BIG EASY CAUGHT ON CELLULOID.

Byline: JUDY O'ROURKE Staff Writer

SANTA CLARITA -- Members of a nonprofit group devoted to preserving and screening home movies wondered if it was premature, or even wise, to open their annual public screening event in New Orleans this year, two weeks before the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

Though areas in the city are still in ruins and many residents were intent on simply resuming their lives or commemorating the one-year mark, the film folks held the event.

``The devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina placed the historical record of New Orleans at great risk,'' said Brian Graney, one of the five decision makers and a film library technician for the UCLA Film and Television Archive, in Los Angeles. Its massive collections are due to be moved to Santa Clarita in a couple of years. ``We contacted people and they were uniformly enthusiastic.''

Under normal circumstances, watching flicks at Home Movie Day gingerly transports viewers to times past, where people and places change gradually over the years. In New Orleans, fragile celluloid images were sometimes the sole remnants of a world wiped out in one fell swoop.

``We lost 90 percent of our stuff,'' said filmmaker Helen Hill, a graduate of Valencia's California Institute of the Arts. Her water-logged 16mm film survived flooding in her Mid City home, located in the heart of New Orleans.

Hill earned a master's degree in experimental animation at CalArts in 1995, and was an artist in residence there about a month ago.

On Aug. 28, Hill, her husband and son returned to town from South Carolina, settling in a nearby home just in time to celebrate the year-mark at an event held at Louis Armstrong Park, where jazz began, where slaves gathered to play drums. The family might turn the tattered home into a studio or community center -- or both -- if the neighborhood reawakens.

Hill's film showed life as it was before.

``It was kind of ghostly when we were in her house, sitting on her porch. You could imagine what it looked like a year ago,'' said volunteer Dwight Swanson, an archivist at Appalshop, an arts and education center in Whitesburg, Ky., where films and videos, recordings and books are made.

Nation's worst catastrophe

The storm, which ripped through a 90,000-square-mile area -- about the girth of Great Britain -- was the nation's most catastrophic and costly natural disaster ever. It flattened tens of thousands of homes and its wrath and subsequent flooding altered the lives of more than 6 million people. Billions of federal dollars have been spent removing debris, providing aid and rebuilding loans, and subsidizing basic services in the most needy areas, which includes New Orleans.

Local film or historical groups usually host the screenings -- held worldwide the second Saturday in August since 2003 -- but in New Orleans those people had other priorities. After five months of planning and promotion, the volunteers converged from California, Kentucky, Tennessee and New York, hauling equipment and supplies. Graney, who arrived the day airports began enforcing the ban against stowing liquids or gels in hand-carried luggage, had already decided against transporting film-cleaning solution.

``I did make a last-minute call to leave out some equipment (though),'' he said. ``The guillotine splicer may have raised eyebrows.''

Projectors were set up Aug. 11 at the undamaged Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center near St. Charles Avenue -- one of the city's first theaters to reopen -- and Aug. 12 at the Historic New Orleans Collection, a museum and research center in the French Quarter.

Volunteers visit different venues each year, but none had staged screenings in a disaster zone. Films with minimal shrinkage were shown and in some cases the volunteers performed repairs. Those with damaged films were referred to preservation labs, and some with unique reels were referred to archivists.

A crowd of roughly 50 watched about 15 films Friday, followed by about 25 folks viewing five films Saturday.

`A city of neighborhoods'

In Hill's nostalgic black-and-white ``before'' footage, neighborhood kids are seen running around, yelling, pushing scooters -- and her physician husband, Paul Gai-Liunas, is pictured swinging one child by his hands.

``I was watching CNN pretty obsessively right after Katrina and one thing that kept coming true is how New Orleans seemed to be a city of neighborhoods,'' Swanson said. ``I realized as I was watching (her film) that a lot of the history of the city is not going to be represented or shown in any official histories. What I feared was going to be lost was the history of the neighborhoods and the history of the families as they were being displaced.''

A friend of Hill's, New Orleans-based experimental filmmaker Courtney Egan showed her version of the aftermath depicted in Hill's film, intercutting the decayed black-and-white frames with color footage Egan shot in the same spots a couple of months ago. The contrast is great -- Egan's frames are vivid but the neighborhood's vitality is gone, replaced by overgrown weeds and debris.

Both films were shown.

``Living here, every day that you step outside you mentally compare everything, `That's gone, oh this looks awful now, this is fixed up,''' Egan said. ``It's a daily catalog everybody goes through of their neighborhood path they travel on a daily basis.'' Her area was not flooded, so Egan was displaced for just a month. Graney raved over a couple of reels of parade footage brought in by others.

``Parades in New Orleans are like nothing else you see,'' he said. One was a 1952 Mardi Gras film shot on Kodachrome, a home movie donated to the Historic New Orleans Collection. Another showed a 1963 jazz funeral procession, also part of the collection.

``The fun thing about parade film, it had music,'' Graney said. ``The Barry Martyn jazz quartet accompanied the films, and during the parade films (the musicians) recognized a lot of the musicians performing in the parades. They were chiming in to identify old friends they spotted, while playing.''

He always hopes someone in the room will be able to give the films context.

``It's one thing when people can identify a street. When people know the name of a guy holding the trombone, it's something else,'' Graney said.

Local event held

At Santa Clarita's event held Aug. 12, a man seated several rows behind a woman who showed 30-year-old Super 8 footage from her home on a remote South Pacific island also had memories of the place. He had been serving in the Marine Corps, stationed in Guam, and by chance hopped aboard a Coast Guard mail run to the island in 1949. The two had never met.

Rene Broussard, Zeitgeist's founder and director, whose sizeable house in the hard-hit Lakeview area held 10 1/2 feet of standing water for a month, lost everything after the hurricane, including his video and editing equipment and two documentary projects he had spent more than 400 hours filming. Graney dubbed Broussard's entry -- shot with one hand on the steering wheel, the other gripping a hand-held camera that captured the town as it reopened to business owners -- ``surreal.''

``There were thousands of vinyl and cardboard signs placed on (medians) advertising for mold removal, house gutting, roof, electric, plumbing, every kind of repair or demolition need,'' Broussard said. ``They just let people back in legally ... I'm wondering how did these signs get there? You couldn't go anywhere in the city without seeing rows and rows of these signs.''

On his stereo he cranked up ``Little Bit of Rum,'' a ``moving song'' by Shreveport-based band Dirtfoot, for the soundtrack.

Broussard donated the use of the theater. His sister, who had worked for the New Orleans Museum of Art for 20 years, lost her house and her job as the museum's associate marketing director for tourism -- which is not a big business right now.

Stasia Wolfe -- who works at the Historic New Orleans Collection and helped with the event -- closed escrow on her Los Angeles home the Friday before Katrina hit. She missed the hurricane, having returned to the West Coast for a week, but her husband evacuated to Lafayette with neighbors he had met hours before.

Santa Clarita resident Rhonda Vigeant, who founded Santa Clarita's Home Movie Day and owns Burbank-based film company Pro8mm, did not go, but she provided all of the supplies: pickup reels, leader, a splicer and splicing tape.

Though attendance was light, Graney pronounced the event a success. Swanson agreed, saying the group will build on its many New Orleans connections next year. He is helping others create an online guide to disaster recovery for home movie collections, and hopes to return to New Orleans next year.

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Photo:

A scene from the film ``Cleveland Street Gap.'' The movie's filmmaker, Helen Hill, recovered it from her flooded house in the New Orleans neighborhood of Mid City and had it restored by San Francisco filmmaker Alfonzo Alvarez.