I’ve become fascinated over the past year with the visual tropes of the Hurricane Katrina film. The helicopter shots of the city underwater, borrowed news footage of refuges spilling out of the super dome, and of course, the ultimate post-Katrina New Orleans money shot: the passenger-side tracking shot of a devastated residential street, probably in the Lower Ninth Ward, meant to bowl us over by offering the illusion of an endless loop of devastation.

When that tracking shot appears in Peter Entell’s Shake The Devil Off, which screened for the first time in the U.S. last night at True/False, it plays to a slightly different end. For every three addresses occupied by a pile of rubble, there seems to be one house not only left standing, but apparently without significant external damage. Certainly, such an image speaks to the frustrating randomness of nature, but more than that, it reminds that appearances can be deceiving. The owners of that home may have the advantage of having an intact structure to return to, but that may not mean much when their community has crumbled all around them.

With shots like this, Shake The Devil Off incorporates some of the tropes of Cinema Katrina, but it’s maybe the least dependent on those tropes for its power than any of the many recent films about the storm and the city that I’ve seen. In fact, in that sense, it’s maybe the only truly post-Katrina film on the festival circuit, in that it’s not really at all concerned with the storm itself, but with the social, economic and racial ripple effects of Katrina that really only became apparent in the months thereafter.
St. Augustine’s, a Catholic church built in the mid-1800s by slaveowners with slave labor, known colloquially as the first place where whites and blacks prayed together in the US, as well as the possible birthplace of jazz, is one of those buildings that, physically, survived the Hurricane relatively unscathed. But six months after Katrina, the New Orleans archdiocese announced that they were taking over the church, merging St. Augustine’s parish with another local parish, and removing St. Augustine’s much-beloved pastor, Father LeDoux. The parishioners––a mix of white folks and black, some elderly and some college-aged, all working-class––were devastated, and they fought back. In cinema verite style, Entell’s camera follows the fight over the church from bureaucracy to physical protest, from crushed hopes to a tentative Easter day happy ending––which, we learn via end titles, doesn’t stick for very long.

“I’ve never made a film with a happy ending,” Entell, who flew in from his home in Switzerland, said at last night’s Q & A. “Generally, happy endings trouble me––I find them too simple. But when Easter came around, while we were editing, we thought we had a happy ending. We were fooled.”

Until those end titles, Entell avoids spelling out the details of the story, preferring instead let it organically unfold around his camera. As such, the only explanation that we get for the Church’s closing comes from footage of an archdiocese representative speaking to CNN about the parish’s lowered attendance since the storm. Last night, Entell explained that the members of the community would often accuse the Catholic bureaucracy of “crawfishing, “or weaving around the issue instead of speaking to it directly.
But in the film, the members of the community vocally read between the wavy lines. Knowing that property values in the surrounding neighborhood of Treme, which was spared flooding, have skyrocketed since the storm, the St. Augustine church council accuse Father LeDoux’s replacement––who happened to be on the archdiocese committee that rejected their appeal to save the parish––of being a “a landgrabber,” of having a “PhD in bullshit.” And LeDoux’s habit of ministering to the poorest of the poor (theoretically, a key tenant of being a good Catholic),

The economic issue soon bleeds into the racial issue. “Poor black people are not part of this government’s plan,” says one member of the parish, and indeed, the St. Augustine situation seems to be emblematic of a larger effort to gentrify New Orleans in the wake of the storm. One of Father LeDoux’s assistants, whose ancestors were among the first slaves who attended mass at the church, says she feels as though her heritage is being erased.

New pastor Father Jacques becomes the symbol of what the parishioners feel is the white establishment’s effort to deracinate the community. Father LeDoux says a sermon “should be like a woman’s dress: long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to be interesting.” His raucous and ebullient “jazz masses” occasionally featured performances from stars like the Marsallis brothers, but they were built on the efforts of local fixtures like Glenn David Andrews, a charismatic trombonist and storyteller with the voice of a modern-day Louis Armstrong, whose band serves as the Greek chorus of the story. Not only does Father Jacques admittedly lack Father LeDoux’s connection to the locals, but there’s no room for this kind of cultural celebration in his traditional Catholic sermons. On his first Sunday on the job, the parishioners essentially push him out of the building with song.

The film received a lengthy standing ovation from the True/False crowd, and in a comprehensive Q & A, Entell offered updates on the state of the church and some of the film’s players. But a bittersweet footnote to the evening came from a woman in the crowd who said she came to True/False from New Orleans, in part to see Entell’s film. She noted that trombonist Andrews had recently been arrested “quite roughly” for second lining, a local tradition where musicians perform in the street behind a funeral procession. The arrest came because a resident of Treme had called the police and accused Andrews of disturbing the peace. Apparently unaware of the incident, Entell commented that in the “old New Orleans,” getting arrested for second lining would have been unheard of. His film plays as an elegy to that old New Orleans which, it seems, may not have much time left.

Tonight, there are three films playing at around the same time that I want to see, and I have no idea what I’m going to do. What would you most like to see coverage of, between American Teen, Girls Rock! and Forbidden Lies? I’m leaning toward one of the latter two, as American Teen has distribution (and I’ll also theoretically be able to catch it at SXSW), but I live to serve you, so let me know what you think. Also, yesterday, I promised party coverage, but I ended up falling asleep at 10:30. Whoops. I’ll try to be social tonigh