On the surface, Mardi Gras looks like good, cheap (if not always clean) fun. On the internet, $17 will buy ten dozen Mardi Gras beads––roughly what a group of revelers might be expected to toss as bait for tossed-off tops on Bourbon Street in a single hour. This ritual––one part libido, one part alcohol, one part peer pressure, one part historical precedent––leaves no room for practical realities, harsh or otherwise. So maybe it’s not much of a surprise that when sociologist-turned-filmmaker David Redmon went to New Orleans in 2004 and asked the question, “Where do you think the beads come from?” none of the young party people he encountered knew that $17 American dollars is enough to pay the salary of the average underage worker who makes Mardi Gras beads in sweatshop conditions in China for weeks
Yes, there’s a secret, hidden cost to this tradition-steeped debauchery: a complete divorce between the economics, the social realities, and the moral ambiguities that make production of a commodity possible, and the relative wealth, privilege and, well, moral ambiguities that transform that product, once transported across oceans and continents, into something virtually worthless.
With his 2005 documentary Mardi Gras: Made in China (a Sundance Grand Jury Prize nominee which just came out on DVD), Redmon manages to bridge these disparate worlds by spending time in both New Orleans and Fuzhou, China, and smuggling information from one locus to another, using his own curiosity to enlighten the hand on one end of the global marketplace as to what the other hand is doing.
David Redmon’s Mardi Gras: Made in China comes out on DVD today, as the first release from Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s DVD distribution gambit, Carnivalesque Films. I returned home from San Diego last night to find a screener waiting for me, and though I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, as a big fan of Redmon and Sabins later films, Kamp Katrina and Intimidad, I’m excited to see it. I’m even more excited after reading this GreenCine interview with Redmon, where he shares some of the secret history of the Bourbon Street party scene. An excerpt:
The first such recorded event in exchange for beads was in 1978, and it was actually the showing of the penis…The women first started yelling at the men to show theirs, and initially this was called weenie-wagging (men dangling their weenies from balconies). After that is when the beads became big - and became a commodity that could be marketed as a kind of commerce - in exchange for nudity.
Oh, equal opportunity objectification. What became of you?
Margaret Brown’s The Order of Myths opens at the IFC Center in New York on Friday. This review is adapted from our coverage of the film at the SXSW Film Festival, where we also interviewed the director. Above: Brown shops and talks at Sundance.
Margaret Brown’s The Order of Myths offers an immersion into the archaic miasma that is Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama. It’s the world’s oldest celebration of its kind, and tradition mandates that the two weeks worth of parties and parades are mostly racially segregated. Using Mardi Gras season as a microcosm for a portrait of contemporary race relations in the city, Brown gets a filmmaker’s dream gift in the black and white Mardi Gras associations’ selection of their queens.
Queen Stephanie, a black schoolteacher, is a descendant of a group of slaves who were transported on the Clothilde, the last slave ship to enter the US. When the Clothilde came ashore, there was a fire and the passengers escaped into the woods, ultimately settling in an area that came to be known as Africatown. Queen Helen Meaher, whose family now owns most of the land in Africatown, is a descendant of the company that brought the Clothilde over. “My people was on her people’s ship,” Stephanie says, with a slow, matter-of-fact nod. That nod confirms the film’s thesis: racism isn’t an outrage or even a spoken issue Mobile––it’s casual, habitual, and historically excused.
Margaret Brown’s The Order of Myths is an immersion into the archaic miasma that is Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama. Mobile’s Mardi Gras is the oldest in the world, and in keeping with tradition, its two weeks worth of parties and parades are mostly segregated. Using Mardi Gras season as a microcosm for a portrait of contemporary race relations in the city, Brown gets a filmmaker’s dream gift in the black and white Mardi Gras associations’ selection of their queens. Queen Stephanie, a black schoolteacher, is a descendant of slaves who were transported on the Clothilde, the last slave ship to enter the US. When the Clothilde came ashore, there was a fire and the passengers escaped into the woods, ultimately settling in an area that came to be known as Africatown. Queen Helen Meaher, whose family now owns most of the land in Africatown, is a descendant of the company that brought the Clothilde over. “My people was on her people’s ship,” Stephanie says, with a slow, matter-of-fact nod. That nod confirms the film’s thesis: casual racism is not an outrage in Mobile, it’s an institution.
In this video, shot at the Sundance Film Festival, Joe Swanberg goes shopping for Western wear with Margaret Brown, who talks about her excellent documentary, The Order of Myths. Brown talks about sleep deprivation, how filmmaker Michelange Quay provoked an “emotional” Myths Q & A, and why, “like it or not,” Sundance is a valuable launching pad for independent film.
If you’ve watched the last twoepisodes of our Sundance video coverage, you’ve learned a little bit about the spoils of Sundance swag. Designer pooper scoops are great and all, but I always like to see filmmakers passing out something that promotes their film in a clever way. In the industry lounge a few minutes ago, I stumbled over a friend of filmmaker Margaret Brown, who was affixing stickers for Browns’ The Order of Myths to a carton full of Mini Moon Pies. Moon Pies play a surprisingly significant role in Brown’s film, which is otherwise about race relations and Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama. It probably goes without saying, but this kind of thing is so much more interesting and valuable to a weary journalist than a bag full of random corporate stuff.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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David Redmon’s Mardi Gras: Made in China comes out on DVD today, as the first release from Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s DVD distribution gambit, Carnivalesque Films. I returned home from San Diego last night to find a screener waiting for me, and though I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, as a big fan of Redmon and Sabins later films, Kamp Katrina and Intimidad, I’m excited to see it. I’m even more excited after reading this GreenCine interview with Redmon, where he shares some of the secret history of the Bourbon Street party scene. An excerpt:
