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The tragedy of hurricane Katrina is still unfolding, on many levels
— it is exacting its price in human lives, in standards of living,
in sheer physical destruction along the Gulf Coast, and in the
threat it poses to one of the country’s liveliest subcultures.
It’s astonishing whenever anything survives past the 100-year mark
in America, and doubly so when it is as rich as the life, art,
language, traditions and cooking of Acadiana.
Les Blank has dedicated a sizable portion of his time as a filmmaker to documenting
this beautiful world, resulting in films that are as ravishing
as they are inquisitive, as vibrantly alive as they are informative.
“Although I consider Les Blank to be a quintessentially American
filmmaker,” wrote
Annette Insdorf, “something about his work reminds me of Jean
Renoir. Both are drawn to the rituals of daily life — the meals,
music and festivals that bind individuals together into communities.”
And as Jay Cocks put it so simply and perfectly, “I can't believe
that anyone interested in movies or America … could watch Blank’s
work without feeling they’d been granted a casual soft-spoken revelation.”
As a celebration of Les Blank and Cajun culture, weíre showing six of this great
artist’s finest films. Thanks to Tom Luddy and Les Blank for their help with this program.
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Three celebrations of the history, customs,
and sheer beauty — not to mention the tastiness — of
Cajun culture (a 1972 TV broadcast of Spend
It All prompted
a local resurgence in Cajun music and traditions). Always
for Pleasure takes us on a musical-cultural-eating
tour of New Orleans, including the great Allen Toussaint,
crayfish at Frankie and Johnny’s and the Wild Tchoupitoulas. Yum,
Yum, Yum! is one of the most joyous celebrations of
the pleasure of eating good food in all of cinema, and that
sensual vision is also at the heart of the earlier Spend
It All, despite the film’s most famous scene
(for those of you who haven’t seen it, let’s
just say that it impressed Werner Herzog and Paul Schrader
so much that they reenacted it, respectively, in Stroszek and Affliction).
“Les Blank’s
documentary celebrations of the bright, workaday world of
American subcultures pick up the Flaherty tradition where
Flaherty himself leaves off… But Flaherty’s
obdurate individualism and family sense are relaced in Blank’s
films by a sense of community, of tribal interaction with
soil and substance. The tale his Cajun musician-fisherman-gourmands
tell, their relaxed and wrinkled faces breaking suddenly
into crackling laughter, is one of joyful camaraderie, a
mutual involvement and appreciation taken, for all the ease
with which it is presented, quite seriously indeed.” –
Raymond Durgnat and Judith Bloch
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Sat Nov 26: 1:30
Sat Nov 26: 8:30
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“I got chummy with Clifton Chenier, and I thought this guy is really a great
subject, a natural for a film. So I applied for a grant to do a film on the
black French-speaking people in southwestern Louisiana, thinking I’d just
do one simple film on Clifton and his lifestyle and Bois Sec and his music
and community and way of life. After six weeks, we found that it was like
two different worlds, the world that Dry Wood was in and the world
of Clifton. We ended up with two films… [Clifton’s] music, as you
may know, is a lot different than that of Bois Sec. There’s more punch to
it. It’s more sophisticated, more wild and lively. People dress fancier to
go to a zydeco dance. A friend of mine who was along on the trip wrote me
a letter later, while I was editing the project and looking for a catchy
title. He asked, ‘How is Dry Wood and
Hot Pepper?’ That pair of names just stuck with me. They seemed
like nice film titles. Poetically the names just appealed to me. I planned
to release the two as a feature-length film — Dry
Wood being part one, Hot
Pepper being part two.”
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Sat Nov 26: 4:00
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“Les Blank…is well on his way to becoming
an uneasy national treasure,” wrote Vincent Canby at the
time of J’ai été au bal. ìI
say uneasy only because Mr. Blank's films are too much fun
and too full of life for the man who made them to be altogether
comfortable in any kind of hall of fame, which suggests the
end of the line. Mr. Blank is still very much in mid-career,
looking at the world and making documentaries with the transforming
vision of a singular artist.” These two films celebrate the
vibrant spirit of Cajun music, covering everyone from Dewey
Balfa, D.L. Menard and the Hackberry Ramblers, the Balfa
Brothers and Clifton Chenier to Dennis McGhee doing an imitation
of the great Baudoin Ardoin, Michel Doucet and Beausoleil,
and Marc Savoy. The exuberant Marc and his equally exuberant
wife Ann, who have played no small part in keeping Cajun
culture alive (Ann’s self-published book Cajun
Music: The Reflection of a People, was the basis for J’ai
été au
bal),
are the subjects of the wonderful Marc
and Ann. |
Sat Nov 26: 6:00
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