737 Les Blank: Always for Pleasure

[zedz]

I thought there'd be more people joining in on a chronological watch, but anyway. . .

Spend It All - A charming and richly informative film. Blank seems to still be finding his way with structure, or perhaps more correctly, with reconciling his own personal sense of structure (which is more immersive and evocative of personal discovery) with documentary norms and expectations. In this film, titles do the heavy lifting of exposition, which is something Blank would integrate a little more organically in later works, but on the other hand, how many people back in 1972 knew all about Cajun history? And in the absence of 'found' garrulous experts, some onscreen text is much more palatable than an authoritative voice over telling us "the facts" and pushing the voices of the people themselves to the margins.

A Well Spent Life - This (apart from Chicken Real, which isn't in the set) is the first Blank film that I really love, and it's one of my absolute favourites of his work. The structural anxieties of some of the earlier films are tossed aside in favour of gorgeous free-floating impressionism, adding up to a film that's gentle, bucolic and philosophical while also being a more than decent portrait of its artist. It seems to me to go deeper than the previous films and give us a more complete picture of its subject, and of Blank's own priorities.

Dry Wood and Hot Pepper - It's a little perverse that these two films are isolated on separate discs, as they've been joined at the hip since birth, and even in the extras Maureen Gosling et al. speak of them in one delicious mouthful. Dry Wood is the more adventurous of the pair, and demonstrates another strategy in Blank's ongoing mission to communicate an entire culture without narrating it. In this instance, he drops us directly into a new culture at its most alien - a different language, bizarre masks and costumes, idiosyncratic rituals - and then slowly 'normalizes' them by providing more familiar frames of reference (e.g. a shift from the purely Creole ritual of the opening to the Christian ritual of Ash Wednesday) or universal structural categories (the film boils down to a fresco of labour and play, both of which are formalized and culturally inflected).

Hot Pepper tackles similar material from a more conventional perspective. Like A Well Spent Life and The Blues According to Lightnin' Hopkins before it, it's a portrait of a (very great) artist, but it's equally a portrait of the artist's community context: Lafayette. And here Blank is not far from that perfect balance he struck in the Lipscombe film.

[Lemmy Caution]

I might be wrong, but it seemed like after the early titles Les Blank had others (primarily?) edit the material. I would assume Les (Blank) was involved, but I think Maureen Gosling and later Chris Simon, two of his key female assistants, get the editing credits for many of the mid to late films.

One problem I have is remembering which quirky/colorful title goes with which film.
Dry Wood? Er ...
Hot Pepper? Is that the Clifton Chenier one?
A Life Well Spent? I think that's Mance Lipscombe.
And the only reason I think I'm right about the last two is that I really made an effort to remember which title goes with which film. Especially for the films I liked, and to be able to comment on the films here. And still I wouldn't be surprised if I'm wrong.
And by next week, I likely won't be able to match subjects and titles any more.

Guess I'd prefer a subtitle, something such as Hot Pepper: Or Clifton Chenier's Electric Fingers. Mance Lipscombe: A Life Well Spent. Etc.
Basically Les (is it okay to call the director by his first name if everybody does in the extras? -- I mean, nobody says Les Blank) uses this approach for The Maestro: King of the Cowboy Artists.
While The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins and Gap-Toothed Women have more conventional, easily recognizable titles.

[Lemmy Caution]

A few extra thoughts:

I think I would have preferred starting with the most recent Les Blank films and working back to his early films. That is, going through the set from back to front. I think having first experienced his later more coherent, mature works, I would have been more sympathetic to his early works.

In general, I like starting from a filmmaker's early period and following the chronological output. But sometimes it's better to experience mature works first and then seek out the early efforts. I'd have to think about it where this applies, but I think this approach would be best for say Fassbinder and other artists who don't start off fully formed, but grope and develop their way to a significant body of work.
___________________________________
Swo's breakdown is of course for the 3-disc Blu set.
On Deeveedee it's a 5 disc set and I think the order is slightly different.
____________________________________

For anyone who watches Hot Pepper and wants to hear more from the great Clifton Chenier, a few tunes I'd rec:
My Soul (1955), a boss R&B tune with tremendous energetic vocals, and a real foreboding rhythm. Just a great great tune. I love the way it builds and crescendos.
Things I Did For You is in a similar R&B vein, and similarly dynamite.
Baby Please is more in line with classic 50's New Orleans R&B (more sax and less emphasis on the accordion here)
Eh, Petite Fille and Jole Blonde are two of his signature tunes, with the latter a chance to hear Chenier and band work a ballad.

[zedz]

Plugging on amidst the tumbleweeds!

Always for Pleasure covers so much ground so economically that it serves as an ideal primer for Treme. Just about the only social or cultural reference that appears in this film that didn't ultimately emerge as a plot point of that show is the existence of Squaws amongst the Mardi Gras Indians. Lots of fun, with some great music (though Fess's live rendition of 'Big Chief' is rather muted compared to the wild, Wardell Quezerque-produced original). It is one of the films that feels a little constrained by its running time (presumably owing to the need for TV sales) but Lagniappe scoops up some fine outtakes (and sticks them in a conventional structure, but never mind).

Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers - Perhaps the quintessential Les Blank film, but I have to confess it's not one of my favourites. It's firmly in his preferred mode: rambling, entertaining and fundamentally celebratory. Blank wants to enthuse us about his own enthusiasms, and he'd be disappointed if we walked away from Always for Pleasure without wanting to track down the Wild Tchoupitoulas album, or this film without a craving for garlic. Normally, that's just fine with me, but with this film Blank and his resident garlic geeks just seem too insistent. Maybe it's because I've never remotely considered garlic to be a culinary 'outsider', as various people here try to assert. It's a simple cooking staple (and thus really not that interesting?), so in the absence of any other angle, the evangelical one seems over the top to say the least. The life in so many of his films comes from their shared sense of discovery (which Blank is expert at communicating), but that approach seems really forced with this subject matter.

Sprout Wings and Fly - This film may be charming and slight, but it's so much more satisfying. All it does is hone in on a single personality and surrende itself to his charisma. Tommy Jarrell simply tells stories (wonderfully) and plays songs (wonderfully). There's not much more to it than that, but you don't need much more than that to make a fine documentary, and the sense of a living, breathing community seeps in naturally around the edges.

My Old Fiddle - And here's where things get really interesting. The film is cobbled together from outtakes from Sprout Wings and Fly, but they're the kind of outtakes that most documentary filmmakers would have tagged as A material: the film's subject delivering central biographical anecdotes; a high concept set-piece in which the backwoods folk musician gets a chance to play a Stradivarius at the Library of Congress. I think almost every other doc maker would make that latter story the climax of their film, but Blank decided to leave it on the cutting room floor. Tommy Jarrell and Sprout Wings and Fly just didn't need that kind of external validation to justify their existence.

Julie - Even more outtakes, this time from interviews with Jarrell's elderly sister. It's understandable that Blank didn't want to dilute his original portrait, but these are gold - no wonder he wanted to preserve them. Such a sweet film.

[Shrew]

Spend It All- Fun and informative, and another great attempt at capturing the feeling of a community. I for one didn't know the history of Acadia, so the infodump text was useful, and preferable to the other options I can imagine: either a discursive, joke-filled history from a local expert that goes on forever, or an intrusion by some historian from Tulane. I do wish that Blank would have explored a bit more of the black cowboys we glimpse at the horse racing here, just to see how the two communities were interacting around this time, but that would have been another film.

Garlic is as Good as 10 Mothers-Definitely my favorite so far, and the only one I'd seen before. In some ways, the film is more of a time capsule than the others, as garlic is still around (even more so) in a way that southern Blues and cajun culture isn't. With internet foodie culture, garlic has become the norm in the kitchen of just about anyone who's stepped outside their grandmother's cookbook, but in the US at least, there have been long-standing prejudices against garlic. Blank and his garlic lovers suggest a class/WASP/Puritan anti-garlic sentiment at work, though I think its far more complex. I remember my working-class Irish Catholic grandmother complaining about how one of the Italian families at church always reeked of garlic, and my mother had never seen anyone cook with fresh garlic until I made a stirfry while visiting home 5 years ago.

Anyway, the best part is probably Herzog randomly popping up with a simultaneously informed and bewildered take on garlic.

[swo17]

He being an expert for having recently made a film about a vampire (that forgot to include anything about garlic in it!). Regarding zedz' criticism of the film's subject being uninteresting, I think the main draw here is all the wild theories about garlic being more than just a simple cooking staple, having mystical curative properties, etc. (hence the title's suggestion that a clove of garlic can do much more for you than can your own mother).

[mfunk9786]

It's also food porn to the nth degree

[Minkin]

hence the title's suggestion that a clove of garlic can do much more for you than can your own mother.

Well, for attracting a mate at least.

I just received the set and won't have time at the moment to start digging through it (although I'm very excited to). Since we're on the subject of the Garlic Festival, I'd recommend this television documentary visit to the 25th anniversary of the festival (if I don't mention it is Huell Howser, will people actually watch it? ). I might imagine some of the characters from Blank's film might show up + you can see what the festival has become (garlic ice cream, etc).

[knives]

You guys weren't kidding about God Loves Us which is pretty awful in every way, but I can't help and think that it offers something in its short runtime which could be interesting if developed and refined a great deal better. Parts of it suggest an almost Vertovian display of montage adapting to the rather awful Hippy reality versus the more bearable (on the audience) Soviet reality. I'm really glad he didn't continue down this direction, but it would be interesting to see someone try to continue these basic ideas if to less obnoxious subjects.

[scott80]

The third disc would not play. I requested a replacement from Amazon. Is there anyone else experiencing the same problem? Thanks!

[Lemmy Caution]

The Gilroy Garlic Festival is one town over from where my brother lives. I've never been, but I'm sure he has. So I was hoping to see more of the festival and get a feel of what it is like.

[movielocke]

Luckily I had been typing my thoughts on the films into Word as I saw them, I attempted to post this before the new year, but the only time I've had my computer on to do so the forum was unreachable due to SQL errors.

I've since finished the set, but haven't put together responses to all the films, the best extra is the Maestro speaks, as his bitterness at not being recognized as a "true artist" for his virtueousness is eschewing compensation is fascinating, and the extra sort of completes the portrait of him in a different way, Blank's bio portraits are almost never bitter, particularly not at the end of life, so it's a startling revelation to have an unfiltered-by-Blank statement from one of his subjects.

A Well Spent Life is the masterpiece of this set. Mance, his wife, the beautiful camera work and the laconic cultural… density… of the piece makes the film absolutely rise above the others. Mance reminds me of everything great about my cashpoor farmer grandparents. The fucking fences, I’ve built fences like that, with my grandfather one summer. Why is the just seeing his barbed wire fence with homemade fence posts so powerful to me? Also coffee. Goddamn that coffee looked amazing. This whole thing was almost too much, sunovabitch, Blank is becoming one of my new heroes. I wish I’d discovered these films twelve years ago.

Dry Wood is a brilliant short that plays like a slightly hungover memory of a loud family weekend. I know there was some cooking in Spend it All, but here the second half of the film the food takes over. Family is about food, after all, and while the first section embeds us, the second section is for your average weekend of extravagant communal feasting.

Hot Pepper funnily enough is not about food. The film feels more like an expanded version of Lightning Hopkins but with a slightly less compelling central figure and it’s not so well paced as the other films. For me, so far, this film has been the only real disappointment of the set. I don't think he ever trusted Les, and the whole filming process made him nervous, he's the only subject who isn't very natural or at ease on camera.

Always for Pleasure almost feels like an anthology film, and that initially left me feeling like it was one of the weaker efforts. On the other hand I wound up splitting up the viewing as I was starting to fall asleep, so some of that impression is probably my fault, and it's an impression I think is largely wrong. Watching the special features, I can see how they structured the film in the edit and that definitely gives me more appreciation for how it flows, but it still lacks the focus given to the other films that precede it. I feel like Les was obligated to make a Mardi Gras film, but he wound up enamored of the Indians (and this film gives me way more context for the mostly unexplained huge Indian presence on Treme), but there wasn't an opportunity to form a film just about the Indians, so he had to combine them into the Mardi Gras film. Speaking of Treme, it was also great to get an explanation of the Second Line and see the funeral procession which are also central to the series. I’d planned on finally watching those final five episodes, and now I’m really in the mood to finish it off.

Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers is a little bit of a revelation considering where organic, local, sustainable and other buzz words of the current food scene are all at. I sort of had a ‘this was where it all began’ moment seeing the raw enthusiasm of the nascent movements that now have found global success with international grocery chains (whole paycheck), fast food franchises (chipotle), and a complete revolution of the American restaurant scene. Which is of course wildly inaccurate. I feel like if I’d seen this ten years ago I would have been lamenting how almost nothing had changed in thirty plus years, and that local/organic/sustainable etc was still breathtakingly rare, luxuries of enclaves of close knit aging hippy communities in rural California; today I go visit Missouri and am completely blown away at how much things have changed just because there is access to these options everywhere now. The film is certainly a celebration of garlic, as its title indicates, but as the editor points out, they structured the film deliberately in reverse order so that the final piece you have is of the garlic being grown and harvested in the fields. That changes things to make you think not just about the joys of great food but about the whole system of farm-to-table which encompasses the restaurant industry, or at least for me it did. The film certainly made me think much more about food than made me hungry. The Cajun films made me hungry, this film made me thoughtful.

Sprout Wings and Fly is unbelievable, wonderful and another superb surprise. My wife couldn’t understand the language, which I found amusing. We found this out because I was laughing hard at the opening tall tale and she said, “wait, what, something about a toe?” Tommy Jarrell is basically my Uncle Rick, if my uncle could sing or play an instrument. They have the same style of storytelling, down to the tempo, pauses, delivery and satisfaction at delivering a whopper of a story. I’ve never actually asked my uncle about his moonshining father and uncles, but now I’m going to record it next time I see him, my mom’s versions of the stories seem somewhat sanitized, mostly vague tales about the lengths they went to for avoiding the revenuers. And my goodness, the old women in this film are almost my favorite thing ever. I’m so glad there’s a whole separate film with his sister, I found her just as mesmerizing as her gregarious brother. These films are reminding me that the whole country is suffused with people and stories long neglected by coastal/suburban oriented filmmaking. I’m not sure that they’re making me homesick as much as they’re making me feel relieved that someone recorded these stories and sad that I hadn’t ever seen a filmmaker talk to anyone in the deeply rural parts of the country.

[zedz]

More!

In Heaven There Is No Beer? is kind of a generic Blank documentary for me, because I have practically no interest in polka music, but I can't claim the same for Blank: he seems to be totally involved in his subject. The film features one of the most prominent and amusing of his Hitchcockian cameos (dunking a woman at a wet t-shirt competition), and when we get a look at a jukebox we see that one of the tunes available to play is "In Heaven There Is No Beer?' by Les Blank & His Flowers. My lack of interest in the music allowed me to pay a little more attention to the structure, and I realize that he generally has a kind of two- or three-to-one primary to secondary content ratio going. You get a little bit of exposition, then a big slab of music. Blank is antsy about too much filtering of his subjects and he'd much rather proselytize through raw exposure than argument. My distance also made many of the films conventional platitudes just seem all the more platitudinous: "Hey! The polka is getting pretty damn popular with the young'uns nowadays!" "Right on, brothers and sisters! Listening to the polka is a blow against the mass media!" So that's what Peter Watkins films have been missing all these years: wall to wall polka music. I've got to give honourable mention to the appearance of a man named Dick Pillar (!) and the unexpected return of the trippy-dippy 'let's follow a bubble and see where it leads us' shot from GRUWWWBLUWWD.

Gap-Toothed Women - A really great film, and one that only Blank (and his collaborators) could have delivered. It's charming and whimsical, but it's also subtly empowering, and that's one of its secret strengths, since it's a film that obviously classifies women by their appearance (and Blank makes no secret of the fact that he finds that key trait really sexy) but has the intelligence and wit to get immediately beyond that. It's a rare 80s film (and - regrettably - it would still be a rare film today) in which women are defined by what they do rather than which men they're 'attached' to. We learn next to nothing about these women's romantic lives or marital status, but I don't think there's a single one that doesn't talk about or demonstrate her career or activities. The physical trait they all share (a bit like the 'matchmaking' fiction of Sherman's March) is simply a pretext for getting to know a diverse range of really interesting women, as well as providing an ingenious way of approaching key feminist issues from an unexpected angle. One of my favourite of Blank's films.

Yum, Yum, Yum! A Taste of Cajun and Creole Cooking is probably my favourite of Blank's food porn movies. As usual, it's relaxed and celebratory, and if you don't leave this film craving some New Orleans dish, you're a better man than me (for me, it was definitely Marc Savoy's Crawfish Etouffee - I could smell that cooking!) Stylistically, it's quite sophisticated, despite the casual aura, and his solutions to the 'problem of narration' are more creative than ever. He's got to the point where he has such a command of the culture that he can use vernacular music as commentary (e.g. "She Can Cook Biscuits"), and he employs unifying chains of dissolves to link sections of the film (e.g. a shot of Margaret Chenier dissolves into the pure texture of a close up of wheat, which dissolves into a long shot of a cornfield, which dissolves into a bag of processed product, which leads us to the next vignette) - they function like Ozu's pillow shots.

The Maestro has already been well celebrated by other commentators, and it's a beautifully structured film that takes incredibly gimmicky subject matter (sorry, Mr Gaxiola!) and exposes the serious ideas behind the gimmickry. The Maestro Rides Again is more of the same, and it's a lot of fun, but it lacks the tight structure and sense of discovery of the parent film. The recent interview with a somewhat bitter Gaxiola is a real revelation, even if it's a little hard to see things from his point of view (nobody was forcing him to dress in Nudie suits! - and if he refuses to sell his work, he can't really be angry at failing to make money from it).

Sworn to the Drum - I saw this on release accompanying The Maestro, and for the longest time this was the last new work Blank produced. (There were rumours about his "film about tea" that never seemed to be any closer to completion until it suddenly arrived twelve years later, but otherwise silence. I don't know if there were funding problems, personal problems or what, and the box set offers no clues.) I found this rather conventional at the time. There's way more traditional exposition than you'd expect from Blank - testimonials from talking head experts, first-person storytelling, captions - and it makes for an extremely dense history in a short span, but inevitably this is at the expense of more performance footage. But the performance footage we do get is amazing. There's a particularly incredible moment when the coverage of a santeria ceremony ends (by prior arrangement) at the instant that one of its participants is possessed.

[swo17]

Another random tidbit about In Heaven There Is No Beer?: The Frankie Yankovic depicted in the film is not related to "Weird" Al, though the two have worked together!

And zedz, I applaud you for being able to come up with meaningful discussion for all of these films, which I think a lot of us appreciated on an aesthetic level but found difficult to discuss much in conventional terms.

[matrixschmatrix]

Worth noting, that in Gap Toothed Women, the convenient shorthand of conflating the director with their collaborators is a bit misleading- as pointed out by Maureen Gosling in the excellent interview earlier in the thread, it seems as though the needle-eye it threads in getting Blank's own eroticized interest across while still feeling at least vaguely empowering was something worked through particularly with Chris Simon, but also with Gosling herself. I can't help but to think the warmth and richness of Blank's filmography owes a lot to the people he worked with, and the apparent freemasonry of ideas and control amongst them- they never have the obsessive, personal drive that people like Errol Morris and Werner Herzog always give to their doc work, and while I love those two dearly, I think being the Altman to their Kubrick has some value as well.

[EddieLarkin]

When Marc Savoy turned up in Spend it All I was curious as to why I knew his face. The only place I would have seen someone like him is on Treme, but then there would be a 40 year time gap to account for, so that didn't make sense. It turns out his son Wilson continues the Cajun music tradition with his own band, and it is him who has made several appearances on the show. Funny how similar they look.

I hope someone bought David Simon this set for Christmas.

[zedz]

When Marc Savoy turned up in Spend it All I was curious as to why I knew his face. The only place I would have seen someone like him is on Treme, but then there would be a 40 year time gap to account for, so that didn't make sense. It turns out his son Wilson continues the Cajun music tradition with his own band, and it is him who has made several appearances on the show. Funny how similar they look.

I hope someone bought David Simon this set for Christmas.

Wilson Savoy also appears in Maureen Gosling and Chris Simon's terrific This Ain't No Mouse Music, which is about as close as you can get to a Les Blank movie without Blank. Actually, he presumably also appears in Marc and Ann, Blank's lovely 'home movie' on the Savoys from the early 90s. No use checking imdb, as the cupboard is bare when it comes to cast and crew credits for that film.

When I first saw him in Treme I had kind of the complementary response, thinking "well that's obviously a Savoy, but there's no way Marc could be that well preserved!"

[PfR73]

Great DVDBeaver review. So excited about this release. Happy to see they interviewed Strachwitz as well.

I asked Maureen Gosling about A Poem is A Naked Person, she told me this. I hope Harrod is able to finally get the rights, and hopefully we can see another Criterion release down the line:

"Harrod Blank, Les' son who took on Les' business after Les passed away, has had a mission to try to tie up all the loose ends in all the films. Especially the ones we had problems with like the Leon Russell film and the Ry Cooder film (Ry Cooder Group ’88 in Santa Cruz). So Harrod is now having conversations with Leon and has been meeting with him. He's actually making some progress. I saw Leon with Harrod one time when he was here in Oakland and it was kind of wonderful to see him after all these years. I avoided seeing him for 25, 30 years. We caught his concert in Oakland and went to his tour bus. We stayed there for like 45 minutes. He was very funny and kind of wry. So that was like breaking the ice. Harrod is still trying to make things work out with Leon, which would be a wonderful ending to this story because Les wasn't able to do it."

A Poem Is A Naked Person has been announced in the SXSW 2015 lineup

[whaleallright]

These films are reminding me that the whole country is suffused with people and stories long neglected by coastal/suburban oriented filmmaking. I’m not sure that they’re making me homesick as much as they’re making me feel relieved that someone recorded these stories and sad that I hadn’t ever seen a filmmaker talk to anyone in the deeply rural parts of the country.

Anyone who enjoyed the magnficent Sprout Wings and Fly really ought to see the films made by filmmaker, ethnographer, photographer, and musician John Cohen, especially the powerful The End of an Old Song about the North Carolina ballad singer Dillard Chandler. I'd argue that Cohen allows his subjects to reveal themselves in an even more haunting complexity than does Les Blank. The Chandler film is available as part of the Dark Holler CD/DVD set from Smithsonian Folkways—I cannot recommend that enough. It is also available on this Shanachie DVD compilation of several of Cohen's films, which has unfortunately mediocre image quality.