737 Les Blank: Always for Pleasure

[swo17]

I'm pretty sure now that it's actually the same short that was advertised as "More Fess (1978)" in Criterion's initial announcement, given that it literally gives you more Fess (aka Professor Longhair) and that the footage dates back to 1978.

[swo17]

Here's a disc navigation guide for everyone's reference. The film lengths are also listed, which might be useful in planning when to watch some of the films.

DISC 1
The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins (w/ Skip Gerson, 1968) - 31
+ The Sun's Gonna Shine (w/ Skip Gerson, 1968) - 10
+ Mr. Charlie (w/ Skip Gerson, 1969) - 8
+ Lightnin' Les (w/ Skip Gerson, 1968) - 4
God Respects Us When We Work, But Loves Us When We Dance (w/ Skip Gerson, 1968) - 20
Spend It All (1971) - 43
A Well Spent Life (w/ Skip Gerson, 1971) - 44
Dry Wood (w/ Maureen Gosling, 1973) - 37

DISC 2
Hot Pepper (w/ Maureen Gosling, 1973) - 54
Always for Pleasure (1978) - 57
+ Lagniappe (2006) - 25
Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers (1980) - 50
Sprout Wings and Fly (w/ Alice Gerrard & Cece Conway, 1983) - 30
+ Julie: Old Time Tales of the Blue Ridge (w/ Alice Gerrard & Cece Conway, 1991) - 12
+ My Old Fiddle: A Visit with Tommy Jarrell in the Blue Ridge (w/ Maureen Gosling, 1994) - 18

DISC 3
In Heaven There Is No Beer? (1984) - 49
Gap-Toothed Women (1987) - 31
Yum, Yum, Yum! A Taste of Cajun and Creole Cooking (1990) - 31
The Maestro: King of the Cowboy Artists (1994) - 53
+ The Maestro Rides Again! (2005) - 29
Sworn to the Drum: A Tribute to Francisco Aguabella (1995) - 34

[zedz]

Until I saw swo's breakdown of the contents of this set in the Film Club thread, it hadn't really occurred to me that Criterion had avoided including any of Blank's feature length films in this set. Maybe if we're lucky they might form the basis of future standalone releases.

J'ai ete au bal is a wonderful music film, and could be paired with Marc and Ann. (It often used to be paired with Yum, Yum, Yum!, which did make the set.)

Innocents Abroad is a terrific film about American tourists 'doing' Europe. It's well outside the scope of the box, but maybe a release of that film could scoop up some of the other misfits like Chicken Real (a bizarrely charming industrial film that utilizes on its soundtrack every poultry-themed song Blank could think of).

All in This Tea is another outlier, and a film Blank was working on for many years. It's a bit 'straighter' and more expository than many of Blank's films, but is nevertheless really good. And it's got Werner Herzog in it!

The pop music films are fraught with their own legal challenges, but if those can be ironed out that would make for an incredible set of largely unseen, important material.

Perhaps the most glaring omission from the box is Chulas Fronteras and its companion film Del Mero Corazon, a couple of the most ravishingly beautiful music films ever made. They're major works and are designed to work as a pair, so this might be the most likely follow-up release if the box does well. Fingers crossed.

I don't know if the book accompanying the box set goes into this sort of detail, but Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers used to come with very specific screening suggestions. Because these films were distributed on 16mm and often got shown in non-commercial settings (film societies, community groups etc.) and unconventional venues (community halls, schoolrooms), Flower Films suggested that Garlic should be screened as an immersive, multimedia experience, with garlic being fried and garlic-infused dishes being prepared in or adjacent to the hall / room / cinema in which the film was being screened. The audience would enjoy an olfactorially-enhanced film screening, then partake of a communal feast afterwards. Recipes and diagrams for staging this kind of an event used to accompany prints of the film. Anyway, the brave among you might want to replicate this 'happening' in the comfort of your own home!

[warren oates]

Flower Films suggested that Garlic should be screened as an immersive, multimedia experience, with garlic being fried and garlic-infused dishes being prepared in or adjacent to the hall / room / cinema in which the film was being screened. The audience would enjoy an olfactorially-enhanced film screening, then partake of a communal feast afterwards. Recipes and diagrams for staging this kind of an event used to accompany prints of the film. Anyway, the brave among you might want to replicate this 'happening' in the comfort of your own home!

Who would have guessed that Les Blank's version of odorama would have predated John Waters'?!

[Gregory]

He did similar things with other films as well, as this LA Times article explains. This makes me ponder whether Burden of Dreams would be even better accompanied by the aromas of yuca fermented with saliva.

The garlic "aromaround" thing reminds me of a long time ago when I worked in an extremely rustic grocery store that often had problems with grain moths (pantry moths), and so the owner would put essential oil of garlic into atomizers every night to make the whole store smell strongly of garlic, which he believed was an effective natural insecticide or repellant. It was a pretty effective customer repellant as well!

[Adam]

Perhaps the most glaring omission from the box is Chulas Fronteras and its companion film Del Mero Corazon, a couple of the most ravishingly beautiful music films ever made. They're major works and are designed to work as a pair, so this might be the most likely follow-up release if the box does well. Fingers crossed.

But to the best of my knowledge, these exist on an in-print DVD. On Blank's website, there is even a link to it.
http://www.lesblank.com/?portfolio=chul ... teras-1976" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
So maybe a Blu-Ray, but I don't believe that Chris Strachwitz has any particular motivation to license the rights to Criterion.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Every film in the Criterion set has a DVD available from Blank's site except for three of the "bonus" shorts, so that doesn't tell us anything about what Criterion might or might not be able to license.

[D50]

The July 2014 interview with Chris Strachwitz, Meeting Mance, A Well Spent Life supplement, ties together Les' visual of Mance in front of the T. Moore building, while detailing how he 'found' him on a trip to Navasota, while tying in to Lightnin's first recording about Mister Moore. And you've already seen Mance jamming with Lightnin' in the back yard in the first doc - The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins.

[Bando]

He did similar things with other films as well, as this LA Times article explains. This makes me ponder whether Burden of Dreams would be even better accompanied by the aromas of yuca fermented with saliva.

The garlic "aromaround" thing reminds me of a long time ago when I worked in an extremely rustic grocery store that often had problems with grain moths (pantry moths), and so the owner would put essential oil of garlic into atomizers every night to make the whole store smell strongly of garlic, which he believed was an effective natural insecticide or repellant. It was a pretty effective customer repellant as well!

Speaking of the "odorama" phenomenon, I made the red beans and rice recipe included in the Always for Pleasure booklet.

Now, I'm a fair cook for a grad student, but... Verdict: Not good. I think it calls for way too much onion and possibly too much garlic. Heretical, perhaps, but the flavor is just completely overpowering. It may be I just don't really have a taste for the New Orleans palate. I now have an unbelievably huge pot of red beans and rice that I can barely gulp down without gagging. Your results may vary.

[Mr Sausage]

Thread open!

[matrixschmatrix]

I've only gotten to see two of these so far- Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers and Sprout Wings and Fly- but in both cases the feeling of richness and delight in what is being filmed is palpable, and something that only kind of comes across in the only Blank work I'd seen before (Burden of Dreams and Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe).

Sprout Wings and Fly reminded me a bit of Louie Bluie, a window into someone who carries a sense of a cultural world that feels pre film around with him, with this whole repetoire of songs and stories that are at most half recognizable, and a slightly drunken sly old man sense of humor. It doesn't feel nostalgiac, per se- there's too many stories of horrible death, often told with no hint of what emotion lies beneath it until a sudden sob or tear near the end, to feel like the work is pulling backwards into an imagined better past- but there is a sense that it's about an endangered species, a whole world that's going to be gone forever when Tommy and Julie go.

This is one where one doesn't think much of the filmmaking, as Tommy in particular so dominates the proceedings (though I appreciated that Blank shot the dancer's feet during the dancing scenes, which had a wild joy to them that reminded me of the Ford dictum about the beauty of dancing) but I think that's a strength of Blank's- his personality is expressed in whom he chooses to shoot (though this one was apparently something of a work for hire job) and what he thinks is interesting about them, but he gives what he shoots a sort of beautifully-shot-and-edited home movie quality, where one can feel like one is just sitting and experiencing first hand instead of having consciously to think of the intermediary of film.

That's less true of Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers, which is more of a kaliedoscopic work- it feels somehow like an entry from the most wonderful encyclopedia in the world, or a visual version of one of those little single recipe books L.Q. recommended a while back. Though there's actually more information in this than one might consciously realize, with enough about how garlic is grown, its culutural origins, the cuisines that use it, and especially the class issues around it to write a fair middle school report on the subject, that information always comes through in the form of guileless enthusiasm, people bubbling away about a favorite topic that one feels they never shut up about, in the most charming way.

I like how direct Blank is here in supporting the people who actually grow and process garlic, and I like that he has someone describe what he and a lot of people in the work say as "sounding like a hippy dipshit" without ever breaking the mood, or the obvious love for all these entire hippy dipshits- it's a work of powerful nerdliness, about something one might have imagined nobody is a nerd for. I am also, in real life, an extraordinarily picky eater who normally cannot enjoy depictions of merry eating because there's almost always at least one dish that I can't help but to imagine putting me off (I'm a deeply irritating person), but here- despite the large number of foods that should have triggered that in me- I didn't care much, because this isn't really food porn, it's warmth and joy and society porn. I want to live in a Les Blank film.

[zedz]

I've nearly finished the set, but I'll try to work through it methodically.

Overall impressions: what a delightful collection, and what a lovely set of extras. Blank often recycled outtakes into freestanding works, and that grand tradition continues here, and the bite-sized interviews / reminiscences are wonderful, concise, and with very little redundancy. Congratulations to the producer of the set for organizing everything so well.

The Blues According to Lightnin' Hopkins - This is something of an epochal film, and it's one I've seen many times before, but it's never been a particular favourite for some reason. Blank is already taking the principles of direct cinema and pushing them into his own distinctive shapes, and the resulting film is kind of a mix of Monterey Pop (free-floating observation of performance, with as much curiosity about the audience as the performer) and Portrait of Jason (direct address by a contentious / flamboyant personality), but Blank invests it with poetic diversions and a ramshackle sense of his own personality. With most of his films, you feel like your following his eye and his interest rather than viewing a conventionally constructed portrait of a person or topic. I guess I feel like those different aspects of the film aren't quite synthesized as organically as they would later be, and so the film, for me, feels like it's either too short (so the Blankian drift is a little constrained) or too long. But the music's great (and I'd like more of it), Lightnin' is great (and I'd like more of him), and a lot of the side observations are cherishable - I mean, in a few minutes of this film we see more black cowboys than in the entire history of the western up until this point - so why worry?

The Sun's Gonna Shine is a kind of awkward half-dramatization, which I'm glad was left out of the film, but it takes a while for the anecdote to get up and running and there's some fantastic ambient material while we're waiting. I actually think that including that material (and some of the other outtakes found in this set) could have made for a more satisfying parent film.

God Respects Us When We Work, But He Loves Us When We Dance - Perhaps the most characteristic title for a Blank film, but it's hardly a characteristic film, thank God. Goofy hippies cavort in a field. It's pretty laughable at this distance (watch out for the guy rubbing a balloon on another guy's face!), but harmless enough. More of a worry are the stylistic tics and tricks Blank employs to try and get into the groove, something he soon abandoned, to my eternal gratitude.

[swo17]

Ha! I'm afraid I agree with you on GRUWWWBLUWW--oh, I give up. Great title though.

[movielocke]

He did similar things with other films as well, as this LA Times article explains. This makes me ponder whether Burden of Dreams would be even better accompanied by the aromas of yuca fermented with saliva.

The garlic "aromaround" thing reminds me of a long time ago when I worked in an extremely rustic grocery store that often had problems with grain moths (pantry moths), and so the owner would put essential oil of garlic into atomizers every night to make the whole store smell strongly of garlic, which he believed was an effective natural insecticide or repellant. It was a pretty effective customer repellant as well!

Speaking of the "odorama" phenomenon, I made the red beans and rice recipe included in the Always for Pleasure booklet.

Now, I'm a fair cook for a grad student, but... Verdict: Not good. I think it calls for way too much onion and possibly too much garlic. Heretical, perhaps, but the flavor is just completely overpowering. It may be I just don't really have a taste for the New Orleans palate. I now have an unbelievably huge pot of red beans and rice that I can barely gulp down without gagging. Your results may vary.

I took a look at the recipe and I wouldn't cook that. 3 onions and a whole head of garlic to 2 ribs of celery a bell pepper and two cups of beans? Definitely sets off alarm bells for me. Usually you'd have a 2:1 ratio of onion to celery for any dish using both onion and celery. Three onions to two ribs of celery is closer to a 10:1 ratio, I would guess.

As for the garlic, in one or more of the cajun films, you see people adding the un-pealed whole head of garlic to pots of red beans of rice and other recipes, since the recipe doesn't specify mincing nor peeling the garlic I'm guessing tossing in the whole head is what blank means when he says to add it to the pot with everything else.

Old recipes are sometimes so mystifying, one of the most memorable I've run across was for quail which started off with this first instruction: "prepare as you would pigeons."

[Lemmy Caution]

Thanks for that interview (a month back).
This thread is a good primer before delving into the set.
I just picked it up earlier today and really had no idea what all was in there.
Didn't realize there was so much blues and NO music. Lightnin' Hopkins, Prof. Longhair, Clifton Chenier -- those are some standout performers. I didn't have a chance to see any of them perform live, as my NYC clubbing days were roughly from 1982-88, when many blues and jazz and soul greats were playing small clubs nearly every weekend. But Hopkins and Fess were gone by 1982, and I'm not sure if Clifton Chenier played in NYC during that period.
I think soon after the zydeco craze/breakthrough circa 1983, Chenier started having health issues, and it was mostly the next generation touring and cashing in.

[Ishmael]

Old recipes are sometimes so mystifying, one of the most memorable I've run across was for quail which started off with this first instruction: "prepare as you would pigeons."

I didn't know this until a couple days ago (this came up in a novel by John Barth that I'm reading), but apparently pigeons are called squab when they're prepared as food, and dishes containing them (e.g., pastilla) are apparently more popular in the Middle East. Now I want to try some. Preferably with a lot of garlic.

[zedz]

GRUWWWBLUWW

Really, swo, if you've got food poisoning, you're excused from the forum. Get well soon!

[danieltiger]

I more or less also agree on God Respects Us When We Work, But He Loves Us When We Dance. The use of entirely pre-recorded music is easily understandable as Blank couldn't afford sound equipment at the time, but it really only works because the whole thing is 20 minutes long. It's a neat look at a particular time, but it's mercifully short. The title is definitely the best part of this one.

[Shrew]

The Blues According to Lightning Hopkins- This is a lot of fun, but it can't help but feel like an inchoate version of Blank. As great as it is to get a portrait of Hopkins' community and others around him, there's just not quite enough of Hopkins there to feel like we get a true sense of him. The many tangents aren't so much distractions as they are part of a broader surface that we barely scratch. Louie Bluie is a really great point of comparison--they're similar takes on old, charismatic Americana musicians and the community around them, but Louie is more successful thanks to more time spent with the subject. Still, Blank and this film in particular must have influences (I haven't watched the extras on Louie, so sorry if they're full of Zwigoff raving about Blank).

Hopkins gets in a couple good stories (the one about swerving to avoid a pig in North Carolina is particularly great/awful), but it could have benefited a little more from seeing Hopkins interact with the community a bit more, or with someone equal to his charisma.

[Lemmy Caution]

I'm about 2/3rds of the way through the set, and rather ambivalent about it.
I like his subject matter -- blues and zydeco musicians, rural southern culture, garlic, polka, etc. He manages to capture some nice little moments and there are many flamboyant characters willing to show off for brief moments. But the films often are rather unsatisfying overall. Often I wanted more footage, or more structure, or more context added. I think the free-form 70's ethos -- a sort of don't-explain/let-it-flow style -- doesn't really make for a great documentary approach.

So far, I think the Clifton Chenier might be my favorite, though I still felt like I didn't really get a full sense of the man or performer. The garlic film didn't cohere and remained too loose and disjointed. There were also a lot more pig carcasses than I expected.

A good example of when I wanted more was when we see Professor Longhair performing at Tipitina's. It's all done in tight closeup on his face, which was an interesting choice, but I couldn't help wanting to see the band and instrumentation, the piano Fess was banging away on, the size of the audience, and even what the interior of Tipitina's looked like then. On the extra film of essentially outtakes, we do get to see Fess perform a medley and we see snippets of the band and the audience (looking kind of sparse, semi-interested and white). It also would have been nice if we could have seen Fess performing something other than his standard repertoire.

And in the Mardi Gras doc, Allen Toussaint and Irma Thomas appear briefly talking. Shame we couldn't get an anecdote or performance snippet from either of them.
Maybe my favorite part of the set so far was the half of the Mardi Gras film which focused on performances and the costumes of the Wild Tchoupitoulas. Where we stick with one thing for a long enough period of time that it starts to cohere.

[swo17]

A couple fun facts I learned while (but not from) watching this set:

- At the end of The Maestro Rides Again, we are treated to an atypically bitter graphic involving a middle finger and the phrase "The Original Flower Films." This finger is presumably pointed right at Drew Barrymore, who started her own production company called Flower Films in the mid-'90s (responsible for several films that she has starred in, including Donnie Darko) but who unlike Blank, bothered to trademark the name. As a result, I gather that Blank was only allowed to continue using the name until his death, which is why his production company was recently rebranded Les Blank Films.

- Over the weekend, I was watching the new Arrow edition of Killer Klowns from Outer Space, and imagine my surprise when I saw Harrod Blank (son of Les, featured in some of Criterion's extras) listed in the end credits...as one of the killer klowns!

[Lemmy Caution]

I generally find food/cooking on film rather dull, as it doesn't do much for me without the associated smell and taste (which is I guess why Les Blank would go up and down theater aisles with pots of red beans and rice, or garlic and such). So the garlic and Cajun and Creole Cooking films weren't terribly interesting to me. Not to mention the pig deaths.

And Gap-Toothed Women, while okay, was a rather thin reed to construct a film around.
So I was mentally checking out while the Les Blank set was winding down.
Then I ran smack into The Maestro: King of the Cowboy Artists.
An interesting subject who loves the attention and is quite prolific.
He kind of straddles the fence between folk/traditional/performance artist.
Quite a character, which is why his fence has three sides.

I like how in the extras he complains about not having been taken seriously as an artist and that Les Blank's film focused too much on the cowboy persona. But here's this guy dolled up in fancy cowboy gear he's made himself, calling himself the Maestro, leading an annual Maestro Day for a theater audience, involving a fair amount of cowboy related themes, etc. Not surprisingly the Maestro persona is a large part of what Blank captures and focuses on. Overall, this just seemed a more rounded portrait and better conceived than the early films. The Maestro film is definitely my favorite of the set. And the supplemental film and the extra added an extra layer to the subject.

[zedz]

I like how in the extras he complains about not having been taken seriously as an artist and that Les Blank's film focused too much on the cowboy persona. But here's this guy dolled up in fancy cowboy gear he's made himself, calling himself the Maestro, leading an annual Maestro Day for a theater audience, involving a fair amount of cowboy related themes, etc. Not surprisingly the Maestro persona is a large part of what Blank captures and focuses on.

I was pretty amused by that. If you don't want people to focus on the cowboy stuff, maybe you should ditch the schtick! If you're dressed as a cowboy all the time, what do you think the camera is going to record? I actually think that film is pretty remarkable for managing to get beyond all of Gaxiola's gimmicky trappings and give us a sense of the philosophical and artistic core of the man.

(Though I think that's also true of Gap-Toothed Women, which similarly uses an apparently frivolous surface topic to deliver complex and serious feminist content.)

[swo17]

I think Gap-Toothed Women is one of the most intriguing films on the set. It can be heartbreaking to see how a diastema affects some women's self-esteem, and yet at the same time, there are women who tell of how this inspired them to explore their creative sides, since they couldn't just "coast by on looks." I must say though, as a man with a slight gap, the film fails to address my #1 issue: my upper lip always getting caught in it.

[Lemmy Caution]

Gaxiola is such a restless, relentless sort.
He really tackles projects full-on.
Next thing you know, he's chiseling Chinese characters into the floorboards of his studio.
I almost felt worn out just watching him go about it.

As for me, I liked the whole package Gaxiola creates. I liked the Maestro persona as much as the varied artwork he produced.

At the end of The Maestro Rides Again, we are treated to an atypically bitter graphic involving a middle finger and the phrase "The Original Flower Films." This finger is presumably pointed right at Drew Barrymore, who started her own production company called Flower Films in the mid-'90s (responsible for several films that she has starred in, including Donnie Darko) but who unlike Blank, bothered to trademark the name.

The image is of professional badass Sonny Barger providing the one-finger salute. I assumed this was one of The Maestro's cutout figures.