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Film Festivals Previews The Weird and the Wonderful of New Orleans at BAMcinématekThe Weird and the Wonderful of New Orleans at BAMcinématek
- Details
- Parent Category: Film Festivals
- Category: Previews
- Published on Thursday, 01 March 2012 15:33
- Written by Renzo Adler
From March 28 to April 1 and on April 8, 2012, the BAMcinématek will present New Orleans on Film, featuring 10 films on the fabled city, leading up to New Orleans music legend Dr. John’s nine-night residency at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House this spring.
The Jim Jarmusch film Down by Law features musician Tom Waits and John Lurie, as well as Roberto Benigni (yes, the same actor/director who made Life is Beautiful) as three wrongfully imprisoned convicts on the lamb. Down By Law portrays New Orleans as a nexus of constant duality. A place where someone can be mired in despair, and yet be able to meet a companion that is equally mired.
Down by Law is a film as much about the strangeness of Americana as it is about the strangeness of New Orleans.As eclectic and fascinating as the actual city of New Orleans is, so too is this festival.
Spanning almost every genre of film, the oldest film in the festival is the 1934 Mae West starrer, Belle of the Nineties, while the most recent are the 2009 Abel Ferrara's post-Katrina crime drama Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and Disney’s return to traditional animation, The Princess and the Frog. This festival embraces New Orleans both as a place of strange possibility and as a place of seedy but beautiful despair.
Paul Schrader’s 1982 remake of Val Lewton’s Cat People is a smoldering film that eschews Lewton’s subtlety for acts of debauchery punctuated by bloodshed. Nastassja Kinski slinks across a New Orleans in which the humidity is almost palpable to the viewer. While it lays the stereotypes of voodoo and decadence a little thick, Cat People is still a cult classic.
On the other side of the coin is Disney’s Princess and the Frog, a film which began to pull Disney back to traditional animation after several clumsy attempts at making CGI films without Pixar holding their hand. While the Randy Newman score can be distracting at times, Princess has a wonderful aesthetic combining 1920’s art deco evocative of Disney animator Mary Blair (Sleeping Beauty), with excellent natural and urban landscapes brought to life with post-Lion King elasticity.
Often when we think of New Orleans on film, we go to either the vested but somewhat tired classics like A Streetcar Named Desire, or to the absurdly stereotyped "Big Easy" of films like Live and Let Die.
This festival creates a picture of New Orleans that feels more whole, a place that is simultaneously beautiful and terrible, an exotic and fragile world that is bound by the same burdens of humanity as anywhere else, but still maintaining and unmistakable charm.
To learn more go to: http://www.bam.org/BAMcinematek
New Orleans on Film
March 28 - April 1
BAMcinématek
30 Lafayette Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11217
