New York City just showed us what that might look like: more hot days, hotter hot days, and extreme rain events that will be more extreme. It also releases the gas, carbon dioxide, that is gathering in our atmosphere to heat up and destabilize our planet and threaten the future of human civilization as we know it. We've chosen instead to continue pulling coal and gas and oil out of the ground and to set fire to them at an alarming rate, a process which produces energy and lots of money for the people doing the burning. And the American West has a bit of a water problem, in that there isn't very much of it.īut it was America's most populous city that played host to a series of events this past week that may best encapsulate the range of horrors that await the human race now that we've proven ourselves determined to ignore the warnings of scientists. After all, it was 108 degrees in Paris on Thursday-and not Paris, Texas, either. "A lovely, wordless documentary.Perhaps we'll remember the week of Jas the first teaser trailer for the apocalypse. Put the two together the result moves up another creative and emotional level." -The Guardian Guitarist Bill Frisell's live soundtrack of howling blues chords, Thelonious Monk hooks, country-swing and Old Man River quotes would make a fine concert without a film, too. In closeup, it shows trickling streams and rain on cotton plants swelling into torrents cigar-toting politicians gesticulate reassuringly, and the wealthy making dignified retreats while the impoverished cling to the remains of shacks. " would be a memorable drama even played in total silence. " extraordinary confluence of talents and subject-matter." -The Telegraph "A history lesson so vividly immediate as to resemble a ghostly conjuration." -The L Magazine "Four stars! all the terror and pity that modern disaster footage imparts its subject to breathe anew. "Hypnotic, playful, wildly evocative…Masterfully assembled a terrific achievement." -LA Times history classes throughout the country." -The Daily Beast "This is cinema as art, and a classic." -LA Weekly "Archival wizard Bill Morrison's film finds lyricism in disaster" -The Wall Street Journal "Critic's Pick! Visual poetry, sublime" -The New York Times We see the images through a prism of history, but one that dances with the sound of modern music. These layers of visual information, paired with Frisell's music, become contemporary again. In THE GREAT FLOOD, the bubbles and washes of decaying footage is associated with the destructive force of rising water, the filmstock seeming to have been bathed in the same water as the images depicted on it. Playing guitar, Frisell is joined by Tony Scherr on bass, Kenny Wollesen on drums and Ron Miles on trumpet. The degraded filmstock figures prominently in Morrison's aesthetic with distorted images suggesting different planes of reality in the story-those lived, dreamt, or remembered.įor the score, Frisell has drawn upon his wide musical palette informed by elements of American roots music, but refracted through his uniquely evocative approach that highlights essential qualities of his thematic focus. All film documenting this catastrophe was shot on volatile nitrate stock, and what footage remains is pock marked and partially deteriorated. Louis and on up to Chicago.įor the film, Morrison scoured film archives, including the Fox Movietone Newsfilm Library and the National archives, for footage of the Mississippi River Flood. In the spring of 2011, as the Mississippi River was again flooding to levels not seen since 1927, Frisell, Morrison, and the band traveled together from New Orleans, through Vicksburg, Clarksdale, Memphis, Davenport, Iowa, St. THE GREAT FLOOD is a collaboration between filmmaker and multimedia artist Bill Morrison and guitarist and composer Bill Frisell inspired by the 1927 catastrophe. Musically, the Great Migration fueled the evolution of acoustic blues to electric blues bands that thrived in cities like Memphis, Detroit and Chicago becoming the wellspring for R&B and rock as well as developing jazz styles. Part of its legacy was the forced exodus of displaced sharecroppers, who left plantation life and migrated to Northern cities, adapting to an industrial society with its own set of challenges. In the spring of 1927, the river broke out of its earthen embankments in 145 places and inundated 27,000 square miles. The Mississippi River Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in American history.
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