Mardi Gras Carnival (1898)
An actuality film of New Orleans's 1898 Mardi Gras parade, recording a procession of decorated floats — among them Corn, Cherries, Coffee, Tea, and the Boeuf Gras — as they pass before a stationary camera.
Mardi Gras Carnival is believed to be the oldest surviving film shot in New Orleans, a brief but rare actuality record of Carnival pageantry from the earliest years of American motion pictures.
Background
Mardi Gras Carnival was shot on February 22, 1898, by a cameraman for the American Mutoscope Company, who set up at Gallier Hall facing Lafayette Square as that year’s Rex parade, themed “Harvest Queens,” rolled down St. Charles Avenue. The footage sat largely unrecognized for over a century until the Eye Filmmuseum in the Netherlands, responding to an inquiry from the Louisiana State Museum, identified its holdings as the oldest surviving moving images of Mardi Gras, and of New Orleans itself. The Library of Congress later added it to the National Film Registry.
What to watch for
The surviving two minutes show a sequence of decorated floats, among them ones representing Corn, Cherries, Coffee, Tea, and the ceremonial Boeuf Gras, passing a stationary camera along with the crowd gathered to watch them. There is no editing or camera movement to speak of, since actuality films of this period simply recorded whatever passed in front of a fixed lens, but the footage is valuable precisely for that plainness: it preserves costume, float design, and crowd behavior from a Carnival parade more than a decade before any other surviving film record of the tradition.
