LES BLANK HAS captured
some pretty peculiar things on film. After all, this is the guy who, in his 35
years of film work, has taken the art of the documentary to new heights by
bringing his camera to bear on everything from East Coast polka fanatics (In
Heaven There Is No Beer?) to Cajun musicians and cooks (Always for Pleasure) to
lovers of the stinky rose (Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers), deftly mixing
music, food, and ethnography together in a style so natural that the viewer
feels more like a participant than an observer.
Speaking on the phone
from his El Cerrito home, Blank is polite, friendly, soft-spoken--just the sort
of person one would imagine slipping easily into the cultural inner sanctums of
various ethnic and social subcultures with his trusty 16mm camera in hand. His
serious, non-judgmental voice never slips, even when describing the time he
filmed eccentric German director Werner Herzog (Fitzcarraldo, Every Man for
Himself and God Against All) eating his shoe in front of an audience at the UC
Theater in Berkeley.
"Werner Herzog had been
talking to a UC Berkeley student named Errol Morris," Blank explains, "who had
up until then been a failure at everything he had tried--being a mathematician,
a writer, a cello player--and Werner said, 'Since you've failed at everything in
life, you have the perfect makings to be a filmmaker.'
"But Errol protested that
he had no experience, or friends in film, or money, and Werner told him that you
don't need money, you need guts to be a filmmaker. He said that if Errol
succeeded in making a film that was shown at the Pacific Film Archive in
Berkeley, he would come back and eat his shoe."
Thus motivated, Morris
scraped together the resources to make Gates of Heaven, a quirky documentary
about the moving of a Bay Area pet cemetery. And true to his word, Herzog came
back and ate his own boot, cooked in duck fat by none other than Chez Panisse's
Alice Waters while Blank filmed the proceedings. "I tried a little piece myself,
washed down with bread, garlic, and beer," says Blank. "It was
awful."
Morris went on to become
the acclaimed maker of The Thin Blue Line, A Brief History of Time, and other
non-fiction features, and Blank's own association with Herzog would yield yet
more bounty. In 1982, Blank followed Herzog to the Amazon jungle to document the
making of Fitzcarraldo. The end product, Burden of Dreams--a film about an
obsessive director making a film about an obsessive man--became Blank's
best-known film, garnering more praise in some quarters than Herzog's own movie.
"I've heard that," says Blank. "And if I did make a better film, it's only
because I had better subject matter.
Werner Herzog was a far
more fascinating character than any fictional person he could shoot."
Given Blank's interest in
the extremes of the creative urge, it's only appropriate that the Sonoma Film
Institute will be showing two films on the subject: Sworn to the Drum: A Tribute
to Francisco Aguabella and The Maestro: King of the Cowboy Artists. "They're
both about non-compromising artists," he says of the two works. "The Maestro is
a man who makes art for the love of creating it and isn't bound by the rules of
the marketplace. And Francisco Aguabella gave up the financial security of being
a regular band member for the likes of Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra, and Paul Simon
to stay true to his drumming ancestors and respect the sacredness of the
[Afro-Cuban] Santeria tradition that he works within."
But Blank needn't have
traveled far to find artists who forsook fame, fortune, and financial security
to instead honor their consciences and idiosyncratic artistic visions. Looking
in the mirror would have done the trick just as easily. A failed fiction writer
himself, Blank was inspired to make films after being bowled over by a screening
of Ingmar Bergman's Scandinavian bleak-fest, The Seventh Seal. "Finally, I
thought as I walked out of the theater," recalls Blank, "I've found someone more
depressed than I am."
As
Blank explains it, his own distinctive filmmaking style evolved out of a stint
he spent making the sort of cheesy promotional films familiar to anyone who's
been forced to sit behind a balky 16mm projector in a fifth-grade classroom.
"When I got out of school and didn't have the money to do narrative films, I
ended up working for a company making industrial films for the army and
instructional films for companies," Blank says. "It was a small company, so they
let me shoot, edit, record, and mix sound-- everything."
Despite the valuable
experience Blank received on the job, he chafed in the shackles of the format's
ham-fisted linear editing and voice-over narration.
"I
grew to hate that kind of filmmaking," he recalls. "I thought there must be a
more direct way to provide for the audience the kind of experience I had while
making the film."
THUS WAS BORN Blank's
characteristically naturalistic, unobtrusive, loosely structured style of
documentary. "Some people seem to like it, and others don't," he says with
characteristic modesty. "One critic said about Always for Pleasure that it
looked like it was shot by a guy wandering through New Orleans with a bottle of
beer in one hand and a camera in the other."
While that viewer may not
have understood what Blank was up to, many others did, and continue to eagerly
anticipate the completion of each new Blank project. In the planning stages for
Blank are projects on radio storyteller Garrison Keillor, a Romany (Gypsy)
musician/dancer living in the Rajasthan region of India, and a Marin man who
journeys annually to the mountains of western China to buy tea. "I'm applying to
the Rockefeller Foundation for a grant right now," he says, "and they're really
interested in films about other cultures, so they'll probably like the Gypsy
project the best."
But the drying up of
available grant money and spiraling costs of 16mm film stock and developing have
combined to put the financial squeeze on Blank's style of filmmaking. To
economize, he's preparing to buy a state-of-the-art digital video camera, which,
while not providing the warmth and resolution of film images, will reduce costs
considerably and allow him to keep bringing his quirky, intensely creative work
to audiences. "I prefer working with 16mm film," Blank says with a verbal shrug.
"I like seeing images projected up on the big screen. But if it's between
shooting in video and not making any films at all, then I'll shoot in
video."
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