Wednesday, April 10, 2013

art of life


If you're not familiar with the work of legendary documentary filmmaker Les Blank, who passed away on Sunday, you need to rectify that situation.

Burden of Dreams, about the making of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, is probably his best-known work and is far better than the fiction film whose production it documents. His many short verité pieces on both obscure and famous musicians including Sprout Wings and Fly and The Blues According to Lightnin' Hopkins, are remarkable and uplifting portraits of people who live to make music. His light-hearted documentary experiments Gap-Toothed Women and Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe are studied in Film courses as prime examples of California avant-garde cinema of the 1970s and 80s. His aptitude as a camera man was immortalized in the 1968 Hollywood classic Easy Rider; he shot the handheld, psychedelic acid-trip sequence in the New Orleans cemetery, which is easily my favourite part of that film.

I was lucky to have met Les and to have had my work judged by him seven years ago at the fantastic Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula, Montana. He was a notorious "man of few words", but finally after seeing each other at numerous parties, we did engage in some small-talk. He said he was saddened that the music-making rural Louisiana of his early films was now all but gone thanks to Wal-Mart and satellite TV. He talked about swimming in the ocean and, late in the evening, he quipped that he'd like to put me in the sequel to Gap-Toothed Women. I told him how much I enjoyed seeing his work (the festival had screened an extensive retrospective) and he said he'd enjoyed my film too. I couldn't have been more thrilled, until my film was given an award for Artistic Vision at the end of the festival. Coming from him and his fellow jury members that was, to this day, the single greatest compliment I have ever received as a filmmaker and remembering that moment has gotten me through a lot of dark times.

There will always be a special place in my heart for Les Blank and his films; he had a love of life and a documentary sixth-sense that are truly rare among filmmakers. I hope that the flood of recognition he is getting now will introduce many new people to his work, and I hope for his sake that there is beer in Heaven. RIP, Les.