Film

New Orleans independent films will be shown at three Moscow institutions from May 15 – May 25, 2014.


New Orleans is two thousand miles from Hollywood, in more ways than one. The city’s earliest role in American cinema was as exotic location. The first Tarzan film, Tarzan of the Apes, was shot in nearby Morgan City in 1919, with the swamp doubling for Africa. Tennessee Williams wrote his masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire in New Orleans, and the faithful 1948 film adaptation by Elia Kazan pioneered the idea that the city is more than a setting: it’s a character. The confluence of European, African and Caribbean culture (and the utter lack of Puritanism) suggests a wildness and iniquity different from the rest of America. When Abbott and Costello made a comedy called Abbott and Costello go to Mars in 1953, they actually crash landed in New Orleans during Mardi Gras and thought they were on another planet. The place has to be seen to believed. Read More

No wonder so many of the most authentic portrayals of local culture have been documentaries. Robert Flaherty helped invent the form with his 1948 Louisiana Story, and the region has been the subject of non-fictional filmmaking ever since. In 1978, Les Blank made his seminal Always for Pleasure after attending an ethnographers’ convention in New Orleans and realizing that the city was every bit as exotic as Colombia, the subject for what he thought would be his next film. Blank’s many documentaries captured a culture, and inspired a generation of others to follow suit.In 2002, Louisiana established a system of tax incentives to attract film production that refunded a percentage of the money film companies spent in the state. This has revolutionized the industry. Now Hollywood makes for films in Louisiana than anywhere in the world. For example, the 2013 Academy Award winners 12 Years a Slave and Dallas Buyers Club were shot in Louisiana, as was the 2012 Cannes and Sundance laureate Beasts of the Southern Wild.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina redefined the city in the eyes of itself and the world, adding gravitas to its otherwise festive atmosphere. The rise of inexpensive home video cameras provided the basis for a legion of Katrina documentaries made from amateur footage. The newest, best films are the ones that show the city in its transition from third-world, Caribbean outpost to a politically active, ingenious vanguard of post-disaster enterprise. The story of New Orleans, once about pleasure, is now also about endurance and survival.

– Henry Griffin

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