Viewing the Iconic Mississippi: Strategies of Reenactment in River Panoramas and Bill Morrison’s The Great Flood (2013)

The Mississippi River, Janet L. Whitmore writes, both reflected and delineated our frontier identity, and revealed itself to artists as a force to be “mapped, documented, and recorded in the hope of understanding its vast watershed” (57). Transcending efforts to describe and define it, the Mississippi can be seen as a “shifting mirror,” providing a “unique perspective to every individual who peers into its surface” (14). The Mississippi, so often linked to the shifting tides of Southern identity, has been central to key moments in the cultural and historical narrative of the South. This essay examines the nineteenth century Mississippi River moving panoramas and Bill Morrison’s experimental documentary The Great Flood (2013) as two views into such moments. I will discuss the Mississippi River panorama as a genre and cultural practice that can be understood as a precursor to the cinema. I will also discuss the aesthetic of reenactment shared by Bill Morrison’s film and the panorama, and Morrison’s emphasis on the materiality of the film stock in relation to the subject of the Great Flood of 1927.

Morrison achieved his reputation by appropriating and recontextualizing cellulose nitrate footage that has deteriorated due to the chemical instability of the film stock. I argue that Morrison’s alternating emphasis on the indexical and analogical aspects of the image positions the film as both a witness to historical events and a meditation on human mortality in relation to the iconic qualities of the Mississippi River. Morrison’s aesthetic approach to the Great Flood offers an intimate and respectful modified vision of Southern identity forged through struggle, survival, and migration.

One of the first white men to witness and chronicle the flooding of the river was a member of Hernando de Soto’s expedition. In 1543 Garcilaso de la Vega observed the river entering the gates of the Indian village Aminoya, near the future location of Greenville, Mississippi, and marveled at the way each side of river extended over sixty miles of land with nothing in view but the tree tops (Barry 173). By the mid-nineteenth century the Mississippi was firmly established in the American imagination, as evidenced by Abraham Lincoln’s characterization of the Mississippi as “Father of Waters” making its way “unvexed” to the sea. Plantation slaves, according to Lee Sandlin, referred to the Mississippi as the “Old Devil River” because of its habit of “playing bizarre and malicious tricks. A man would go to bed o n one side of the river and wake to find that it had changed course overnight and his property was now on the opposite bank . . . [If he went to sleep in a slave state, he might wake in a free state,” and find that his slaves had been freed, which is why some called the Mississippi the “abolitionist river” (29). Morrison’s film, through its assemblage of found footage, captures the many facets of the Mississippi: its monumentality, its power, its destructive force, and its capacity to overflow its banks and levees.

Flooding often accompanied the most dramatic redirection of the course of the river. On an annual basis, writes Sandlin, the river followed a familiar pattern: the upper Mississippi froze over in the winter, thawed in early spring and cascaded down in chunks, then in the following weeks, the meltwater swelled thousands of tributaries, causing the river to rise, following the basic form of horseshoe curves, technically known as “meander loops” which tend to form in continually reshaped equidistant patterns, forcing the water along the river’s outer curve to accelerate, while the water forming the inner curve simultaneously slows down and deposits silt, eroding the outer bank and building up of the inner bank (27–28). Eventually the increasing curves of the adjoining loops would touch, and the river would penetrate the banks, forming a new connection. If one were to map the perpetual formation and reformation of meander loops, the meander belt would reveal, in Sandlin’s words that “over the centuries the river had writhed around its current route like a nest...