Abstract
Spike Lee’s four-hour documentary about Hurricane Katrina,1 When the Levees Broke (2006), extends outwards from testimonial interviews, to news footage and public representation of events, to specialist reflection on those events, and understanding of their involvement in a dense history of discrimination within the United States.2 It follows other comparable films by Lee, in Paula Massood’s words, ‘textual systems employing quotation, allusion, and homage to explore the shared national trauma of racism and its continuing social, economic, and political effects’.3 This film takes us into the space of a city where the living and the dead coexist for an extended, traumatising time in the horrific context of catastrophe, of the hurricane, of the floods following the breaking of the levees, and of the humanitarian disaster that was allowed to ensue. Whilst mapping this space, the film questions relations between the living and the dead through the threading together of lost or damaged histories.
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Notes
Hurricane Katrina will be used here as a term to refer to the wider scale damage in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region in the wake of the hurricane, the breaking of the levees and the humanitarian disaster ensuing. Reference to Katrina is by no means intended to imply that this was a ‘natural’ disaster or indeed that the suffering in the Gulf Coast Region dating from August 2005 was only a direct result of the hurricane. I would like to signal a brilliant paper by Elizabeth Cowie, ‘The Fiction of Time in Documentary and Fiction Film’ (given in Cambridge, 12 May 2009), which initiated my interest in When the Levees Broke.
The film can be seen on one level as an oral history project, though as will be seen in the chapter that follows, I am most concerned here with its function as artistic project in response to catastrophe. On oral history and Katrina, see Alan H. Stein and Gene B. Preuss, ‘Oral History, Folklore, and Katrina’, in Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires, There Is No Such Thing As A Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 37–58.
Paula J. Massood, ‘Introduction: We’ve Gotta Have It–Spike Lee, African American Film, and Cinema Studies’, in Paula J. Massood (ed.), The Spike Lee Reader (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), pp. xv–xxviii (p. xxiii).
See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
Robert Polidori, After the Flood, with an introduction by Jeff Rosenheim (Göttingen: Steidl, 2006), pp. 10–11.
Elisabeth Bronfen, Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 21.
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (London: Virago, 1986 [1937]), p. 244.
Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 109.
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004), pp. xiv–xv.
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© 2012 Emma Wilson
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Wilson, E. (2012). Home. In: Love, Mortality and the Moving Image. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230367708_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230367708_8
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