[Kabar-indonesia] Heartrending Reflection On An American Tragedy [+NYT]

[Joyo at aol.com]

also: NYTimes Review: ‘When the Levees Broke’: Spike
Lee’s Tales From a Broken City

The Guardian [UK]
Saturday September 2, 2006

Film review

Spike Lee's sonorous, heartrending reflection on an
American tragedy

When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts

Venice Film Festival

Peter Bradshaw

Festivalgoers at Venice, or anywhere else, are unused
to having their attention-span tested by a four-hour
documentary, especially when the screenings are
subject to delay, as this one was, for mysterious
"technical reasons". But Spike Lee's history of the
Katrina disaster in New Orleans, sonorously-named When
The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, commanded
everyone's attention - and even opened a few tear
ducts.

Anti-Bush sentiments triggered the traditional
approving whoops: the unhappy US president is now the
pantomime villain for all European film festivals with
a doc or two on the menu. But Lee's movie was notable
for how measured its judgments were, and even ventured
some politically incorrect views about the city
itself.

Spike Lee has some introductory archive footage and
photos of New Orleans, but mainly his film juxtaposes
heartrending shots of the wreckage with interviews,
talking to politicians and New Orleans residents, most
of them even more angry about the debacle, one year
on, than they were at the time.

The furthest up the political food-chain Lee gets is
talking to the city's embattled mayor, the defensive
Louisiana state governor, and the now contrite police
chief who went on TV and whipped up a storm by
exaggerating the looting problem his men faced. The
awful truth, as so many testified, was that Katrina
was an act of man, not God: New Orleans was only hit
by wind and tempest for a relatively short time.

But later the inadequately maintained levees, or flood
walls, broke and a city below sea level was
catastrophically submerged. A president anxiously
focused on the "war on terror" was all too slow to
respond, apparently unable to decide if conspicuous
federal intervention would make him look strong or
weak. Days passed, and TV pictures of starving, dying
Americans made the US look like a third world country
- or perhaps, arguably, disclosed the third world
country that America secretly keeps in its closet.

Media sophisticates commenting on Katrina at the time
were squeamish about citing the race factor, but one
person noted the elephant in the flooded living room.
Lee shows the classic clip of pop star Kanye West
going on TV, apparently for an innocuous charity
broadcast and breaking with the script to say: "The
president doesn't care about black people." Next to
him, comedy star Mike Myers flinches and half-turns to
him, for a fraction of a second appearing mutely to
implore West to qualify the statement in some way,
clearly panicking at being associated with these
views. An unmissable moment of celeb-career anxiety.

Lee also revives the wince-making memory of Barbara
Bush, former First Lady and current First Mom, who
gave a notorious interview, superciliously claiming
that evacuees moved out to prosperous Texas - many
parted from their families - were actually getting a
nice break.

Mrs Bush disgraced herself, yet Lee boldly declares
that plenty of evacuees in Texas and Utah found that
there was more for them there in terms of education
and jobs than in New Orleans - and maybe they were
being loyal to a place that was holding them back.

It is a movie which, for non-US audiences, is a little
reticent in explaining what a levee is, how it is
built, how it gets damaged.

And I could have done with more of a strategic
overview of when and how floodwaters entered the city.
But this is a heartfelt movie, a documentary unafraid
to spread itself across its vast subject matter, and a
fierce denunciation of the arrogant political classes,
still in denial about one of the biggest tragedies in
American history.

· Peter Bradshaw is the Guardian's film critic

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The New York Times
August 21, 2006

TV Review

‘When the Levees Broke’: Spike Lee’s Tales From a
Broken City

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

It isn’t the painful recapitulation of the
incompetence, indifference and confusion in high
places that makes Spike Lee’s epic documentary “When
the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts” a wrenching
experience. What breaks your heart is the film’s
accumulated firsthand stories of New Orleans residents
who lost everything in the flood after Hurricane
Katrina, and the dismaying conclusion that a year
after the disaster, the broken city has been largely
abandoned to fend for itself.

A powerful chorus of witnesses and talking heads that
cuts across racial and class lines was assembled for
the four-hour film, to be shown tonight and tomorrow
on HBO in two-hour blocks. Although seeds of hope are
woven into this tapestry of rage, sorrow and
disbelief, the inability of government at almost every
level to act quickly and decisively leaves you aghast
at what amounts to a collective failure of will.

The sights, familiar from television, are as shocking
as ever: people stranded on rooftops waving signs
pleading for help from passing helicopters and the
thousands herded into the Superdome, which over
several days turned into a giant, leaky sewer. Saddest
of all are the personal stories of people who lost
loved ones in the flood that inundated 80 percent of
the city, leaving large sections looking like a
bombed-out war zone. The sheer volume of suffering and
misery chronicled by the film is crushing.

We hear horror stories of the ailing and elderly whose
bodies were discovered by family members returning to
their devastated homes. At the end of one chapter the
film shows corpses, some covered, some not, left on
the street to rot.

The trumpeter Terence Blanchard, who composed the
film’s elegiac soundtrack, tenderly escorts his
mother, Wilhelmina, to her ruined house for the first
time after the flood, and she breaks down at the sight
of destruction far worse than she had imagined.

Some comparative disaster perspective is useful.
Calvin Mackie, a professor of mechanical engineering
at Tulane University in New Orleans, notes in the film
that the damage of 9/11 was confined to 16 square
acres of Manhattan, while the devastation wrought by
Katrina encompassed 90,000 square miles. At the time
of the filming, which took place as recently as June,
only 70 percent of the debris had been removed from
the city, he says, and that 70 percent amounted to 25
times as much as was carried away after the collapse
of the World Trade Center.

Each chapter of the story has a musical prologue and
epilogue (Fats Domino’s “Walking to New Orleans” is
heard twice) that lends the film the flavor of a
traditional New Orleans funeral procession in which
grief is transmuted into mournful celebration. Wynton
Marsalis, a native son, offers a brief history of the
city’s culture and the special way music is embedded
in the fabric of New Orleans life.

Even with its formal musical trappings, “When the
Levees Broke” is the opposite of a Ken Burns
documentary. Where Mr. Burns’s historical panoramas
examine momentous events from a magisterial distance,
Mr. Lee’s documentary boils with anger and a degree of
paranoia. Was it really necessary to bring in voices
who suggest that the levees were dynamited, when no
tangible evidence is offered beyond people who recall
hearing sounds of an explosion during the storm?
Occasionally the film can’t resist taking a cheap
shot, as when it makes a side trip to Mississippi just
to show a visiting Dick Cheney being taunted with
obscenities. Thankfully such lapses of judgment are
few and far between.

Most of the events in the first two hours will be
familiar to anyone who watched television news in the
disaster’s early weeks. It is in the last two parts —
which examine the uncertain futures of tens of
thousands of evacuees, analyze the engineering
failures that allowed the flood to breach the levees,
and speculate about the city’s future — that the movie
rises to greatness.

Lt. Gen. Carl Strock of the Army Corps of Engineers
says: “This is the first time the corps of engineers
has had to stand up and say we had a catastrophic
failure of one of our projects.” No disaster in modern
American history better illustrates the risks of
cutting corners, then closing your eyes and hoping for
the best.

Some of the stories that hurt the most describe
indignities suffered by ordinary New Orleanians
leaving the city, like those who were turned back by
armed police officers as they tried to cross a bridge
into the town of Gretna. There are also firsthand
accounts of how the chaotic evacuation process
separated parents from children as people were loaded
onto buses dispatched to unknown destinations, with no
return tickets.

As that evacuation began, even the estimable NBC news
anchor Brian Williams referred to the flood victims as
refugees, wrongly implying that these people, a
majority of them poor and black, were citizens from
another country seeking asylum in the United States.
The term of course was uncomfortably accurate in
evoking the attitude of the federal government toward
a city with a high poverty rate, a crumbling
educational system and no political value to the
Washington establishment.

Douglas Brinkley, the author of “The Great Deluge”
(William Morrow), observes that Louisiana has always
been treated as colony from which natural resources
could be extracted. Because its offshore oil wealth is
beyond the three-mile limit, revenue from oil and gas
leasing has accrued to the federal government, leaving
the state without the funds to restore the protective
wetlands, which have been compromised by
industrialization, and shore up the levees that
everyone from the top down has always known were
vulnerable.

Hurricane Katrina actually missed New Orleans when at
the last minute it veered slightly to the east, says
Garland Robinette, an impassioned New Orleans radio
personality. The worst winds to hit the city were of
Category 1 or 2 force, he says. But even then, the
levee system, which was supposed to withstand a
Category 3, failed. The protections hastily erected
since the disaster are described by Mr. Brinkley as
“Lego levees.”

“When the Levees Broke” has clear-cut heroes and
villains. New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin comes across
as a salty, tough-talking leader bravely persevering
in the face of social breakdown. Harry Belafonte and
the Rev. Al Sharpton are treated as sages, and Lt.
Gen. Russel Honoré, belatedly dispatched to begin the
major evacuation, is hailed by Mayor Nagin as “a John
Wayne dude.” The villains are the usual ones from the
Department of Homeland Security and FEMA.

The film has no major new revelations about the
outrageously tardy response of the Bush administration
to the crisis, as if any were needed. The failures
speak for themselves.

Today some New Orleans neighborhoods remain largely
uninhabited, and the future of the Lower Ninth Ward,
in particular, remains uncertain. Will it be taken
over by developers, bulldozed and gentrified? Or will
the city’s spunky, independent spirit, which its
residents believe to be one of its greatest resources,
prevail? The answers to those questions may be a long
time coming.

WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE

A Requiem in Four Acts

HBO, tonight and Tuesday night at 9, Eastern and
Pacific times; 8, Central time.

Directed and produced by Spike Lee; Sam Pollard,
producer and supervising editor; Cliff Charles,
cinematographer; Geta Gandbhir and Nancy Novack,
editors; Terence Blanchard, composer; Butch Robinson,
line producer. For HBO: Jacqueline Glover, supervising
producer, and Sheila Nevins, executive producer. A
Spike Lee Film and a 40 Acres & a Mule Filmworks
production.

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