If one were to speculate about fiercely independent filmmaker Les Blank’s politics, via the worldview presented in his wondrously luminous documentaries, it would quickly come down to one option: libertarianism. Distilled down to their essence, Blank’s offbeat, yet inconspicuous and low-key documentaries, indebted to cinéma vérité without being purist about it, were often concerned with capturing the natural simplicity of unencumbered life, following those with the liberty to explore the fundamentals of existence and to self-express. Perennially fascinated with music, food, and marginalized cultures, Blank’s casual, unobtrusive films are primal in the sense that they seem built for the very reason the camera was invented: to capture images that would otherwise be unseen for the purpose of communicating back something new and vivid to the rest of the world.
Perhaps best described to a newcomer as a kindred spirit to Werner Herzog—a friend and colleague he would document twice—Blank was his own singular figure, but we can think of much worse gateway drugs to help you get hooked. Employing an intuitive, free wheelin’, but intimate style, eyewitness accounts of Blank’s approach usually describe the same version of events. He was a silent, almost invisible observer who usually had a can of beer within reach, such was his sly, unhurried, and relaxed presence. If first-person everyman documentaries, the trend popularized by Michael Moore and adopters like Morgan Spurlock, are the new tour guide form of modern documentary, then Blank’s approach was the polar opposite, especially as the notion of tourism feels like an anathema to the filmmaker’s authentic, lived-in style. Blank uncompromisingly eschewed almost all forms of narrative convention. Context? Who needs it when you have such intoxicatingly fascinating subjects captured moment-to-moment.
Peripatetic and restless with curiosity, Blank’s ethnographic wanderlust found the filmmaker/cinematographer/producer exploring myriad sidelined cultures—the Cajuns of Louisiana; the Native Indians of Peru; the fringe communities of New Orleans; Appalachians, Creoles, Tex-Mex cowboys, et al— but the enthusiasm he vividly portrayed always suggested a man who dreamt of giving everything up just to live amongst the vibrant peoples he felt lucky enough to stay with for a time. There’s a temptation to see Blank as a champion of the idiosyncratic outsider voice, but even that would be too much of an agenda. He was simply there to observe life and in doing so his still, subdued, quiet camera would often simply soak in peculiar wonders that a more goal-driven filmmaker might well have missed.
With sincere apologies to the Maysles, Blank was the premiere documentarian of American life, a transient-like figure who traveled the entire nation in search of the lost, forgotten voices who made this country beautiful and unique. Perhaps as eccentric as his subjects—though you’d never know it from his work as the man rarely imposed a discernible will on his films aside from assembling footage into a vague shape—ultimately Blank inevitably returned to the same fixation: the various pleasures of life through music, food, and art, and through it all rang out a clear love and admiration for people living authentic lives.
Over the course of five decades, Blank made over 40 films, almost one a year for four decades until he started slowing down in the mid-’90s (he passed away at the age of 77 last year). Long admired, but with very few films available for commercial release, his work until recently have been sorely underseen. This all changes with the Criterion Collection’s new boxset, the aptly titled “All For Pleasure” which collates 14 of his best films. To celebrate the release of this selection from this undersung national treasure we thought it the perfect excuse to look through Blank’s essential works, these utterly invaluable time capsules of American life.
“Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers” (1980)
There isn’t any one of Les Blank’s films that distills the full scope of what made him such an invaluable chronicler of—and contributor to—the American 20th century, but “Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers” is a perfect example of how Blank was able to stretch a flavor into a three-course meal. A 51-minute plunge into the all-encompassing world of garlic lovers, ‘Ten Mothers’ isn’t just a fine representation of Blank’s unobtrusive style, it’s also a prime example of the sincerity that made his subjects warm to him, and the palpable humanity that compels contemporary viewers to respect the kind of eccentrics that most documentary filmmakers reduce to comic relief. The premise is simple: Some people really love garlic. Like… a lot. And while their devotion to this most beloved step-child of the onion family is initially hard to swallow, their affection is soon justified (and not just because culinary pioneer Alice Waters, one of the high priestesses of food, is shown at Chez Panisse wearing a wreath of garlic around her neck). Intercutting footage from the Gilroy Garlic Festival with a wide array of evangelical interviewees—including Blank’s good friend Werner Herzog, who speaks of the use of garlic in “Nosferatu”—‘Ten Mothers’ affirms what one of its most wide-eyed subjects has to say about the eponymous plant: “Whether you like garlic or not, you have to have an opinion.” As always, Blank is eager to explore and preserve the hidden cultural touchstones that make his topics so much more important than they might seem. One recurring figure is a Spanish man whose face looks like it was cobbled together from a thousand years of lost traditions, who urgently tells the camera about how garlic sandwiches kept his people alive during the leanest of times. The man embodies Blank’s lifelong obsession with history’s place in the modern world, with the filmmaker determined to prove that every idiosyncrasy has a real story behind it, and to tell that to a modern world that sees every interesting wrinkle as a defect. There’s a reason why this film’s title only represents half of the old saying: “Garlic is as good as ten mothers… for keeping the girls away.” [A-]