ascends to a dif­fer­ent state entire­ly.

Some­times it takes Fela just about that long to start singing, and when he does, he’s giv­en to procla­ma­tions, chants, calls-and-respons­es, and polit­i­cal exhor­ta­tions deliv­ered in the kind of Eng­lish that sounds high­ly unfa­mil­iar to non-African lis­ten­ers. Not that it’s always alien­at­ing: indeed, this par­tic­u­lar com­bi­na­tion of words and music has cap­ti­vat­ed gen­er­a­tions of lis­ten­ers from far out­side its place of ori­gin. One of them is David Byrne, who used Talk­ing Heads’ Remain in Light as more or less a medi­um for chan­nel­ing the musi­cal spir­it of Fela. Not that he him­self was gone yet: indeed, he had almost two decades of his event­ful life to go, one you can learn much more about from Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, a twelve-part bio­graph­i­cal pod­cast by Jad Abum­rad.

Brought into Fela’s world by a fam­i­ly con­nec­tion, that for­mer Radi­o­lab host con­duct­ed dozens and dozens of inter­views on the rela­tion­ship between the man, his music, and the polit­i­cal con­text in which he found him­self. The facts, as any Fela fan knows, don’t always align com­fort­ably with main­stream sen­si­bil­i­ties of the twen­ty-twen­ties — the charges range from essen­tial­ism to polygamy — but as Lefevre reminds us, an artist should be inter­pret­ed through the lens of his own cul­ture and his­to­ry. How­ev­er many of us con­sid­er him a “prob­lem­at­ic fave” today, Fela Kuti will always be the man who invent­ed Afrobeat — and since nobody else has quite man­aged to repli­cate his grooves in their simul­ta­ne­ous tight­ness and loose­ness, blunt­ness and sub­tle­ty, per­haps also the man who dis­solved it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to the Life & Music of Fela Kuti: Rad­i­cal Niger­ian Band­leader, Polit­i­cal Hero, and Cre­ator of Afrobeat

When Afrobeat Leg­end Fela Kuti Col­lab­o­rat­ed with Cream Drum­mer Gin­ger Bak­er

Zam­rock: An Intro­duc­tion to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psy­che­del­ic Rock Scene

Watch the Talk­ing Heads Play Mate­r­i­al From Their Ground­break­ing Album Remain in Light in an Incred­i­ble Con­cert from 1980

The Awe-Inspir­ing But Trag­ic Sto­ry of Africa’s Fes­ti­val In The Desert (2001–2012)

Stream 8,000 Vin­tage Afropop Record­ings Dig­i­tized & Made Avail­able by The British Library

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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What Pompeii Looked Like Hours Before Its Destruction: A Reconstruction

in History | December 22nd, 2025

How­ev­er cel­e­brat­ed by his­to­ri­ans, scru­ti­nized by archae­ol­o­gists, and descend­ed-upon by tourists it may be, Pom­peii is not excep­tion­al — not even in the fate of hav­ing been buried in ash by Mount Vesu­vius in the year 76, which also hap­pened to the near­by town of Her­cu­la­neum. Rather, it is the sheer ordi­nar­i­ness of that medi­um-sized provin­cial Roman city that we most val­ue today, inad­ver­tent­ly pre­served as it was by that vol­canic dis­as­ter. The new Lost in Time video above recon­structs Pom­peii as it must have looked at the very end of its days, tak­ing a look at every­thing from its homes to its aque­ducts, its forum to its basil­i­ca, and its wine and per­fume pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties to its glad­i­a­to­r­i­al are­na.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, the Amphithe­atre of Pom­peii is much small­er than the Colos­se­um. But it was actu­al­ly built 140 years ear­li­er, at a time when local lead­ers across the empire were already start­ing to feel that any self-respect­ing Roman town ought to have its own venue for spec­ta­cles involv­ing one-on-one com­bat, feats of ath­leti­cism, exot­ic ani­mals, and even pub­lic exe­cu­tions.

The same ulti­mate­ly went for all the types of facil­i­ties unearthed in the entombed city’s pub­lic spaces and pri­vate homes alike, includ­ing baths, snack bars, and din­ing rooms. To that extent, Pom­peii had it all, even if life there lacked the poten­tial for advance­ment and intrigue offered only by the Eter­nal City.

As the video gives its tour of a still-thriv­ing Pom­peii, it counts down to the erup­tion of Vesu­vius, which last­ed about two days. “Why did­n’t peo­ple leave the city?” asks the nar­ra­tor. “His­to­ri­ans claim that about 2,000 peo­ple lost their lives in Pom­peii that day, mean­ing about 10,000 man­aged to escape.” It is to the writ­ings of one such escapee, Pliny the Younger, that we owe much of what we know about the expe­ri­ence of the cat­a­stro­phe itself — and to cen­turies of exam­i­na­tion since its redis­cov­ery as an archae­o­log­i­cal site that we have the kind of knowl­edge about the place that goes into a recon­struc­tion like this one. Those efforts have fed our under­stand­ing of life in the ancient world as a whole, for in its after­life, Pom­peii has become not just a medi­um-sized provin­cial Roman city, but the medi­um-sized provin­cial Roman city.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Destruc­tion of Pom­peii by Mount Vesu­vius, Re-Cre­at­ed with Com­put­er Ani­ma­tion (79 AD)

Take a High Def, Guid­ed Tour of Pom­peii

Behold 3D Recre­ations of Pompeii’s Lav­ish Homes–As They Exist­ed Before the Erup­tion of Mount Vesu­vius

The Last Morn­ing in Pom­peii & The Night Pom­peii Died: A New Video Series Explores the End of the Doomed Roman City

The Only Writ­ten Eye-Wit­ness Account of Pompeii’s Destruc­tion: Hear Pliny the Younger’s Let­ters on the Mount Vesu­vius Erup­tion

The Only Writ­ten Eye-Wit­ness Account of Pompeii’s Destruc­tion: Hear Pliny the Younger’s Let­ters on the Mount Vesu­vius Erup­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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A Visual Timeline of World History: Watch the Rise & Fall of Civilizations Over 5,000 Years

in Design, History | December 18th, 2025

In the video above, Use­fulCharts cre­ator Matt Bak­er sug­gests that we not refer to the peri­od span­ning the fifth and the late fif­teenth cen­turies as the “dark ages.” In jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, he does­n’t put forth the argu­ment, now fair­ly com­mon, that the time in ques­tion was actu­al­ly full of sub­tle inno­va­tion occlud­ed by mod­ern prej­u­dice. The real prob­lem, as he sees it, is that the slow­ing, if not revers­ing, of the progress of human soci­ety that we’ve tra­di­tion­al­ly regard­ed as occur­ring in what are com­mon­ly known as the Mid­dle Ages only occurred in Europe. What’s more, there have been mul­ti­ple such eras in the world: take the ear­li­er “Greek dark ages” asso­ci­at­ed with the Bronze Age civ­i­liza­tion­al col­lapse of 1177 BC.

All this and more comes across at a glance on Bak­er’s Time­line of World His­to­ry, whose design is explained in the video. With char­ac­ter­is­tic Use­fulCharts clar­i­ty (also demon­strat­ed by the World Reli­gions Fam­i­ly Tree and the Evo­lu­tion of the Alpha­bet, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), it lays out all the peri­ods of his­to­ry we may know bet­ter by their names than by their rela­tion­ship to actu­al events.

At the top, it begins with the end of pre­his­to­ry and the start of his­to­ry: that is, when writ­ing devel­oped around 5,300 years ago. At that point, mul­ti­ple civ­i­liza­tions had already begun to estab­lish them­selves around the world, and it is their growth and decline rep­re­sent­ed by the thick­ness of the lines run­ning down the time­line’s reg­u­lar cen­tu­ry-long divi­sions.

As the ear­ly Bronze Age gives way to the Bronze Age, the Bronze Age gives way to the Iron Age, and the Iron Age gives way to Clas­si­cal Antiq­ui­ty, these lines of civ­i­liza­tion thick­en into those of empire. None come thick­er than that of ancient Rome, which occu­pies the visu­al cen­ter of the poster (itself, inci­den­tal­ly, avail­able for pur­chase from Use­fulCharts’ site), but the design’s strength lies less in under­scor­ing the impor­tance of any one empire than of reveal­ing how much his­to­ry was going on all over the world at any giv­en time. Using its ver­ti­cal lines to trace the rise and fall of the Olmecs, say, or the Aksum­ite Empire or the Mis­sis­sip­pi­an Cul­ture, one can hard­ly sup­press a feel­ing of Ozy­man­di­an tran­sience. Nor, for that mat­ter, can one ignore that all of us live out our lives with­in the span of two of its hor­i­zon­tal ones.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Inter­ac­tive Time­line Cov­er­ing 14 Bil­lion Years of His­to­ry: From The Big Bang to 2015

The His­to­ry of Civ­i­liza­tion Mapped in 13 Min­utes: 5000 BC to 2014 AD

World Reli­gions Explained with Use­ful Charts: Hin­duism, Bud­dhism, Judaism, Islam, Chris­tian­i­ty & More

The His­to­ry of the Earth (All 4.5 Bil­lion Years) in 1 Hour: A Mil­lion Years Cov­ered Every Sec­ond

6,000 Years of His­to­ry Visu­al­ized in a 23-Foot-Long Time­line of World His­to­ry, Cre­at­ed in 1871

The Writ­ing Sys­tems of the World Explained, from the Latin Alpha­bet to the Abugi­das of India

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Hear Debussy Play Debussy: A Vintage Recording from 1913

in History, Music, Photography | December 18th, 2025

A cen­tu­ry ago, the great French com­pos­er Claude Debussy sat down at a con­trap­tion called a Welte-Mignon repro­duc­ing piano and record­ed a series of per­for­mances for pos­ter­i­ty. The machine was designed to encode the nuances of a pianist’s play­ing, includ­ing ped­al­ing and dynam­ics, onto piano rolls for lat­er repro­duc­tion.

Debussy record­ed 14 pieces onto six rolls in Paris on or before Novem­ber 1, 1913. Accord­ing to Debussy enthu­si­ast Steve Bryson’s web site, the com­pos­er was delight­ed with the repro­duc­tion qual­i­ty, say­ing in a let­ter to Edwin Welte: “It is impos­si­ble to attain a greater per­fec­tion of repro­duc­tion than that of the Welte appa­ra­tus. I am hap­py to assure you in these lines of my aston­ish­ment and admi­ra­tion of what I heard. I am, Dear Sir, Yours Faith­ful­ly, Claude Debussy.”

The selec­tion above is “La soirée dans Grenade” (“Grena­da in the evening”), from Debussy’s 1903 trio of com­po­si­tions titled Estam­pes, or “Prints.” Debussy was inspired by the Sym­bol­ist poets and Impres­sion­ist painters who strove to go beyond the sur­face of a sub­ject to evoke the feel­ing it gave off. “La soirée dans Grenade” is described by Chris­tine Steven­son at Notes From a Pianist as a “sound pic­ture” of Moor­ish Spain:

Debussy’s first-hand expe­ri­ence of Spain was neg­li­gi­ble at that time, but he imme­di­ate­ly con­jures up the coun­try by using the per­sua­sive Haben­era dance rhythm to open the piece–softly and sub­tly. It insin­u­ates itself into our con­scious­ness with its qui­et insis­tence on a repeat­ed C sharp in dif­fer­ent reg­is­ters; around it cir­cles a lan­guid, Moor­ish arabesque, with nasal aug­ment­ed 2nds, and a nag­ging semi­tone pulling against the tonal cen­tre, occa­sion­al­ly inter­rupt­ed by mut­ter­ing semi­qua­vers [16th notes] and a whole-tone based pas­sage. Debussy writes Com­mencer lente­ment dans un rythme non­cha­la­m­ment gra­cieux [Begin slow­ly in a casu­al­ly grace­ful rhythm] at the begin­ning, but lat­er Tres ryth­mé [Very rhyth­mic] in a bright­ly lit A major as the dance comes out of the shad­ows, ff [Fortissimo–loudly], with the click of cas­tanets and the stamp­ing of feet.

Debussy was 52 years old and suf­fer­ing from can­cer when he made his piano roll record­ings. He died less than five years lat­er, on March 25, 1918. Since then, his beau­ti­ful and evoca­tive music has secured a place for him as one of the most influ­en­tial and pop­u­lar com­posers of the 20th cen­tu­ry. As Roger Hecht writes at Clas­si­cal Net, “Debussy was a dream­er whose music dreamed with him.”

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear The Rite of Spring Con­duct­ed by Igor Stravin­sky Him­self: A Vin­tage Record­ing from 1929

Hear a 1930 Record­ing of Bolero, Con­duct­ed by Rav­el Him­self

Rare 1946 Film: The Great Russ­ian Com­pos­er Sergei Prokofiev Plays Piano, Dis­cuss­es His Music

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The Evil Genius of Fascist Design: How Mussolini and Hitler Used Art & Architecture to Project Power

in Architecture, History, Politics | December 17th, 2025

When the Nazis came to pow­er in 1933, they declared the begin­ning of a “Thou­sand-Year Reich” that ulti­mate­ly came up about 988 years short. Fas­cism in Italy man­aged to hold on to pow­er for a cou­ple of decades, which was pre­sum­ably still much less time than Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni imag­ined he’d get on the throne. His­to­ry shows us that regimes of this kind suf­fered a fair­ly severe sta­bil­i­ty prob­lem, which is per­haps why they need­ed to put forth such a sol­id, for­mi­da­ble image. The IMPERIAL video above explores “the evil genius of fas­cist design,” focus­ing on how Hitler and Mus­soli­ni ren­dered their ide­olo­gies in art and the built envi­ron­ment, but many of its obser­va­tions can be gen­er­al­ized to any polit­i­cal move­ment that seeks total con­trol of a soci­ety, espe­cial­ly if that soci­ety has a suf­fi­cient­ly glo­ri­ous-seem­ing past.

Fas­cis­m’s visu­al lan­guage has many inspi­ra­tions, two of the most impor­tant cit­ed in the video being  Roman­ti­cism and Futur­ism. The for­mer offered “a long­ing for the past, an obses­sion with nature, and a focus on the sub­lime”; the lat­ter “wor­shiped speed, machines, and vio­lence.” Despite their appar­ent con­tra­dic­tion, these dual cur­rents allowed fas­cism “a pecu­liar abil­i­ty to look both back­ward and for­ward, to sum­mon the glo­ry of past empires while promis­ing a rad­i­cal new future.”

In Italy, such an empire may have been dis­tant in time, but it was nev­er­the­less close at hand. “We dream of a Roman Italy that is wise and strong, dis­ci­plined and Impe­r­i­al.” Even Hitler drew from the glo­ries of ancient Rome and Greece to shape his own aspi­ra­tional vision of an all-pow­er­ful Ger­man civ­i­liza­tion.

Hence both of those dic­ta­tors under­tak­ing large-scale Neo­clas­si­cal-style archi­tec­tur­al projects “to bring the aes­thet­ics of ancient Rome to their city streets,” includ­ing even mus­cu­lar stat­ues meant to embody the offi­cial­ly sanc­tioned human ide­al. Of course, the builders of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca had also looked to Roman forms, but they did so at a small­er, more humane scale. Fas­cist struc­tures were designed not just to be eter­nal sym­bols but over­whelm­ing pres­ences, intend­ed “not to ele­vate the soul, but to crush the indi­vid­ual into the crowd and pro­mote con­for­mi­ty.” This, in the­o­ry, would make the cit­i­zen feel small and pow­er­less, but with an accom­pa­ny­ing qua­si-reli­gious long­ing to be part of a larg­er project: that of fas­cism, which sub­or­di­nates every­thing to the state. For the likes of Mus­soli­ni and Hitler (an artist-turned-politi­cian, as one can hard­ly fail to note), aes­thet­ics was pow­er — albeit not quite enough, in the event, to ensure their own sur­vival.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wal­ter Ben­jamin Explains How Fas­cism Uses Mass Media to Turn Pol­i­tics Into Spec­ta­cle (1935)

Yale Pro­fes­sor Jason Stan­ley Iden­ti­fies 10 Tac­tics of Fas­cism: The “Cult of the Leader,” Law & Order, Vic­tim­hood and More

Mus­soli­ni Sends to Amer­i­ca a Hap­py Mes­sage, Full of Friend­ly Feel­ings, in Eng­lish (1927)

Are You a Fas­cist?: Take Theodor Adorno’s Author­i­tar­i­an Per­son­al­i­ty Test Cre­at­ed to Com­bat Fas­cism (1947)

The Sto­ry of Fas­cism: Rick Steves’ Doc­u­men­tary Helps Us Learn from the Painful Lessons of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

Umber­to Eco’s List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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How Movies Created Their Special Effects Before CGI: Metropolis, 2001: A Space Odyssey & More

in Film, History | December 16th, 2025

The youngest movie­go­ers today do not, of course, remem­ber a time before visu­al effects could be cre­at­ed dig­i­tal­ly. What may give us more pause is that, at this point in cin­e­ma his­to­ry, most of their par­ents don’t remem­ber it either. Con­sid­er the fact that Steven Spiel­berg’s Juras­sic Park, with its once impos­si­bly real­is­tic (and still whol­ly pass­able) CGI dinosaurs, came out 32 years ago. That may put it, we must acknowl­edge, into the realm of the “clas­sic,” the kind of pic­ture whose enter­tain­ment val­ue holds up despite — or because of — the qual­i­ties that fix it in its time. Equal­ly spec­tac­u­lar but longer-can­on­ized clas­sics pose a greater chal­lenge to the imag­i­na­tions of young view­ers, who can hard­ly guess how they could have been made “before com­put­ers.”

After see­ing the notable exam­ples pro­vid­ed in the new Pri­mal Space video above, they’ll cer­tain­ly under­stand one thing: it was­n’t easy. Even a seem­ing­ly sim­ple effect like the pen float­ing loose through the zero-grav­i­ty cab­in in 2001: A Space Odyssey required no small degree of inge­nu­ity. We might nat­u­ral­ly assume that film­mak­ers in 1968 would have accom­plished it with a cou­ple of pieces of Scotch tape and fish­ing line, but that would have result­ed in unac­cept­able tan­gling prob­lems, to say noth­ing of the trick­i­ness of ensur­ing, quite lit­er­al­ly, that the strings did­n’t show. Instead, Kubrick­’s team end­ed up attach­ing the pen to a sheet of glass — metic­u­lous­ly cleaned, no doubt, to elim­i­nate the pos­si­bil­i­ty of streaks — large enough to occu­py the entire frame and thus go unno­ticed by the view­er. It was then slow­ly rotat­ed by a crank-turn­ing assis­tant.

A few dif­fer­ent effects from 2001 come in for expla­na­tion through­out the course of the video, includ­ing the mul­ti­ple-expo­sure pho­tog­ra­phy that made pos­si­ble shots of space­craft pass­ing plan­ets as well as the psy­che­del­ic “Star Gate” sequence toward the end. Though some of the devices used in these process­es were put togeth­er just for the pro­duc­tion, the under­ly­ing tech­niques had already been evolv­ing for more than 60 years. Indeed, many were pio­neered by Georges Méliès, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for A Trip to the Moon from 1902, the very first sci­ence-fic­tion film. This video goes behind the scenes of a work from the year before: L’Homme à la tête en caoutchouc, or The Man with the Rub­ber Head, in which Méliès man­aged a shot in which his own cra­ni­um inflates to huge pro­por­tions with­out the use of so much as a zoom lens.

Oth­er exam­ples, drawn from a range of beloved films from Metrop­o­lis to Mary Pop­pins, illus­trate the inven­tive­ness born of sheer tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tion in the days when film­mak­ing was a whol­ly ana­log affair. In some cas­es, the effects these pro­duc­tions pulled off with minia­tures, prisms, and mir­rors 60, 80, 100 years ago look as good as any­thing Hol­ly­wood puts on the screen today — or rather bet­ter, since the innate phys­i­cal­i­ty behind them makes them feel more “real.” Per­haps unsur­pris­ing­ly, this video’s arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence course spon­sor makes ref­er­ence to the end­less range of visu­al pos­si­bil­i­ties avail­able to those who mas­ter that tech­nol­o­gy. And it’s not impos­si­ble that we now stand on the cusp of a rev­o­lu­tion in visu­al effects for that rea­son, with at least as much of an upside and down­side as CGI. If so, we should pre­pare our­selves to hear the ques­tion, from chil­dren born today, of how any­one ever made movies before AI.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Georges Méliès A Trip to the Moon Became the First Sci-Fi Film & Changed Cin­e­ma For­ev­er (1902)

The Art of Cre­at­ing Spe­cial Effects in Silent Movies: Inge­nu­ity Before the Age of CGI

The 1927 Film Metrop­o­lis Cre­at­ed a Dystopi­an Vision of What the World Would Look Like in 2026–and It Hits Close to Home

How Stan­ley Kubrick Made 2001: A Space Odyssey: A Sev­en-Part Video Essay

How 2001: A Space Odyssey Became “the Hard­est Film Kubrick Ever Made”

Why Movies Don’t Feel Real Any­more: A Close Look at Chang­ing Film­mak­ing Tech­niques

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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