BuzzFlash Reviews
When the Levees Broke (2006 3 DVD Disc Documentary)
Directed by Spike Lee
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Lee lets New Orleans and its residents speak for themselves. There is no narrative voice to set a tone; that all comes from the people and the music of the Big Easy.
Katrina was a third-world response to a horrific event. It would have been a first-world response if the victims were largely white Republicans. There's no question about that.
This widely acclaimed, sweeping HBO 4-part documentary ought to go into the Smithsonian for its breadth, compassion and how it takes its cues from the residents of New Orleans themselves.
From HBO: Three months after Katrina struck, Lee, cameraman Cliff Charles and a small crew made the first of eight trips to New Orleans to conduct interviews and shoot footage for the film. With so many people affected, Lee had a wide range of subjects and opinions to choose from. "Spike wanted to offer multiple points of view," says his longtime editor, Sam Pollard. "He needed to represent the voices from the community, the different levels of government, activists and the celebrity element to provide a balanced take on the issues facing New Orleans."
Lee and his team selected close to 100 people from diverse backgrounds and representing a wide range of opinions to interview, including Governor Kathleen Blanco; Mayor Ray Nagin; residents Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, Kimberly Polk, Shelton "Shakespeare" Alexander and Rev. Williams; activists Al Sharpton and Harry Belafonte; CNN's Soledad O'Brien; and musicians Wynton Marsalis, Terence Blanchard and Kanye West.
Lee uses key elements of New Orleans' cultural legacy to illustrate its history of surviving against the odds. Long before Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and its citizens developed coping strategies for dealing with tragedy. Its aboveground cemeteries are not only practical, but evidence of a people used to the sight of death. The traditional jazz funerals - musical parades that mourn death, and then celebrate life - serve as testament to that fact. [End of HBO excerpt]
"What's happened down there is unprecedented," Lee says. "This country has forever been going to the far corners of the earth to help other people in need... When this occurred here on U.S. soil, this government turned its back on its own citizens."
More from Spike Lee:
"Anyone who has been to New Orleans will automatically tell you that what you saw on television, the pictures, they can't really describe the scale of the devastation. When you go to the Lower Ninth Ward, it looks- Hiroshima must have look like that. Nagasaki. Beirut. Berlin after it was bombed in World War II. That's the way the Lower Ninth Ward looks like, and a lotta other places in New Orleans.
People in New Orleans are up in arms about progress. People wanna move back. New Orleans was a predominantly African- American city, and its black citizens were dispersed to 46 other states. People wanna come home, but there's nowhere for them to live. They wanna work."
"Well, I would just say, what Kanye West expressed, that George Bush doesn't care about black people. Many people think it had nothing to do with race, it had more to do with class. You have a large population who happened to be poor, and if they did vote they didn't vote Republican anyway."
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