Unstoppable Crises: Hurricane Katrina in Film and Media Representations

This paper examines how film and media representations have become a crucial tool of political response to the Katrina emergency, by framing it as emblematic of the compounded crises that so-called ‘extreme natural events’highlight, involving the exacerbation of social injustice and second class citizenship, the questioning of the relationship between natural phenomena and man-made disaster, and the special vulnerability of coastal cities to the effects of climate change. By analyzing four visual texts emerging from the Katrina crisis—Spike Lee’s When the Levee Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006), Carl Deal and Tia Lessin’s Trouble the Water (2008); HBO’sTreme (2009-2013), Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)—this paper frames eco-catastropheas a new conceptual paradigm of modernity