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A generation ago in the era before e-mail and DVD, in the latter days of overland mail and 16mm, I received a yellow postcard from Flower Films inviting me to preview some films made by Les Blank. Being the type to jump immediately on the back of any gift horse, I marked a title on the card that appealed to me and two weeks later an unwieldy box of 16mm film landed on my desk. I took it home and strung it up on a veteran Bell and Howell projector and proceeded to watch Mance Lipscomb of Navasota, Texas, sing and be in A Well Spent Life. The next day I called Flower Films; and the next semester, not only did we screen A Well Spent Life, but the director was in the Mechanical Engineering Auditorium to introduce the film to an appreciative audience, few of whom had ever seen a real live cineaste before - including me, except for the time I spotted Robert Altman pacing a lobby, waiting for a test screening of Images to get out.
Les came to Rolla, Missouri because he is a brave missionary of film and because he needed the modest honorarium to cover some of his lab bill for a film he was working on at the time about Werner Herzog lugging a boat over a mountain in the jungles of Peru. The next year Les came back to Rolla to screen Burden of Dreams, whose lab bill had been covered and to good effect. I found myself literally gasping with joy at the beauty of the river footage amidst the best film ever about the essential challenges of making ANY film. I think Burden of Dreams is one of the great river films of all time, in happy company with Apocalypse Now and African Queen. Les' camerawork is exquisite, as usual, as witnessed in the long take of two boys on a log raft being swept swiftly along in the current as Fitzcarraldo's steamer, the Molly Aida, is hung up on a bank. The shot pans left, zooms out while panning, pans some more and then zooms in to follow the raft til it almost disappears around the bend at the end of this long 35 second take. Hand-mind-eye coordination. The movement of the river, the stasis of the ship, the freedom of the boys are all caught in one unhurried take with several deft moves within the shot. I asked Les if he had set up the scene, and he told me he caught it on the fly. Ready to roll film. Spend it all. In 1985 I found myself sent to Brazil to teach a two week course in "American Culture," such as it is. In order to communicate my idea of same, I schlepped about four pounds of Walt Whitman in Portuguese and American, 200 slides of the workingman's murals of Thomas Hart Benton, and three reels of 16mm film: A Well Spent Life plus the Spanish version of Burden of Dreams, which was quasi-comprehensible to the Portuguese-speaking Brazilians. Les had been kind enough to loan me the films for this outing to Belem at the mouth of the Amazon, two degrees south of the equator, and about 2500 miles down river from where he had filmed in Peru. A beacon of independence, Les Blank is the John Sayles of documentarians. His films are exemplars of material that stay true to their own subject, unprocrusteanized by 26 minute television half-hours. And here I would like to testify to the heroic persistence with which Les encourages aspiring artists: making introductions, writing reference letters, e-mailing petitions to maintain artistic freedom, reading and promulgating poems, making suggestions, and even looking at raw footage. I have seen him listening patiently to students, amateurs, and colleagues as they spin their half-baked and fully-baked ideas. I wonder if I would have become a practicing film maker had I not sent in that yellow postcard in search of A Well Spent Life? |
| James Bogan is a Distinguished Teaching Professor of Art and Film at the University of Missouri-Rolla. |