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Notes from
hot springs documentary film institute |
My first meeting with Les was in 1977, when the Walker Art Center sponsored one of the first retrospectives of his films. I saw Chulas Fronteras (which is still my favorite film by Les, and one of the films on the National Film Registry) and flipped. After watching great documentaries about places all over the world, I had finally seen a great film about my own backyard - one I was familiar with because of my mother being from Texas. After traveling the world some, and living in a few different places, I had come to hate tourists.
Now I finally got to see a film about "the perfect tourist," someone who was part of the culture, and yet could stand back and appreciate it in a somewhat objective way. I thought for sure that Les was Tex-Mex, and probably black!Later the organization I worked with, the U Film Society, had one of several "world premieres" for Les' most macrocosmic film, Always for Pleasure. It was another great success and the Upper Midwest had finally come in contact with the other end of the Mississippi. Using his remarkably invisible camera, he had distilled down the greatest American party into one hour of non-stop excitement. During the last 20 years Les has come to West Virginia (where I headed up the state film library in Charleston for many years) bringing his travelogues of the real America to the least traveled, most down home people in America, the only purely Appalachian Appalachian state. During his first visit on St. Patrick's Day 1980, Les became my surprise best man, testifying for me at the start of our two day Les Blank - Out of the Mainstream Film Fest at the Dunbar Public Library. The chief of the State Supreme Court, Daryl McGraw, was there to perform, and the New Orleans food and fun were set to go ... it was a great wedding, and a great film fest. People have always asked me why Les is so quiet. The answer is obvious - he is Columbus, sailing on his vast ocean, looking for a place to land. He always seems to be looking at least slightly in back of you, slightly somewhere else. He is the man who can literally disappear - right while you are looking at him! And what he is looking at is the same mythical "Promised Land" that Columbus hoped to find, not somewhere else, but somewhere in his own backyard. Les is the truest adventurer of our age, treating the entire world like a microcosmos, and treating the microcosmos we all live in like it is an entire world. When one of West Virginia's governor's got in hot water for not hiring enough African-Americans, I got a call to create a list of our films and videos about multi-culturalism. I told the governor's advisors that we had the best multi-cultural films ever made in these United States - the entire body of work of Les Blank. No one could be racist after seeing his films. No one could stay in their own little world after seeing the worlds of so many exciting, wonderful fellow Americans. I am glad that Les has traveled to many places that I myself have briefly visited, but unlike myself, he had the time, the vision, the humanity to smell out, to live the lives of the local people. |
Steve Fesenmaier served as Head of Film Services at the West Virginia Library Commission from 1978 to 1998. He was co-founder of the West Virginia International Film Festival and continues to program films for that organization.
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