A very short little film, part of a loose cycle of films (& other things), The Streets of New Orleans.
Topless (N. Villere St) (2008) Online
A very short little film, part of a loose cycle of films (& other things), The Streets of New Orleans. Shot during Carnival; 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, & ...
| Credited cast: | |||
 | Justin Eaton | - | Tourist #2 |
 | Henry Unwin | - | Tourist #1 |
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 and 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.