My enthusiasm for Trouble the Water (trailer above) seems to wane in direct proportion to the critic adoration it attracts. As I noted in my Sundance review, I’m underwhelmed by the candid, in-the-shit footage shot by the film’s subject, aspiring rapper Kim Roberts, which has been the focus of many glowing reviews. The fact that the footage exists is a fascinating detail to Roberts’ character, and the film is strongest when directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin point to Roberts’ fierce drive (you could even call it an obsession) to turn her life into a narrative, and to transmit that narrative through popular art.
My frustration over Water stems less from the film itself, and more from the general media’s seeming consensus decision to declare it the Indie Katrina Film of Record (as opposed to Spike Lee’s When the Levee Breaks–the big-budget Hollywood version of the story). As Dennis Lim notes, “There is by now a rich, although unheralded subgenre of independent films — shorts and features, ranging from avant-garde tone poem to vérité docudrama — dealing with Katrina and its aftermath.” The sheer number of films on this subject––I’ve heard more than one person joke that in late September 2005, there were more independent filmmakers in New Orleans than residents left in their homes––is so overwhelming that it makes sense that one would need the backing of HBO or the credibility of a Sundance Grand Jury Prize to breakthrough.
Maybe I’m just annoyed because, within that subgenre, the films that I find the most creatively and emotionally satisfying––the Kamp Katrinas, the Low and Beholds––either have yet to be distributed, or have failed to make Water’s national splash. But I worry that Water’s critical success (whether or not it makes any noise commercially) is simultaneously an activist’s victory (anything that gets Katrina back in the news is some kind of victory) and potential roadblock for the existing and future films to come out of the crisis. If Trouble the Water does become the first theatrical katrina film to breakthrough, I hope it’s not the only one.
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?
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.
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.”
Ashley Sabin co-directed a new documentary shot in cinema verité style (no narration, no interviews) to get beyond the helicopter footage of hurricane Katrina. In Kamp Katrina, they take their cameras into a backyard-turned-refugee-camp on the ground. Paul talks with Sabin about the film in a restaurant at SXSW 2007.
