event
Tchoupitoulas
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Thu Feb 7
7 pm
Tchoupitoulas at UWM Union Theatre
The questions over what’s real and what isn’t real in a documentary have followed the form ever since Robert Flaherty trained his camera on the Eskimos for 1922’s Nanook Of The North, and it can be hard to gauge where the truth lies in the spectrum between the obviously staged and the fly-on-the-wall, because the camera plays an ambiguous role in all scenarios. With their debut feature, 45365, Bill and Turner Ross sought to obliterate such distinctions altogether, returning to their hometown of Sidney, Ohio for an impressionist, experiential, highly aestheticized portrait of a Midwestern town. The Rosses continue in that mode for Tchoupitoulas, a hypnotic 80-minute drift through nocturnal New Orleans that seeks more to pick up on bits of culture and atmosphere than to tell any stories. They blow up the conventions of documentary realism to capture the city’s soul, a much more abstract, elusive undertaking.
UWM Union Theatre 2200 E. Kenwood Blvd., Milwaukee, WI
The questions over what’s real and what isn’t real in a documentary have followed the form ever since Robert Flaherty trained his camera on the Eskimos for 1922’s Nanook Of The North, and it can be hard to gauge where the truth lies in the spectrum between the obviously staged and the fly-on-the-wall, because the camera plays an ambiguous role in all scenarios. With their debut feature, 45365, Bill and Turner Ross sought to obliterate such distinctions altogether, returning to their hometown of Sidney, Ohio for an impressionist, experiential, highly aestheticized portrait of a Midwestern town. The Rosses continue in that mode for Tchoupitoulas, a hypnotic 80-minute drift through nocturnal New Orleans that seeks more to pick up on bits of culture and atmosphere than to tell any stories. They blow up the conventions of documentary realism to capture the city’s soul, a much more abstract, elusive undertaking.
Updated 02/06/2013
