Blank’s films are usually classed as documentaries, for obvious reasons. But they are different in striking ways from most efforts in the genre, and those differences have been evident from the very beginning of his career. The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins was shot in 1967 and runs just over thirty minutes. Its making was a project tinged with desperation - Blank made it on borrowed money and he was at times terrified by the mercurial star. But it launched his career, convincing critics and potential backers and surely ratifying its maker’s sense of his own talent. Preparing this piece, I watched it again, for perhaps the thirtieth time, along with Hot Pepper, the 1973 portrait of the life and music of Zydeco master Clifton Chenier.

What’s most impressive, I think, about both films, is their absolutely unwavering visual confidence. Its title makes clear that the Hopkins film is at base a portrait of a blues musician, but large blocks of video are given over to segments apparently at great remove from the subject. Over the audio of "Good Morning Little School Girl," there’s a full minute given to children playing, and a wonderful ninety second sequence matches the rhythms of various people walking on the street to Hopkins’ playing of "Meet Me in the Bottoms."

Most documentaries, even excellent documentaries, don’t separate audio from video so long, or so adventurously. Many directors would also hesitate to include the relatively short snake-killing sequence, or the longer segments from the rodeo. Most memorable of all are the stunning shots of the country church, introduced by the slow passage of the camera down a narrow dirt road and over a wooden bridge to the accompaniment of a lovely "Come By Here" (done I think by Hopkins himself). A wonderful close-up pan of the scalloped wooden fretwork on the church’s front is followed by shots of the parishioners so slow-paced and tender they come across as cinematic benedictions.

That all these shots were sustained as long as they were, and then survived the editing process as intact as they did, required a confidence amounting nearly to audacity. Hopkins was hardly known for his devotion to religion, and he is explicitly connected neither to the church itself nor to the pictured worshipers. The inclusion of these shots is at last a matter of faith, and it is this faith, I think, that defines Blank as a filmmaker. The articulation of a creed is a daunting task, but perhaps it may help to suggest that Les Blank’s first films display in abundant measure a journalist’s faith in the inherent interest of events, a portrait photographer’s faith in the intrinsic appeal of human faces and hands, and an almost painterly faith in the power of color and movement.