Abstract
The traumatic events wrought by Katrina floodwaters in 2005 exposed painful aspects of the social fabric of New Orleans and the nation generally. Class- and race-based inequities were laid bare. The failure of the government at every level became obvious. Yet the post-Katrina spotlight also inadvertently illuminated a small but significant community of independent media artists working devotedly in old and new media forms. Some are amateurs, in the purest sense. Others are working professionals making small films as an avocation. Still others cobble together piecework and part-time projects that allow them to pursue their creative talents—getting grants, work-for-hire, teaching gigs, and freelance projects. Neither dilettantes nor careerists, they integrate homemade media into their everyday lives, often affiliating their practice with local social and political activism. The filmmaker Helen Hill, we now understand, is a radiant emblem of this community.
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Notes
The media linking of the cases of Helen Hill and Dinerral Shavers was immediate, beginning with the front page of the local newspaper: “Killings Bring the City to Its Bloodied Knees.” Also significant were activist-attorney Billy Sothern’s New York Times op-ed, “Taken by the Tide,” January 10, 2007 (reprinted in International Herald Tribune); Jacqueline Bishop, “Art and Death in New Orleans,” News and Notes, National Public Radio (NPR), January 9, 2007;
Lisa Haviland, “Don’t Stop the Music: A Look at How Two Murders Moved a Community,” Antigravity [New Orleans], February 2007, –. National long-form coverage included: “One Year Later, New Orleans Grieves for Artists,” twenty-minute feature by Noah Adams, All Things Considered, NPR, December 25, 2007; “Storm of Murder,” 48 Hours Mystery, CBS News, October 13, 2007, updated August 14, 2008 (cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/09/48hours/main3348 928.shtml); “After the Storm,” The 5th Estate, CBC News, October 29, 2008 (cbc.ca/fifth/discussion/2008/10); “Unknown Helen Hill Killer,” America’s Most Wanted, Fox Television, September 15, 2007, updated January 12, 2008, and February 14, 2009 (amw.com/fugitives/case.cfm?id=42393); and Karen Dalton-Benina, “Free at Last,” Huffington Post, February 21, 2008, huffingtonpost.com/karen-daltonbeninato/free-at-last-second-liner_b_879i2.html.
Other excellent accounts of Helen’s life and its impact on New Orleans include Phil Nugent, “An American City: New Orleans, Helen Hill and Me,” The High Hat 8 (Winter 2007), thehighhat.com/misc/008/nugent_helen.html;
John Clark, “Remembering Helen Hill,” Fifth Estate 42 (Spring 2007): –, republished in the international libertarian journal Divergences, May 14, 2007, http://divergences.be; an epic-length biographical poem by activist-artist (and member of The Fugs)
Edward Sanders, “Ode to Helen Hill,” Woodstock Journal (2007), woodstockjournal.com/pdf/helenhill.pdf; and the documentary Helen Hill: Celebrating a Life in Film (South Carolina ETV, 2007).
Kara Van Malssen, Disaster Planning and Recovery: Post-Katrina Lessons for Mixed Media Collections, master’s thesis, New York University, 2006. See also Kara Van Malssen, “Preserving the Legacy of Experimental Filmmaker Helen Hill,” SOIMA in Practice (2008), http://soima.iccrom.org.
Paul Gailiunas, “For My Poor, Sweet Wife, Fix New Orleans,” January 26, 2007.
He submitted the letter to the Times-Picayune, but it appeared only online and circulated freely on the Internet. Confusingly, the anarchist collective known as Crimethinc, reworked William Powell’s infamous The Anarchist Cookbook (New York: L. Stuart, 1971) as Recipes for Disaster: An Anarchist Cookbook, A Moveable Feast (Olympia, WA: Crimethinc, Workers’ Collective), but not until 2004, three years after the Helen Hill Recipes for Disaster cookbook-let. Other Crimethinc members issued DIY ’zines, such as D.I.Y. Guide II (Atlanta, 2002). Some people knew Helen as an activist rather than a filmmaker. Howard Besser e-mailed me on January 23, 2007: “In Seattle I ducked into the local Anarchist collective bookstore … I overhead a bit of conversation between two of the workers.” One worker, Besser reported, said “We really have to send some money for Helen Hill.” They knew Helen from her work with “Food Not Bombs.”
Snowden Becker, e-mail, September 29, 2009; David Koen, “A Murder Shakes Confidence in New Orleans,” Morning Edition, NPR, January 11, 2007; Gailiunas, “Fix New Orleans.”
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© 2010 Diane Negra
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Streible, D. (2010). Media Artists, Local Activists, and Outsider Archivists: The Case of Helen Hill. In: Negra, D. (eds) Old and New Media after Katrina. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230112100_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230112100_8
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