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. …Read more
Kim Roberts happened to buy a $20 video camera just days before Hurricane Katrina hit her home city of New Orleans. The day before the storm hit, explaining why she was using the camera to record everything in sight, Kim was already talking apocalypse: “I’m showing the world that we still had a world, before the storm come,” she said, from behind the lens. “It’s like the Lord is upset, angry with New Orleans. And I don’t blame him.”
Roberts’ amateur video footage of her neighborhood shot before, during and after the storm is sprinkled throughout Carl Deal and Tia Lessin’s documentary Trouble the Water, which just won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The footage itself has been billed as “harrowing,” but in practice most of it is too muddy and unfocused (literally on both counts) to make much of an impact. That said, the professionally shot material, of Roberts and her husband’s struggle to rebuild their lives after the storm, tells as powerful a story about the New Orleans diaspora as I’ve seen on film, from an angle unfamiliar. It plays out like a love story, with the Roberts’ turning their backs on their city in times of crisis, only to realize that their hearts are there after all.
The fall festival and new release schedule is so jam-packed that every week it seems like two or three new movies open that I’ve long wanted to see, but have had absolutely no time to watch a screener or go to a screening. The smaller the movie, the worse I feel when I have to let it slip through the cracks unseen. I really don’t care that I never made it to a screening of In The Valley of Elah; it breaks my heart that I didn’t get a chance to see The Last Winterbefore it opened, or that I saw Great World of Sound but didn’t have a chance to write about it between Sundance and its New York premiere last month.
This week, the two films that have unfortunately eluded my grasp are Tony Kaye’s abortion documentary Lake of Fire, which opens at Film Forum on Wednesday; and Desert Bayou, a documentary about Hurricane Katrina victims evacuated to a National Guard camp in Utah.
I’m planning to go see Fire on Wednesday and will have more to say after that. But Bayou has been on my gotta-see list since it screened at the Full Frame Film Festival in Spring of 2006, and as I’ve basically become obsessed with seeing every independent film about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath that I can get my hands on, I really can’t wait to get a look at it. You can check out the trailer above; after the jump, you’ll find a synopsis of the film taken from its MySpace page. Bayou opens in New York on October 5 and in Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and Chicago on October 19.
Kamp Katrina (which opened a series of nationwide screenings last night at MoMA and continues a 2-week New York stint at the Pioneer Theater starting tonight) joins Low and Behold in the budding genre of micro-dramas dedicated to dismantling the clusterfuck that is post-Katrina New Orleans one personal story at a time. Whereas Low and Behold is a character drama that draws strength from documentary elements, Kamp Katrina is a documentary with an uncommon feel for character and an incredible narrative focus. Both stand in contrast to something self-consciously “definitive” like Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, which despite its undeniable significance as a historical document, can’t possibly rival micro-budgeted projects like Low and Behold and Kamp Katrina in terms of microscopic attention to detail.
Kamp focuses on Ms. Pearl, a casually charitable resident of New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward who opens a tent city in her backyard to house displaced residents while they “get back on their feet.” Her companion David has a start-up construction business, through which he employs some of Kamp Katrina’s residents by day. By night, the four or five couples sleeping in the backyard cook communally and share pre-and-post Katrina horror stories.
It becomes clear very early on that, before the storm, the residents of Kamp Katrina were likely not really on their feet to begin with: for every one Kamper that lost a decent home and a good job in the storm, three or four were barely scraping by on the lowest rung of the economic ladder. Each of the women in the Kamp seems to have been the victim of some kind of domestic abuse; two such incidences are captured on camera, while another is memorialized in a camper’s glass eye. One of the men at Kamp Katrina, Charles, believes he’s in a relationship with Joan of Arc, who is the patron saint of Orleans. Charles acknowledges that even he can’t see his girlfriend, but maintains that the relationship is nothing less than real. “I can’t wait to see her in the flesh!” Charles announces to the camera. “All I have to do is be tortured to death first.”
