[AMIA-L] Big Easy caught on celluloid

["Watsky, Lance" <lwatsky@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

September 2, 2006 

Los Angeles Daily News

Big Easy caught on celluloid
By: Judy O'Rourke

Members of a nonprofit group devoted to preserving and screening home
movies wondered if it was premature, or even wise, to open their annual
public screening event in New Orleans this year, two weeks before the
first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. 

Though areas in the city are still in ruins and many residents were
intent on simply resuming their lives or commemorating the one-year
mark, the film folks held the event. 

"The devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina placed the historical
record of New Orleans at great risk," said Brian Graney, one of the five
decision makers and a film library technician for the UCLA Film and
Television Archive, in Los Angeles.  Its massive collections are due to
be moved to Santa Clarita in a couple of years.  "We contacted people
and they were uniformly enthusiastic." 

Under normal circumstances, watching flicks at Home Movie Day gingerly
transports viewers to times past, where people and places change
gradually over the years.  In New Orleans, fragile celluloid images were
sometimes the sole remnants of a world wiped out in one fell swoop. 

"We lost 90 percent of our stuff," said filmmaker Helen Hill, a graduate
of Valencia's California Institute of the Arts. Her water-logged 16mm
film survived flooding in her Mid City home, located in the heart of New
Orleans. 

Hill earned a master's degree in experimental animation at CalArts in
1995, and was an artist in residence there about a month ago. 

On Aug. 28, Hill, her husband and son returned to town from South
Carolina, settling in a nearby home just in time to celebrate the
year-mark at an event held at Louis Armstrong Park, where jazz began,
where slaves gathered to play drums.  The family might turn the tattered
home into a studio or community center - or both - if the neighborhood
reawakens. 

Hill's film showed life as it was before. 

"It was kind of ghostly when we were in her house, sitting on her porch.
You could imagine what it looked like a year ago," said volunteer Dwight
Swanson, an archivist at Appalshop, an arts and education center in
Whitesburg, Ky., where films and videos, recordings and books are made. 

The storm, which ripped through a 90,000-square-mile area - about the
girth of Great Britain - was the nation's most catastrophic and costly
natural disaster ever.  It flattened tens of thousands of homes and its
wrath and subsequent flooding altered the lives of more than 6 million
people.  Billions of federal dollars have been spent removing debris,
providing aid and rebuilding loans, and subsidizing basic services in
the most needy areas, which includes New Orleans. 
Local film or historical groups usually host the screenings - held
worldwide the second Saturday in August since 2003 - but in New Orleans
those people had other priorities. After five months of planning and
promotion, the volunteers converged from California, Kentucky, Tennessee
and New York, hauling equipment and supplies.  Graney, who arrived the
day airports began enforcing the ban against stowing liquids or gels in
hand-carried luggage, had already decided against transporting
film-cleaning solution. 

"I did make a last-minute call to leave out some equipment (though)," he
said.  "The guillotine splicer may have raised eyebrows." 

Projectors were set up Aug. 11 at the undamaged Zeitgeist
Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center near St. Charles Avenue - one of the
city's first theaters to reopen - and Aug. 12 at the Historic New
Orleans Collection, a museum and research center in the French Quarter. 

Volunteers visit different venues each year, but none had staged
screenings in a disaster zone. Films with minimal shrinkage were shown
and in some cases the volunteers performed repairs.  Those with damaged
films were referred to preservation labs, and some with unique reels
were referred to archivists. 

A crowd of roughly 50 watched about 15 films Friday, followed by about
25 folks viewing five films Saturday. 

In Hill's nostalgic black-and-white "before" footage, neighborhood kids
are seen running around, yelling, pushing scooters - and her physician
husband, Paul Gai-Liunas, is pictured swinging one child by his hands. 

"I was watching CNN pretty obsessively right after Katrina and one thing
that kept coming true is how New Orleans seemed to be a city of
neighborhoods," Swanson said. "I realized as I was watching (her film)
that a lot of the history of the city is not going to be represented or
shown in any official histories. What I feared was going to be lost was
the history of the neighborhoods and the history of the families as they
were being displaced."
A friend of Hill's, New Orleans-based experimental filmmaker Courtney
Egan showed her version of the aftermath depicted in Hill's film,
intercutting the decayed black-and-white frames with color footage Egan
shot in the same spots a couple of months ago. The contrast is great -
Egan's frames are vivid but the neighborhood's vitality is gone,
replaced by overgrown weeds and debris. 

Both films were shown. 

"Living here, every day that you step outside you mentally compare
everything, `That's gone, oh this looks awful now, this is fixed up,"'
Egan said.  "It's a daily catalog everybody goes through of their
neighborhood path they travel on a daily basis."  Her area was not
flooded, so Egan was displaced for just a month. Graney raved over a
couple of reels of parade footage brought in by others. 

"Parades in New Orleans are like nothing else you see," he said.  One
was a 1952 Mardi Gras film shot on Kodachrome, a home movie donated to
the Historic New Orleans Collection.  Another showed a 1963 jazz funeral
procession, also part of the collection. 

"The fun thing about parade film, it had music," Graney said.  "The
Barry Martyn jazz quartet accompanied the films, and during the parade
films (the musicians) recognized a lot of the musicians performing in
the parades.  They were chiming in to identify old friends they spotted,
while playing." 

He always hopes someone in the room will be able to give the films
context. 

"It's one thing when people can identify a street. When people know the
name of a guy holding the trombone, it's something else," Graney said. 

At Santa Clarita's event held Aug. 12, a man seated several rows behind
a woman who showed 30-year-old Super 8 footage from her home on a remote
South Pacific island also had memories of the place.  He had been
serving in the Marine Corps, stationed in Guam, and by chance hopped
aboard a Coast Guard mail run to the island in 1949. The two had never
met. 

Rene Broussard, Zeitgeist's founder and director, whose sizeable house
in the hard-hit Lakeview area held 2 feet of standing water for a month,
lost everything after the hurricane, including his video and editing
equipment and two documentary projects he had spent more than 400 hours
filming.  Graney dubbed Broussard's entry - shot with one hand on the
steering wheel, the other gripping a hand-held camera that captured the
town as it reopened to business owners - "surreal." 

"There were thousands of vinyl and cardboard signs placed on (medians)
advertising for mold removal, house gutting, roof, electric, plumbing,
every kind of repair or demolition need," Broussard said. "They just let
people back in legally ... I'm wondering how did these signs get there?
You couldn't go anywhere in the city without seeing rows and rows of
these signs." 

On his stereo he cranked up "Little Bit of Rum," a "moving song" by
Shreveport-based band Dirtfoot, for the soundtrack. 

Broussard donated the use of the theater.  His sister, who had worked
for the New Orleans Museum of Art for 20 years, lost her house and her
job as the museum's associate marketing director for tourism - which is
not a big business right now. 

Stasia Wolfe - who works at the Historic New Orleans Collection and
helped with the event - closed escrow on her Los Angeles home the Friday
before Katrina hit.  She missed the hurricane, having returned to the
West Coast for a week, but her husband evacuated to Lafayette with
neighbors he had met hours before. 

Santa Clarita resident Rhonda Vigeant, who founded Santa Clarita's Home
Movie Day and owns Burbank-based film company Pro8mm, did not go, but
she provided all of the supplies: pickup reels, leader, a splicer and
splicing tape. 

Though attendance was light, Graney pronounced the event a success.
Swanson agreed, saying the group will build on its many New Orleans
connections next year.  He is helping others create an online guide to
disaster recovery for home movie collections, and hopes to return to New
Orleans next year.