Bulletfilm

User

RubyQuincunxPictures

Director

Ruby Quincunx

Producer

Ruby Quincunx

Cast/Crew

Ruby Quincunx, Bellocq, Adam Clayton, Henry Unwin, Justin Eaton, Sylvan Eames-Clayton

Production Company

Ruby Quincunx Pictures

Year of production

2008

Genre

Foreign/Arthouse / Music/Musical / Sci-Fi/Fantasy / Animation / Experimental

Synopsis

A very short little film, part of a loose cycle of films (& other things), The Streets of New Orleans.

It turns on the rather tart double entendre on display in the title. Shot during Carnival, the film offers nothing for the salacious eye or pop-kulch presuppositions.

At bottom it has all the hallmarks of a parable: it is succinct & carries a hidden moral which is obliquely exposed in the unfolding of a simple event. Not much happens here. A little group of tourists with a camcorder encounters something strange on the back of a building, & reacts, in the manner of tourists, with subdued—grudging?—interest. To be a tourist is to feel an obligation to see the sights, & more importantly, get it on tape. They got it on tape. Of course, the cognoscenti will grasp the irony that Villere in the Tremé is well off the path beaten by legions of run-of-the-mill sightseers. But it's not too far of a stretch in this age of post-Katrina disaster tours: grand-scale rubbernecking. As to the moral, it has something to do with the dissonant interplay between three cities piled on top of one another: the New Orleans on offer by the tourism industry, the New Orleans of myth & folk legend, & the New Orleans of gritty reality, run-down, put-upon, & shrugged-off.

It is also an ecphrasis on a real piece of art. The mural, motionless but otherwise as depicted here, is actually to be found on that wall in N. Villere St.

Compelled to assign it a genre, I would struggle to find anything better than ‘magical-realist readymade’.

One might also with some justification consider it a heterodox music video. The music heard in the film is ‘Ory's Creole Trombone’, by Spike's Seven Pods of Pepper Orchestra. This band is none other than Kid Ory's Original Creole Jazz Band; the Pods of Pepper name was used for a couple of recordings on the fly-by-night Sunshine label in Los Angeles in 1922. In addition to being a lively & propulsive tune ideally suited to the gist of the picture, the cut also has historical cachet: it is the first jazz recording made by the music's black New Orleanian progenitors.

ID

film#281

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