Twenty years ago, on Aug. 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana, killing approximately 1,833 people and displacing millions along the Gulf Coast. Eighty percent of New Orleans was underwater, leaving families stranded on rooftops or funneled into overcrowded shelters without food and water.
Media coverage sensationalized the disaster, calling desperate survivors, especially Black ones, “looters,” and fearmongering about the increase in violence. One of the most distinctive cities in the United States — the birthplace of jazz and a haven for Creole and Cajun culture — was framed as a war zone rather than as the home of Americans who were suddenly in dire need of relief.
When the World Broke Open: Katrina and Its Afterlives, a new film series opening Wednesday at the Museum of Modern Art, aims to reclaim the memory of New Orleans and its people. Programmed by K. Austin Collins and Maya Cade (who is a Katrina survivor), the series pushes back against the dehumanizing accounts peddled by the media at the time by presenting a rich vision of New Orleans and its inhabitants over the past century.
There’s the parade of Mardi Gras Indians and brass-band funeral processions in Les Blank’s documentary “Always for Pleasure” (1978), which throws the viewer into the city’s communal traditions; the sprawling mausoleums, shotgun houses and murky bayou waters of Jim Jarmusch’s moody prison-escape drama “Down by Law” (1986); and the eclectic musical stylings of Stevenson J. Palfi’s “Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together” (1982), which profiles three generations of pianists as they mount a show.
Also screening is the pilot episode of the HBO series “Treme,” which begins three months after Katrina and follows a broad constellation of New Orleanians as they struggle to rebuild their lives. Created by the same producers behind “The Wire,” the four-season show — which ran from 2010 to 2013 — was, for some critics, authentic to a fault, relishing in local minutiae to the point of alienating national audiences. Yet the show’s commitment to detail is key: It’s not about packing New Orleans’s features into an easily recognizable dramatic form, where the city’s crime, corruption, and unemployment could easily take place in another major capital; it’s about cultural survival, what it takes to preserve a community’s unique character in the face of depopulation, bureaucratic red tape and gentrification.
The director Spike Lee has built a career around challenging historical representations of Black people in pop culture, and his epic four-hour Katrina documentary, “When the Levees Broke” (2006), is a response to racially coded TV coverage of the hurricane’s chaotic aftermath that reinforced stereotypes of Black criminality. “When the Levees Broke” and Lee’s follow-up, “If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise” (2010), adds an on-the-ground perspective to the MoMA series, with its inclusion of dozens of direct testimonies from Katrina survivors, giving them the chance to control their own narratives. Another documentary, “Trouble the Water” (2008), turns the mic over to survivors, and foregrounds camcorder footage shot by one of its subjects throughout the week of the storm.
In 2002, the Louisiana legislature passed a major tax-incentive program for movie and TV productions, which caused the entertainment business to thrive in the state — think of the celebrated releases over the last two decades filmed in and around New Orleans, like the extra-muggy first season of “True Detective,” the Oscar-winning “12 Years a Slave” and this year’s Southern gothic blockbuster, “Sinners.” After Katrina, though, the industry stalled. But it was swiftly resurrected by a slate of films that incorporated elements of the city’s gradual rehabilitation into their plots.
Many of these films used the post-Katrina landscape to create haunting connections between their fictional intrigues and the present-day inequities laid bare by the disaster. Tony Scott’s “Déjà Vu” (2006) began shooting in New Orleans a mere six months after Katrina, signaling to the rest of Hollywood that the bayou was open for business again. In the film, Denzel Washington plays a federal agent who uses time-travel technology to prevent a terrorist plot, which seemed to parallel public sentiment that the extent of Katrina’s devastation could have been prevented had infrastructural safeguards like levees and flood walls been properly maintained and had evacuation planning and resource deployment been properly organized.
In Werner Herzog’s gonzo policier “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Calls New Orleans” (2009), Nicolas Cage’s sergeant becomes addicted to painkillers after suffering an injury caused by saving a drowning prisoner from the Katrina flooding. His descent into madness — along with the film’s portrayal of the New Orleans Police Department as violent and corrupt — echoes ideas of post-Katrina institutional collapse.
But perhaps the film that made one of the most culturally influential statements about Katrina’s aftermath was “Beasts of the Southern Wild” (2012), a magical-realist vision of the Ninth Ward, the predominantly Black, working-class neighborhood that suffered some of the worst flooding when Katrina struck. Though some commentators denounced the film’s romanticization of poverty, its direct engagement with Katrina imagery — floating coffins, waterlogged houses, makeshift boats in a crippled subtropical community — put the themes of neglect and government indifference on startling display.
Hurricane Katrina was one of the last major natural disasters to happen before the takeover of social media — before civilians themselves could document events for the masses without mainstream media interference and, perhaps, set the record straight. The films in the MoMA series ask how we commemorate events like Katrina, whose consequences are still unfolding today. Other films in the series that are seemingly unconnected to the storm, like “Time” (2020) and “Eve’s Bayou” (1997), remind us that memory is fallible, elastic, but ultimately resilient and load bearing.
To truly honor the memory of Katrina’s victims and survivors is to remember them fully, in all their dimensions; before, after, and apart from the tragedy that has defined their lives.
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