Always For Pleasure1978

"Always for Pleasure" is an intensive insider's look at Mardi Gras and the briad of musical traditions the annual celebration supports in New Orleans. It's a fairly shabby Southern city, with a touristy, almost tacky overlay. But beneath the overlay is something vital, something intimately acquainted with living and dying, that marketing cannot long disguise or distort. New Orleans has a gut-level mythic quality, a resonance unique among American cities. ALWAYS FOR PLEASURE amplifies that resonance. The film takes you to a jazz funeral where a brass band blows dirges on the way to the graveyard, then cuts loose on the way back. It takes you to pre-Mardi Gras practice parades, Mardi Gras celebrations and a St. Patrick's Day parade in the white working class neighborhoods. The second part of the film focuses on Mardi Gras celebrations in the black community, particularly on the annual revival of the black Indian tradition, in which working class blacks try to outdo each other in dancing, talking, and especially in the parading of hand-sewn Indian costumes of their own design. Most of all, there is an underlying sense of community, of an organic link with the past, that is both sobering and exhilarating, providing pleasure and responsibility. This is how I want to go out, says a young man at a funeral parade, with a little band behind me and my friends having a nice time. But I'm living now and I'm not going to wait, 'til I'm in the ground, laid out, to have fun in the streets. .