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LES BLANK: 1990 RECIPIENT, AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE MAYA DEREN AWARD FOR INDEPENDENT FILM AND VIDEO ARTISTS
In 1985, the Board of Trustees of the American Film Institute, wishing to acknowledge the contribution and significance of the work of independent film and video artists, established The Maya Deren Award for Independent Film and Video Artists. Les Blank was a recipient of the 1990 Maya Deren Award. The following essay by film critic Patricia Aufderheide appeared in the tribute program published in conjunction with the award ceremony.
Les Blank has taken faux naivete to new heights of sophistication. His documentaries, executed with an unassuming charm, provide a richly textured, invigorating commentary on and critique of American culture.
His early films chronicle joyful and sustaining aspects of American subcultures--music, food, and festivals. They capture the expression of desire--in dance, cooking, sensual contact and conflict, the passion to simply play--as social fact, part of the fabric of grassroots culture. His later films search out synergies between grassroots and commercial culture.
Positioned respectfully--and positioning the viewer--as invited foreign guest rather than invisible observer or false participant, he shares with the viewer the dignity, energy, and contradictions of his subjects. But let him say it: "Doing a film is a way of getting close to the spirit or the soul of a place."
That mission is not accidental. Blank has spent his working life in search of a spirit richer than his own experience of middle class, white culture. The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins firmly established his idiosyncratic, socially perceptive style. Blank spent six weeks living with the irascible southern bluesman, including one tense evening while Hopkins, in the midst of a feud, waited for an in-law’s arrival armed with a revolver (while Blank filmed around him). The film, a casual, uncommented tour of the world Hopkins lives in and sings to and about, is finally about the social context of the blues.
By the time Blank discovered Cajun and Creole culture, he was attracting a dedicated cult of people ready to be delighted by, say, the sight of a pig being transformed into sausage, while the pig’s preparers talk of men, women, food, and the preservation and passing of a rural way of life. His audience has grown with the range of his subject matter, which often comments obliquely on a certain lack of savor in modern life by celebrating resistance to efficient homogenization. For instance, Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers, whose centerpiece is the lavish preparation of an all-garlic dinner at the upscale Bay Area restaurant Chez Panisse, is also a paean to the highly-seasoned life. Gap-Toothed Women, a compilation of interviews with a kaleidoscope of interesting women, adds up to a critique of ad-fed beauty ideals. Ry Cooder and the Moula Banda Rhythm Aces is a concert film featuring an alliance between folk artists and Cooder, who’s in the inner circle of Los Angeles studio musicians and a longtime aficionado of folk sound.
Blank’s style is not defined merely by his filming technique--which he once described as, "I just tried not to get in their way." Painstaking editing, in which Maureen Gosling has played a major role over the years, works to evoke a gestalt, a way of life, character within culture.
This approach can reveal what the subjects might rather remain hidden. For instance, after traveling in the rock tour fast lane with musician Leon Russell, Blank produced a portrait--A Poem Is a Naked Person--so devastating that Russell forbade him to show it. In Heaven There Is No Beer?, about Polish-American polka, painfully and almost inadvertently reveals a routinized crass circuit that has lost a vital connection with daily life. . . .
A self-aware and thoughtful intellectual, Blank cultivates an image as an inarticulate artist. This may be less perversity than an attitude reflected in the lack of narration in his films: that one must live with (if not in) a situation, not talk about it, to understand it. His films transmit that understanding with a deceptive simplicity. They communicate not only joy in the lives of their subjects, but the filmmaker’s constant search for something that’s missing at the core of prefab culture.
Copyright Patricia Aufderheide, 1990. Ms. Aufderheide is a professor in the School of Communication at American University and may be contacted by e-mail at:
paufder@american.edu
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