"Revisiting Flaherty's Louisiana/Story"
Lush Wilderness and exploratory genius, natural wealth and mechanical power, these are visionary themes that have fostered and sustained the growth of America. Robert Flaherty found both in abundance as he created his own particular vision of Louisiana: the world-renowned documentary classic "Louisiana Story." Within Flaherty's 1949 microcosm of the American myth, the exotic Atchafalaya basin and surrounding area, with its unique and romantic Cajun dwellers, is joined to the engineering marvel of oil exploration, and an emerging world is created for the viewer.
For a United States growing into its role as a new world power, and a Europe struggling to recover from the devastation wrought by the Second World War, such a mid-century vision of natural beauty and modern progress became a marvelous endorsement of the elegance of the past and the possibilities of the future. Flaherty had taken his own engineering marvel--the movie camera--and combined it with the natural beauty of southern Louisiana to create a visionary world for the second half of the twentieth century.
These same themes--and their particular motifs--are still of great aesthetic and economic importance to today's Louisiana. The unique culture of Acadiana continues to draw visitors, artists, and scientists to this region. Oil remains a key segment of the economy. And Flaherty's machine--the camera--now revisits Louisiana as yet another aspect of a vibrant future.
Often proclaimed one of the founding fathers of documentary film, Flaherty made his first film, Nanook of the North, in 1921. His eouvre also includes Moana: A romance of the Golden Age (1926) and Man of Aran (1934). Louisiana Story was to be his last film.
At this point in a new century, the time is right to revisit the promises Flaherty examined, past and present, in a new exploration, one that uses Flaherty's own machine to revisit and recreate Louisiana. "Revisiting Flaherty's Louisiana/Story" is a documentary modeled around Flaherty's concern for the past and the future, for exploring our nostalgia for what was and our hope for what can be.
Using Flaherty's original piece for its framework, this video project will allow the inheritors of Flaherty's vision, the students of this state, to create six different "takes" on key themes and issues that were raised in "Louisiana Story" and that continue to encourage--and vex--Louisiana's struggle to achieve its potential: its natural beauty and resources, its cultural heritage, and the development and destruction that each have enjoyed and suffered. The project, sponsored by the HopKins Black Box theatre, the Film and Media Arts Program, and the Center for French and Francophone Studies at LSU, uses the power of digital video in the context of intensive historical, ethnographic, and artistic research to engage a company of a dozen LSU student filmmakers in an experiment in pedagogy.
Our student filmmakers will revisit not only the themes but also the sources of that original vision. J.C. Boudreaux, the boy "hero" of the original film, still lives in the region, and will be a key part of the piece. We plan as well to explore various sites on Avery Island, Weeks Island, and Bayou Petit Anse, where Flaherty and company were on location nearly 60 years ago. The region itself, with it s swamps, bayous, and prairies, is its own "character," and must be central to what is revisited and explored. The residents of Vermillion and Abbeville, past and present, will add to the ensuing vision, especially as we explore what has happened to Cajun culture and language in the last half-century. Finally, there are the looming figures of Katrina and Rita, and all that the hurricanes meant and mean to Louisiana, and our vision of it.
Guided by award-winning documentarian Rob Rombout, along with LSU professors Patricia Suchy, James Catano, and Adelaide Russo, students will produce a 52-minute video that will be screened November 9 and 10, 2006 in the HopKins Black Box theatre at LSU. Prior to this premier, there will be screenings of Rombout's documentary works and Flaherty's own "Louisiana Story." These works will provide a context for "Revisiting Louisiana" and considering whether our own vision of Louisiana is adequate to the next half-century of Louisiana's story.
Subsequent to the initial screening, the producers will continue to refine the work and to distribute it via television and festivals and to libraries, schools.
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