The photo I posted yesterday of Louis Black and Jackie “the Jokeman” Martling was taken at a dinner for Margaret Brown’s documentary competition film The Order of Myths. Margaret is the Austin filmmaker also responsible for the lovely musician portrait Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Sant. Her new film examines the culture of Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama, the location of the oldest running Mardi Gras festivities in the country. Two separate organizations govern the celebrations: one for whites and one for blacks. In the process, she provides a unique look at the remnants of segregation and racism in America today, institutions that, over the decades, have grown in subtlety and as a consequence of universal complacency. The film smartly avoids blame-mongering in favor of a display of the deep roots of our racial enculturation and complacency. We’ll have much more to say about Brown’s film when it inevitably plays in Austin.

This article appears in January 18 • 2008.

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Marjorie Baumgarten is a film critic and contributing writer at The Austin Chronicle, where she has worked in many capacities since the paper's founding in 1981. She served as the Chronicle's Film Reviews editor for 25 years.