Notes from a      r e t r o s p e c t i v e: hot springs documentary film institute september 16 - 19, 1999. Table of Contents "Review Stew" "Les Blank Is As Good As Ten Directors" by James Bogan "Les Blank --The New Christopher Columbus" by Steve Fesenmaier "There From The Beginning" by Robert Cochran   Review Stew:

"Blank’s films celebrate traditional cultures where family ties remain strong, where work is not wholly divorced from pleasure, where people take time to cook, eat, and swap heartfelt bromides, where music shapes their experience into an ongoing, familiar rhythm. Michael Goodwin, Blank’s Boswell, says that the underlying concern of his films is Time. Loss, might be another way to put it. ‘I"m a cultural peeping tom,’ Blank told one journalist. ‘I find my own cultural heritage to be, uh, a bit thin.’ Blank loves to shoot old hand tinted family photographs and walls filled with yellowed snapshots. His recurring image is the tribal wholeness of a dance where everyone, young and old, is able to boogie to the same primal beat."   J. Hoberman, THE VILLAGE VOICE, June 25, 1979

"Mr. Blank’s films are documentaries, and they’re brilliantly sympathetic, well-crafted essays in that form. But Mr. Blank’s way of making a film avoids entirely the linear, detached quality of many documentary films. Instead, he seems to win his way into intimate association with his subjects, filming them in a way in which the camera becomes unobtrusive. His subjects relax for him, smiling and talking openly. We can observe their celebrations and their fears in a way that might seem almost impossible, and that reveals our shared values . . . Nearly all of the artists in Mr. Blank’s films have made records. But . . . Mr. Blank’s view of them and their contexts is so penetrating that the impact of his presentation far transcends sound alone. Mr. Blank is a documentarian of folk culture who transforms anthropology into art."   John Rockwell, NEW YORK TIMES, June 24, 1979

"Filmmaker Les Blank, documentary doyen and creator of Burden of Dreams, Always for Pleasure, and Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers, tells a story from deep in his past. It is likely that we are at the genesis of his artistic vision. ‘I was five years old, watching some workmen moving urns. I remember the way they talked to each other, and their body language. I was fascinated by this other class of people’--at the time young Blank’s father was a Tampa lawyer and failed real estate tycoon, a slightly wilted bud of the pre-Depression Southern bloom--’and I was clearly aware of their image and identity, and even more aware of my own lack of identity."   David Abramson, "A Roving Eye", San Francisco Examiner IMAGE Magazine, October 11, 1987

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