Kamp Katrina.

"Almost two years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, a vital crop of documentaries has emerged to present both impressionistic (South of Ten, God Provides) and pointedly sociological (When the Levees Broke, NO Cross, NO Crown) perspectives on the storm's aftermath," writes ST VanAirsdale at the Reeler. "Somewhere between styles is Kamp Katrina, Brooklyn-based directors David Redmon and Ashley Sabin's riveting glimpse of an impromptu New Orleans tent community established in the backyard of the disarming, unsinkable local fixture Ms Pearl.... It's hard to overstate the impact of Kamp Katrina's honesty; fresh off their acclaimed venture Mardi Gras: Made in China, the filmmakers' six-month survey arguably captured the city's wounded spirit more frankly than any of its contemporaries." And he interviews Redmon.

Updated through 8/29.

The doc's screening at the Pioneer for two weeks and, in the New York Times, Matt Zoller Seitz recommends it. Ms Pearl and her husband's "blunt-spoken decency is inspiring. So is the movie's portrait of New Orleans after the flood, a debris-strewn ghost town where human kindness is overflowing."

Somewhat related: "Two years after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, the networks are planning a wide range of coverage to mark the anniversary and look in on the long recovery process." Paul J Gough scans the lineup for Reuters.

Amanda Terkel for In These Times:

We all remember "Brownie," the incomprehensibly incompetent FEMA director Michael Brown, who had no idea evacuees were using the New Orleans convention center as an evacuation shelter. But [Karl] Rove was the man President Bush quietly put in charge of overseeing the administration's response plan....

Rove used Katrina to push the administration's failed ideologies on the Gulf Coast, advocating segregated schools, reduced pay for low-wage reconstruction workers, and limited government health care. Political allies received large no-bid contracts. Americans were outraged. A CBS News poll six months after the hurricane found that just 32 percent of the public approved of the way Bush handled the disaster.

"When the Gulf Coast desperately needed a massive public works program, what it got was a stronger dose of the very same toxic neoliberal policies that laid the groundwork for the Katrina disaster," write the Nation's editors. "With such a perversely skewed economic development strategy, the spiraling social crisis that followed - documented by the articles in this issue - was probably inevitable. Still, it was helped along by yet more bad policies.... The solutions to these problems are almost too obvious to mention - but they all depend on the creation of a very different sort of public sector, one that works for the people, not for business elites and Washington ideologues. That does not seem to be in the cards right now. Instead, communities, aided and inspired by outside volunteers and charitable donors, are taking matters into their own hands. They are fighting to restore their neighborhoods, keeping in mind the delicate ecology around them. They are preparing as best they can for the next storm."

Back to Kamp Katrina, which Stuart Klawans calls "an urban platoon movie. Its setting, in the Bywater section of New Orleans, looks like a combat zone. Its characters, who are numerous at first and varied, get picked off by ones and twos until only a couple are left. You settle in with these people and become immersed in the chaos, brutality and surreal humor of their situation, seen close-up and often in fragments. This isn't the heartening experience of [Jonathan] Demme's [Right to Return], nor is it a comprehensive picture like [Spike] Lee's - but it seems appropriate enough to a war of attrition."

"Coincidence or not? This month, 10 of Time Inc's magazines are running articles about New Orleans." Brian Stelter reports in the NYT on how this has come about.

Updates, 8/25: "[T]he movie winds up being all the more fascinating because race isn't an issue as tensions rise among earthy folks in close quarters," blogs Joe Leydon.

"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," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "As co-directors Ashley Sabin and David Redmon buzz like flies around the action in the tent city, their handheld cameras are set to low shutter speeds to compensate for a lack of natural light. The resulting image is slightly slowed, tinted neon pink, and at times, it almost seems to float off the screen. The hallucinogenic spin brought by the video amplifies the feeling that post-Katrina New Orleans might as well be on another planet, in as much as it resembles the 'normal' American city."

Updates, 8/29: Chris Barsanti rounds up some of the best Katrina anniversary coverage.

Phil Nugent:

Given my own experience of the days leading up to Katrina, I'll admit to being surprised when the president, once he'd been persuaded to interrupt his vacation to comment on a major American city having been flushed down the tubes, actually seemed to take the position that no one could have been expected to have seen this one coming. Given the times in which we live, I was a lot less surprised to hear the victims blamed for having been there in the first place, to the point that the mother of the President of the United States could be heard trying her best to sound good-natured and tolerant while mooing that the charity extended to these lucky duckies had made the whole thing a windfall for certain members of our layabout wastrel class. Not surprised, but no less enraged.

[...] Tragedy may be the only word for the city now. As a tourist trap, New Orleans cultivated an image as a free-for-all, anarchic party town were the rules don't apply, so maybe there's a sick joke in the fact that it now stands as the living demonstration of George Bush's dream of an America where government has no responsibilities to its citizens: a city where the veneer of civilization has been washed away and nothing has been put in its place. New Orleans got through the civil rights era with a minimum of racial tension, and when I was there it was a place where people of all races and even of wildly different income brackets lived within blocks of each other in "checkerboard" neighborhoods. Now it's a place where a fair number of black residents, desperate to believe that their lives weren't upended out of incompetence and indifference, think there's something to the rumor that The Man dynamited the levees; a place where white politicians have taken to using coded racist rhetoric to try to turn the spiralling crime figures to their advantage, something that would have been nearly unthinkable when the city was stable (and the electorate mostly black). "If it helps people understand my life and the lives of other people here in New Orleans," one man told Larry Blumenfeld, "if it makes them think about why we're here and we won't leave, let 'em have an anniversary." As Blumefeld puts it, those who actually live in New Orleans now "hardly need to mark calendars. Every day is an anniversary, a stark reminder of nature's wrath and more so of the very unnatural disasters of levee failures, insurance shortfalls, and a tide of bureaucratic red tape that rivals even the water for its ability to stall lives." Everyone I know who was in New Orleans when Katrina hit made it out okay, but I lost a friend to post-Katrina New Orleans, the ongoing tragedy that has its heroes and its villains but no end in sight.

Posted by dwhudson at August 24, 2007 5:20 AM