I???ve become fascinated over the past year with the visual tropes of the Hurricane Katrina film. The helicopter shots of the city underwater, borrowed news footage of refuges spilling out of the super dome, and of course, the ultimate post-Katrina New Orleans money shot: the passenger-side tracking shot of a devastated residential street, probably in the Lower Ninth Ward, meant to bowl us over by offering the illusion of an endless loop of devastation.
When that tracking shot appears in Peter Entell???s Shake The Devil Off, which screened for the first time in the U.S. last night at True/False, it plays to a slightly different end. For every three addresses occupied by a pile of rubble, there seems to be one house not only left standing, but apparently without significant external damage. Certainly, such an image speaks to the frustrating randomness of nature, but more than that, it reminds that appearances can be deceiving. The owners of that home may have the advantage of having an intact structure to return to, but that may not mean much when their community has crumbled all around them.
With shots like this, Shake The Devil Off incorporates some of the tropes of Cinema Katrina, but it???s maybe the least dependent on those tropes for its power than any of the many recent films about the storm and the city that I???ve seen. In fact, in that sense, it???s maybe the only truly post-Katrina film on the festival circuit, in that it???s not really at all concerned with the storm itself, but with the social, economic and racial ripple effects of Katrina that really only became apparent in the months thereafter.
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