“Spend It All” (1972)
Of all of Blank’s anthropological, fly-on-the-wall portraits of those on the peripheries, the colorful and charming “Spend It All” might best encapsulate his work and raison d’etre. An endearing portrait of the Cajun lifestyle in Southwest Louisiana, it’s as off-the-cuff and effortless as can be, like the clapperboard was just the hiss of a Coors being opened during a savory dinner. Blank depicts the joie de vivre all around him: the aromatic meals, the rollicking whole-hearted music, and the self-reliant, self-sufficient people (one particularly resourceful individual plays the role of home-trained dentist, removing a painful tooth with a pair of pliers). One imagines Blank in heaven and never coming back. The Cajuns’ principles are simple: work hard, love your life, live it to the fullest, and enjoy what you have. The film derives its title from an observation Blank makes of these fun-loving people. Most of them are broke because they spend all their money in order to have rich, satisfying lives, even if that means losing it all on horse racing and other forms of entertainment. Featuring salt-of-the-earth people with gloriously impenetrable accents, Blank is perhaps so enamored with these genuine folk he even breaks his soft rule of context, explaining—if only briefly through title cards—how the Cajuns were the descendants of French Canadian Acadians who were driven out of their lands when the English took over. Intimate and exuberant, Blank’s docs are also always succinct and at 42 minutes “Spend It All” never overstays its welcome. Herzog regards the picture as his favorite Blank movie and was so smitten with the home-remedy tooth-extraction scene, that he got the filmmaker’s blessing to appropriate it for his 1978 narrative film “Stroszek.” [A]
“The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins” (1970)
If future historians were to ever look back on culture for (perhaps unintentional) examples of time travel, they could do much worse than to start with the films of Les Blank. One imagines time travel might be as disorienting as Blank’s films often are: suddenly you are dropped without context or explanation into a foreign culture from 40 years past. One of the many beauties of Blank’s unconventional films is his utter disregard for acclimatization of any kind. In fact, one could speculate that Blank must have detested context because his films are almost 100% free of voice-over, exposition, or situating frames of reference—they just begin and the viewer catches up along the way. The economical 30-minute “The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins” is no different, porting you into a world of cigarette-stained teeth, shanty houses and the soul and gospel of elemental blues music. History or conventional storytelling isn’t even attempted, instead Blank’s film soaks up mood, essence and spirit. Hopkins plays the blues, Hopkins smokes cigarettes, and Hopkins sermonizes poetically about the blues, but the doc is mostly wordless. Hopkins wasn’t lightning in a bottle you captured and contained and harnessed for electricity—this Blank seemed to intuitively understand. He was a current you simply watched for as long as the collective electrons allowed. [B]
“Burden Of Dreams” (1982)
Arguably one of the greatest documentaries ever made about the making of a movie, up there with “Hearts Of Darkness” and “Lost In La Mancha,” as the title suggests, ‘Dreams’ has nonetheless much more on its mind than the mere chronicling of Werner Herzog’s 1982 opus, “Fitzcarraldo,” starring the always unpredictable German actor Klaus Kinski. “Fitzcarraldo” is often best remembered for the tumultuous relationship between Kinski and Herzog, but ‘Dreams’ reminds us he was one of many problems the production faced. And it’s perhaps one of Blank’s most conventional docs using contextual voice-over, non-diegetic music, staged interviews, and more, but perhaps they are needed to really gain a sense of the Sisyphean task (or misguided fool’s errand) that faces Herzog. The challenges are myriad: the unforgiving elements, political unrest between natives and opportunists (one of his production camps is burned down to the ground), and sick actors—original lead actor Jason Robards falls ill with dysentery and Herzog is forced to start again despite having shot 40% of the film (co-star Mick Jagger dropped out shortly thereafter). Unbowed and perhaps manic with his insane fever-dream resolve to complete the film, Herzog starts over with Kinski nine months later with a rash of taxing, near-insurmountable obstacles, and always teetering on the razor’s edge of catastrophe. And all the while, Blank is curiously disinterested. Possessing a Malick-ian sense of curiosity and wonder, ‘Dreams’ becomes absorbed with the myriad jungle beauties surrounded the picture: ants on logs, various exotic wildlife, the dynamics of the restless Native Indians on set, and other color that doesn’t seem exactly relevant to Herzog’s picture until it totally does. Throughout the documentary it becomes clear that Herzog would rather take the impossible route and this includes actually dragging a 300-ton steamboat over a mountaintop. The plastic solution of miniatures, combined with cinema wizardry, will just not suffice. And this is Herzog’s madness, his burden, to fulfill the demands of his picture at any cost. But through this touching, comic, and moving portrait, Blank demonstrates in his poetic study of perseverance, how through sheer force of unwavering will and commitment Herzog is able to complete his film, four years after it first began. It’s interesting to note—since the two films do blur together—that many of Kinski’s notorious tantrums do not appear in ‘Dreams.’ Blank decided to not to trivialize the doc with these potentially sensationalistic sequences, but Herzog would eventually employ them for “My Best Fiend,” his 1999 tribute to Kinski and their fraught love/hate relationship. [A-]