Normally, when I scan the New Orleans Film Fest line-up for titles I might be interested in, I rely heavily on the “Narrative Features” filter on their lineup.  This year, I only caught a couple narrative films in-person at the festival: the Zambian funeral drama On Becoming a Guinea Fowl and the Australian stop-motion comedy Memoir of a Snail.  Most of my NOFF selections were filed under the “Documentary Feature” tab instead, and I watched them at home.  All of the documentaries I caught at the festival were intimate portraits of on-the-fringe artists – most empowering, one eerily alienating.  They’re also all still currently available to stream on the festival’s Virtual Cinema portal through the end of this weekend.

So, here’s a quick-takes round-up of all the documentary features I watched during the 35th annual New Orleans Film Festival.  It’s a short but commendable list, one that will make me think twice about my small-minded Narrative Feature biases in future years (and maybe about getting out of the house to see them in-person).

Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story

The Jackie Shane whose story is told in the Canadian-streamer documentary Any Other Way was a popular R&B singer turned agoraphobic recluse – the kind of life-changing discovery you always hope to find whenever you dig through dusty record crates.  Shane was a transgender woman who performed in 1950s & 60s nightclubs in a “flamboyant” boymode persona, a younger contemporary and friend of the similarly styled Little Richard (to the point where early concert posters listed her as “Little Jackie”).  Her early notoriety as a stage act was earned through singing raucous vocals while playing drums in a standing position, which upped the rock ‘n roll theatricality of her shows.  Later, she leaned into the gender-nonconformity of her stage persona by introducing more women’s clothes into her onstage wardrobe, moving from Nashville to Toronto to mitigate the policing of her race & gender.  Her work got increasingly personal, culminating in a confessional live-recording LP that the movie cites as her magnum opus.  Then, she suddenly disappeared from public life, moving again to California and, eventually, back to Tennessee to fully embody her transgender identity, giving up fame for personal authenticity.  It’s both a shame that she was pressured into sacrificing one for the other and a shame that she didn’t live long enough to fully actualize the career resurgence that she was on the precipice of enjoying in the 2010s, when her trans identity was less of a professional liability than a basic fact.

The other shame about Jackie Shane is that there isn’t much video of her performing her music, with the exception of a single televised performance that was almost lost to archival neglect.  She did a wonderful job acting as her own archivist, though.  There’s a wealth of audio, still photographs, journals, costumes, and other artifacts that Any Other Way transforms into an art gallery installation in Shane’s honor.  Some Loving Vincent-style rotoscope animation helps fill in the gaps, with two actresses hired to portray Shane as both a young stage performer and an older shut-in who only communicated with her documentarians by phone in lengthy, candid interviews.  Those actresses are also interviewed about how Shane’s story resonates with their own relationships with transgender identity, which adds another layer of context & thematic depth to the usual talking-head style interviews with the music-historian nerds who most appreciate her as a stage act. Jackie Shane is recreated as a lip-synced watercolor in motion, living on in anecdotes about the time she headlined a popular Toronto nightclub for 10 weeks straight or the time she upstaged Etta James (and, according to some photographs, stole her wig).  It’s a loving tribute to an incredible artist who’s in danger of continuing to slip into obscurity without it, since there’s so little reference material in the world outside of Shane’s storage unit & surviving acquaintances.

Eponymous

In a way, Eponymous is also a portrait of an obscure artist, but it’s more of an exorcism than a tribute.  Hiram Percy is most legendary for his invention of the gun silencer, having already been born into wealth as the son of Hiram Maxim, inventor of the fully automatic machine gun.  Less notably, he was also an amateur filmmaking enthusiast in the early years of the medium, experimenting with the techniques & uses of cinematography in the early 20th century.  This is a complicated legacy for Caroline Rumley, an experimental filmmaker married to a descendent of Hiram Maxim, who shares his ancestors’ name.  Eponymous is an essay film in which Rumley voices her discomforts marrying into a family best known for inventing new, efficient ways to kill human beings in the arts of war & murder.  She struggles with that in-law familial history through hushed narration, imposed onto footage shot by Hiram Percy Maxim in his independent-artist days as an early filmmaking pioneer (with particular attention paid to the double meaning of the word “shot” in filmmaking and weaponry).  Diaristic notes from Percy detail the evolution of amateur, at-home filmmaking from simple portraiture to travel documentation to magic tricks to visual poetry.  Meanwhile, Rumley reaches for the next evolution in the medium, now that it’s aged into a century-old artform: cursed windows into the past.

There are a lot of personal essay films out there illustrated by menacing home video footage, but usually that footage isn’t over a hundred years old, which gives this one a genuinely haunted feeling . . . Well, that and all the talk of machine gun deaths.  The clips are often short, due to the physical and financial limitations of the home-movies medium in the early days of motion picture cameras.  The way Rumley loops, reverses, and teases out those images in close-up study illustrates her fall down an especially dark family-history rabbit hole in obsessive detail.  Some of her choices in presentation can be a little difficult to parse—including a bold white line that often bifurcates the frame—but the intense intimacy of the film suggests that it wasn’t made with an audience in mind outside her of own head anyway.  On Becoming a Guinea Fowl was the best film I saw at the festival about a familial legacy of violence buried just beneath a cheery surface of social niceties, but Eponymous was the one with the more fascinating visual textures – the one that fixated on the art of the moving image.

I Love You, AllWays

A more recent document of D.I.Y. art history can be found in Stuart Sox’s I Love You, AllWays, a loving tribute to the dive-bar cabaret that hosts most of New Orleans’s best drag & burlesque shows.  A spiritual sequel to Sox’s Decadence-weekend hustle doc To Decadence, With Love, this temporal check-in on the local drag scene mostly focuses on the first couple years of COVID, when the venue barely squeezed by to survive.  Even though it’s still recent history, it’s an emotionally tough time to revisit, dragging the audience back to an era when virus variants & vaccination dodgers prolonged a never-ending social lockdown, made doubly devastating by the local impact of Hurricane Ida just as things were headed in a positive direction.  That framing hit me hard, since I used to regularly attend shows at The AllWays until the pandemic, when I abruptly lost the momentum.  There’s even a shot of the calendar from the month they had to close in 2020, and you can clearly see a listing for the Joni Michell drag night I went to right before doing absolutely nothing outside my house (besides work) for about two years.

While The AllWays’s function as a queer communal hub can lead to a lot of passionate interviews with its owner and regular performers, there is something a little silly about taking this subject so seriously.  After intense emotional stress about what New Orleans life & culture would be without the AllWays, the venue bounces back to host the exact kind of pantomimed sexual anarchy it’s been home to for years: curbside peep shows, a twerking-Jesus passion play, and a burlesque performer pegging a watermelon with a strap-on dildo like the modern, erotic equivalent of Gallagher.  I’d be lying if I said the film’s appeal to pathos didn’t work on me, though.  Its genuine, soul-deep love for The AllWays made me so warmly nostalgic for pre-COVID drag shows there that I consciously overlooked its anachronistic VHS tape-warp filters that aimed to induce that nostalgia the cheap way (considering how much less that aesthetic marker has to do with the era it’s recalling than its other visual devices, like its vertical-video smartphone footage or its hesitantly typed Facebook posts).  The good news is that there’s no need to be nostalgic at all, really.  From what I can tell passing by, The AllWays appears to be just as lively today as all the other live performance venues on that busy strip of St. Claude Ave; I just need to start showing up again to get back into the flow of things.

The Flamingo

I said that all four of these documentaries are portraits of artists, and I guess Mary “The Flamingo” Phillips is the one I’d most have to make a case for that to be true.  Defined in The Flamingo mostly as a late-blooming divorcee who became a 60-something dominatrix after being turned on by the Fifty Shades of Grey book series, Phillips functions more as a sex therapist than as an artist.  She does paint and pose for visual art outside of her dungeon space, though, and she has turned her domme persona as The Flamingo into a visual branding project, decorating her body and her living spaces with as much pink-flamingo iconography as they can accommodate.  The Flamingo is, of course, a kind of performance in itself, as alluded to by the terminology of her craft in words like “scene” and “play.”

As straightforward as The Flamingo is in documenting Phillips as she binds, spanks, swaddles, and dirty-talks her scene partners, the movie is admittedly less about the mechanics of her artistry than it is about the effect that artistry has on her plainclothes persona.  She’s found renewed confidence & self-worth in the kink & polyamory scenes, often stressing that her fulfilment in these activities has little to do with penetrative sex; she’s finding herself by becoming someone else.  That inward search makes for a calm, gentle, meditative portrait despite its often-salacious images & subject.  It’s the kind of unrushed doc that will linger on the rippling waves of pool water or the squawking birds of its title for a half-minute of stationary reflection before moving onto the next stop in Phillips’s daily rounds.  Even her interviews play like a casual chat over morning coffee rather than an all-important revelation in a moment of great personal upheaval.  It’s nice.

-Brandon Ledet