The Great Flood (2012)

THE GREAT FLOOD  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Bill Morrison
It might not have matched the scale of Noah's Ark, but for those who were caught up in it, the flood that devastated the lower Mississippi River Valley in 1927 was epic enough. More than 23,000 square miles of land ended up under water. A million people were displaced. Buster Keaton even changed the climax in "Steamboat Bill Jr." from a flood to a windstorm because of it. This movie is no Ken Burns-style history of the flood. It's an artful impression of what all that water did to the houses, farms, towns and lives that stood in its path. The footage is entirely archival, and some of the images have all but disintegrated, creating an eerie sense of time passing, memory fading, a cataclysmic event slipping away into history, the record forever imperfect and incomplete. There's no narration. No witnesses. No talking heads. Just a few chapter titles and a jazz score by Bill Frisell. The music's anachronistic, but it works. References to Jerome Kern's "Old Man River" come and go throughout. Parallels to Hurricane Katrina and the recent disasters in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico are inescapable.