The Brooklyn Rail

And so began the days of the 1000-year floods.

Paradigms were not always destroyed and remade so quickly. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the shock of its paradigm shift lasted for months, constantly broadcast on the news across the nation, in contrast to the splintering effect of how we see news on social media today and our developed sense of normalcy around living in constant crisis. It was a watershed moment for our understanding of how deep into climate change (then global warming) we already were, as well as in exposing how effective organized abandonment had been in condemning the livelihoods of poor Black Americans. Put Katrina—its visuals and representation—next to any other major event in the last thirty years of US history (for instance, in the form of a film retrospective) and such an exercise proves enormously generative.

In MoMA’s brilliant When the World Broke Open: Katrina and Its Afterlives, a twenty-seven-film series running through September 21 showcasing cinema of and about Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, the chronological position of Katrina comes into focus: the storm made landfall in a post-9/11 and pre-Black Lives Matter world. “Until Katrina, racial disparity and class subjugation had not been literalized in images on American TV since the civil rights era,” K. Austin Collins, one of the series’ curators, told the Rail. Twenty years later, it may be impossible to discern the shape of the mark Katrina left on our racial, environmental, and electoral politics, let alone our national psyche. Guest curators Collins and Maya S. Cade say they were intrigued by not only the “psychic wound” of Katrina, but “the psychic wounds that images circulating about it enabled.” Cade, whose family goes back ten generations in New Orleans, is a Katrina survivor now based in Los Angeles. Collins is a New York-based critic and programmer.

The concept for the series evolved out of a discussion about New Orleans cinema in a group text: “What makes a film a Katrina film?” Most of the films in the series made between 2005 and 2015 locate Katrina as a narrative center, or at least allude to its place on the horizon of the past; the full program spans from 1934 to 2023. Belle of the Nineties (1934) is a Katrina film because it feeds on the mystique and spectacle of New Orleans, the city’s great symbolic rise, and its then-emerging association with beauty and extremes. 12 Years a Slave (2013) is a Katrina film because it reminds us that New Orleans was a main site of slave auctions and that slavery is the mass death preceding all the afterlives so named in the series title. Descendant (2022) and All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023), set in Alabama and Mississippi respectively, are Katrina films because they are about the land and water, and what it means to love, fear, and defend your home. These curatorial decisions seem to invite us to hold Katrina as our center as we view every film: everything that happens is before, during, or after.

While several documentaries in the program blur the line between report and artwork, including Time (2020) and Trouble the Water (2008), the fact-based center of the series is Spike Lee’s two four-hour Katrina docs, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2005) and If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise (2010). Covering every beat of the Katrina story, from levee engineering to the Superdome conditions to George W. Bush’s secret meetings with Donald Rumsfeld, this longform documentary project is grounded in the lived experiences of displaced Black survivors and those who were lost. When the Levees Broke interweaves interviews with residents, journalists, activists, celebrities, public officials, and the most comprehensive editing of news footage from the months following Katrina. In his 2010 follow-up, Lee revisits several participants to show how they and their children have fared in terms of housing, physical health, mental health, and education.

Collected in Lee’s projects are spectacular images of horror from the storm, flood, and virtually nonexistent emergency response: children float on mattresses; entire apartment buildings of people wave “SOS” signs from rooftops in 100°F heat, days after the storm has passed and government support still hasn’t arrived; then-Governor of Louisiana Kathleen Blanco speaks at a press conference to her constituents to declare that troops will “shoot and kill” looters seeking food and water; bodies lay decaying on the street outside the Convention Center for days; matted dog carcasses are stretched out over debris, skin gone blue and taut. There are also moments of resistance, even humor: an ER doctor in Gulfport, Mississippi yells “go fuck yourself” at Dick Cheney during his belated visit; Kanye West goes off script during a telethon fundraiser to say “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people;” revelry and fanfare resume in second line jazz parades.

Throughout the series, Katrina’s aftermath is given as much weight as the catastrophe itself. The pilot episode of Treme (2010), an HBO drama by the creators of The Wire, portrays seven characters at different points in their rebuilding processes, all enduring the slow pace, frustration, and individualized burdens that New Orleanians faced after the dust settled. Set three months after the flood, there is an emphasis on decay more than disaster: Treme’s opening title sequence montages photographs of mold grown on house walls like inkblots, intercut with family photos water-stained with neon green and orange chemical reactions, also seen in The Boatman (2017). Amid scenes of urban decay, rituals of artistic expression and communal life are represented not only as pillars of tradition in New Orleans, but as methods for coping: a Mardi Gras Indian chief insists on coming home from Houston to prepare for carnival, defying his disapproving children; the Treme Brass Band plays on for funeral processions as local music economies slowly revive. 

Just as striking as the real is the surreal, and in New Orleans, the veil is thin. Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) dares to say aloud that this—a lifetime of biblical floods and transformations—is the future. “Any day now the fabric of the universe is coming unraveled,” the six-year-old protagonist learns in a speculative alternate version of Terrebonne Parish. “The ice caps gonna melt, the water’s gonna rise, and everything south of the levee’s going under … Y’all better learn how to survive.” Beasts revolves around a rural, impoverished community so far removed from state systems that they are already skilled in repurposing scrap metal and plastic for shelter and hunting and catching their own food. As adults encourage the young protagonist to think of herself as an animal, creature, and wild thing, and to embrace the danger and freedom inherent in this way of life, their worldview challenges the line we draw between humans and animals. A return to thinking of ourselves as ordinary members of a diverse ecological system has never seemed so timely.

Beasts, as well as films like Eve’s Bayou (1997), Cat People (1982), and J.D.’s Revenge (1976), are part of a long artistic tradition well-represented in When the World Broke Open: storytelling and cinema that incorporates Louisiana’s strangeness, magic, and mysticism. While they are conscious to avoid the “usual trappings” of representations of voodoo and Creole myth, Cade and Collins spotlight films that put magic back in Black hands. Such modalities allow for the fluidity, blurring of boundaries, and pleasurable contradictions that characterize the bayou. Everything is liable to become something else. Mistaken identity is a theme in J.D.’s Revenge , a Blaxploitation film that finds comedy in tricks of light, time, and aesthetic signals. When a clean-cut seventies law student becomes possessed by the ghost of a gangster from the forties, his arrival at a club in a zoot suit and fedora elicits compliments from a series of old women, the only people who recognize his fashion as charming.

Within many of the films themselves, there is a sophisticated awareness of images, their power, and their slipperiness in relation to time. Quite often we are witnesses watching witnesses. Eve’s Bayou begins and ends with the mantra: “Memory is a selection of images, some elusive, others printed indelibly on the brain.” A vivid, plot-rich meditation on familial transgression and sexual violence in chattel slavery, Eve’s Bayou knows that images bend and sway under the strain of unbelievable events. Here, the marsh is full of secrets and erasures. While the full truth may be lost beneath the brackish water, the chilling effect and sensation of the image remain.

Among the more provocative of Cade and Collins’s choices is the inclusion of blockbuster action flicks and major Hollywood features, such as the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced Déjà Vu (2006), Werner Herzog’s campy neo-noir Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), and disaster thriller Deepwater Horizon (2016). Yet, these moving images have a texture and nationalist mythology that can only be found in big Hollywood projections of New Orleans. Déjà Vu, starring Denzel Washington, was the first major feature film to shoot in the city after the hurricane. “Even though it's not ‘about’ Katrina,” Collins says, “the resonance of the event is still there and still lives in the images of that film.”

So, too, are the reverberations of 9/11: Déjà Vu veers into sci-fi when Washington, playing an underdog ATF agent, is sent four days back in time using top-secret FBI surveillance technology to stop a ferry bombing on the Mississippi River. In this pro-federal government, copaganda framing that seems antithetical to the actual popular sentiment in New Orleans post-Katrina, the myth becomes one of a heroic Black defender of Western liberal democracy who’s empowered by limitless technological dominance and an unchecked, amoral surveillance apparatus made of American law enforcement’s wildest fantasies. Bill Marsilii, screenwriter of Déjà Vu, paused work on the script in 2001 after he witnessed the Twin Towers fall from downtown Manhattan. Like many big-budget, high-tech action movies, Déjà Vu contracted with the Department of Defense (or War) to help finance production and real US military personnel are present in the film.

These aren’t the only devils the curators dance with. Louisiana Story (1948), a gorgeous and inadvertently eerie film, was commissioned by the Standard Oil Company to promote its drilling ventures in the Louisiana bayous. Pseudo-educational footage of drill pipe being installed takes on the quality of foreshadowing and is visually matched by the massively scaled up offshore drilling in Deepwater Horizon, a reenactment of the BP oil spill and rig explosion. Billed as a documentary but acted and lightly scripted, Louisiana Story follows a young Cajun boy who befriends the oil workers stationed on the barge rig constructed after his father leases his land to the company. No professional actors were cast in the film: the boy was played by a local resident and the rig workers were roughnecks from Texas. Much of the film is naturalistic photography of the boy in his rowboat drifting through lilypads, cypresses, and Spanish moss, befriending raccoons and hunting alligators. Director Robert J. Flaherty was compelled by the locals’ lifeways, awestruck by the lush environment, and generally more interested in finding a way to fund his filmmaking than in selling oil. From the modern era’s view, Louisiana Story is a record of a healthy Louisiana wilderness, playing like a horror movie— “Don’t go in the closet! Don’t open Pandora’s box!”—and enabling the possibility for multiple readings.

In a museum setting, films like Déjà Vu and Louisiana Story find themselves under an art historical lens—arguably the primary way they should be studied. These contradictions are central to the study of New Orleans, a place rebuilt and reimagined many times over. “To MoMA’s credit,” Cade says, “for us to have a twenty-seven-film series, which is quite a large series, allowed us to play, where other smaller series might not have this level of play or roaming thought about what Katrina is.” As part of this expansive ritual of remembrance, both the spectacular and hidden are given room to float to the surface.