August 3, 2006
Agony of New Orleans, Through Spike Lee's Eyes
By FELICIA R. LEE (new york times)
NEW ORLEANS - From the beginning Spike Lee knew that Hurricane
Katrina was a story he had to tell. Watching the first television images of
floating bodies and of desperate people, mostly black, stranded on
rooftops, he quickly realized he was witnessing a major historical
moment. As those moments kept coming, he spent almost a year capturing
the hurricane's sorrowful consequences for a four-hour documentary,
"When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts," to be shown on HBO
this month.
The film, which Mr. Lee directed and produced, comes 20 years after
the August 1986 debut of his first hit, "She's Gotta Have It," about Nola
Darling, a Brooklyn graphic artist, and her three lovers. The
provocative films that followed ("Do the Right Thing," "Jungle Fever,"
"Malcolm X," among others), with their searing cultural critiques,
cemented Mr. Lee's reputation as his generation's pioneering black
filmmaker. This year he had a commercial and critical success with
"Inside Man," about a bank heist.
Like him or not, Mr. Lee, 49, is an artist many people feel they
know. People, black and white, approached him and the "Levees" crew here,
he said, imploring: "Tell the story. Tell the story." "It becomes like
an obligation we have," he said.
Mr. Lee's reputation helped get his camera crew into the city's
water-soaked homes, he said. It allowed him to stretch out a complex
story, with themes of race, class and politics that, he said, have too
often been sensationalized or rendered in sound bites. He received
permission, for example, from Kimberly Polk to film the funeral of her
5-year-old daughter, Sarena Polk, swept away when the waters ravaged
the Lower Ninth Ward. "She came to me in a dream," Ms. Polk says in the
film. "She said, 'Mama, I'm falling.' "
"Levees" opens with the Louis Armstrong song "Do You Know What It
Means to Miss New Orleans?" and offers black-and-white images of the city's
Southern-with-a-twist past - Mardi Gras, Confederate flags -
interspersed with scenes of children airlifted from demolished houses,
a door marked "dead body inside."
This gumbo of a film lingers on the politics of disaster response,
the science of levees and storms, the city's Creolized culture, the
stories of loss. Many faces are familiar: politicians like C. Ray Nagin, the
city's mayor, and Kathleen Blanco, the governor of Louisiana;
celebrities like Harry Belafonte, Kanye West, the Rev. Al Sharpton and
Sean Penn; and the native son and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who
talks about New Orleans as the birthplace of jazz. "It's like somebody
violating your mama," Mr. Marsalis says of the flooding.
Mr. Lee said he intended most of the "Levee" stories to come from the
ordinary people who endured the Superdome's makeshift shelter or long
searches for loved ones. So "Levees" includes many people like Phyllis
Montana LeBlanc, depressed and outraged after her family was
evacuated to different places around the country and she waited four months
for
a government trailer. "Not just the levees broke," she says in the
film. "The spirit broke."
And there's Paris Ervin, a University of New Orleans student, who
fled Hurricane Katrina but left behind his mother, Mary Johnell Morant.
Months later, after their home was officially searched and marked
empty, the police found Ms. Morant's remains in the kitchen, under a
refrigerator. It took two more months for the coroner's office to identify
her officially and release the body.
As a kind of thank-you to the many residents like Mr. Ervin, the
first half of "Levees" will be first shown free on Aug. 16 to 10,000 people
at the New Orleans Arena. HBO is to show the first two hours of "Levees"
on Aug. 21 at 9 p.m., the last two on Aug. 22 at 9 p.m. It will be shown
in its entirety at 8 p.m. on Aug. 29, the anniversary of the hurricane,
one of the country's worst natural disasters.
The critics and audience will have the final say on whether "Levees"
is the thorough examination that Mr. Lee intends. His views are clear.
"What happened in New Orleans was a criminal act," he said, a tragic
backhanded slap to poor, black or politically insignificant people.
"The levees were a Band-Aid here and a Band-Aid there. In the famous
statement of Malcolm X, the chickens came home to roost. Somebody
needs to go to jail."
Douglas Brinkley, the author of "The Great Deluge," a book about
Hurricane Katrina said: "When I heard Spike Lee was coming down, I
felt grateful. I thought the media perspective - while good - still showed
that a lot wasn't being asked." Mr. Lee is "grappling with the larger
question of why so many African-Americans distrust government," said
Mr. Brinkley, a professor of history at Tulane University, who appears in
the film.
Just as Michael Apted's "7 Up," documentary series followed a group
of people, filmed first as children, Mr. Lee said he hopes to return to
the people profiled in "Levees."
One 90-degree Saturday, some of those interviewed gathered in a big
meeting room at the Courtyard Marriott Hotel, not far from the
Convention Center. Each person was photographed within a frame,
intended to convey the idea that each interview is a portrait.
"It's really just a mood," Cliff Charles, the cinematographer on
"Levees," said of what he was trying to capture in the various
portraits.
"Levees" has no voice-over narration and is stitched together by the
witnesses and commentators. Sam Pollard, the producer and supervising
editor, said they had made 30 or so versions of the documentary, wading
through hours of film for the moments and the elements that best tell
the story.
Mr. Pollard, who like Mr. Charles is black, has worked with Mr. Lee
on two other documentaries, "4 Little Girls," about the girls killed in
the bombing of a black church in Birmingham in 1963, and "Jim Brown: All
American," about the former pro football star. Mr. Pollard said Mr.
Lee came up with the film's title last year, before they started
shooting.
On the set Mr. Lee asked all the questions from a typed list. ("You
have to say the question in the answer," he said to those he interviewed.
"Don't look at me, keep looking at the lenses.")
The interview lineup on that day in May included Joseph Bruno, a
lawyer, talking about the complexities of flood insurance, among other
topics; the musician Terence Blanchard (who also did the score for the film);
Calvin Mackie, a mechanical engineer; Brian Thevenot and Trymaine Lee
(who had Mr. Lee autograph his videos), reporters from The New Orleans
Times-Picayune; and Mr. Brinkley.
Mr. Lee's direction was terse, although he is more soft-spoken than
his public image suggests. He told Mr. Mackie, whose father had lung
cancer and was supposed to start chemotherapy the day the hurricane hit:
"Talk about your father and stepmother. Say their names too."
Mr. Mackie, 38, a professor of engineering at Tulane, was mourning
their deaths. His 43-year-old stepmother Linda Emery Mackie's breast cancer
had metastasized in the weeks after the hurricane. His 63-year-old
father Willie Mackie's cancer treatment was delayed for six weeks, his
health records lost. They died days apart in March.
"I hope that the documentary opens America's eyes to how we continue
to struggle here," Mr. Mackie, who is black, said after his on-camera
interview. "No matter how you feel about Spike, and I don't like all
his movies, people know about his integrity and his unrelenting
commitment to African-American people, to tell our stories. You talk about
street credibility, well, he has a cultural credibility."
"Levees" started out as a two-hour, $1 million film. HBO executives
looking for a Hurricane Katrina project snapped it up. Mr. Lee and his
crew were able to get into New Orleans after Thanksgiving, Mr. Lee
said, and he quickly realized that he needed two more hours and $1 million
more to give the story a full airing. He got it.
Sheila Nevins, the film's executive producer and the president of the
documentary and family division at HBO, said "Levees" was an easy
sell, at both prices.
"I realized this would be the film of record," she said. "When Spike
interviews a forgotten American whose kid floated away in the water,
he lets them raise up their poetry. They're able to express to him what
they're not able to express to anyone else."
With all those hours of conversations and interviews, he certainly
ended up with themes that went beyond the floodwaters, Mr. Lee said.
"Politics. Ethics. Morals," he said, when asked what Katrina and in
turn "Levees" was really about. "This is about what this country is really
going to be."
Additional information can also be found @ _www.hbo.com_
(http://www.hbo.com/) :
_http://www.hbo.com_ (http://www.hbo.com/) > Steven E. Fitch MBA
Carole McDonnell
Wind Follower June 2007 Juno Books
www.geocities.com/scifiwritir/Publications.html
carole.mcdonnell (at) gmail (dot)com
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