Rob Nixon
Before embarking on the remarkable series of documentaries that earned him international acclaim, the late filmmaker Les Blank (1935-2013) made industrial films and television commercials, many of which focused on food products and the companies that produced them. There were ads for Almond Joy in 1966 and a piece that same year extolling the candy bar’s star ingredient, made for the California Almond Growers Exchange, as well as short films about the Shakey’s Pizza chain and a company that produced honey. Most notably, there was Chicken Real (1970), a quirky and funny look at large-scale poultry farming that might as easily be called “Chicken Surreal,” following the mass production of one of the world’s most ubiquitous food sources from factory incubation to a county fair barbecue, accompanied by chicken-themed songs and music recorded live in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge mountains.
Blank went on to create roughly 40 shorts and features primarily focused on regional and ethnic American subcultures (and some outside the U.S.) that retained their traditions and ways of life, fostered by years of insular, often isolated existence. He is probably most famous for his feature-length documentary Burden of Dreams (1982), about the beleaguered production of the Werner Herzog film Fitzcarraldo (1982). It won a British Academy award, ranked 14th in Sight and Sound magazine’s list of the greatest documentaries of all time, and was preserved in 1999 by the Academy Film Archive for its historical and artistic importance.
As fascinating and worthy as that film is, it would be a shame if that’s all anyone knew about Blank’s impressive body of work over about 40 years, most of them intimate portraits of life in the margins of American society. Avoiding commentary, narration, and any kind of academic analysis, Blank’s style is more poetry than anthropology, a sensual experience far more than an ethnographic study. Typical of the reserved, unobtrusive artist behind the camera, his fly-on-the-wall approach allows his subjects to reveal themselves on their own terms.
“Nothing needs to be explained,” his friend Herzog said in a filmed supplement for the Criterion Collection. “It’s the pure joy of life.”
That joy is most often expressed through the roots music of the communities Blank documented, but he also reveals the social, cultural, and physical environment the music sprang from. His camera often pulls back from the performers to reveal the world around them, placing their music in that broader context. One of the ways Blank enriches this context is through a focus on food.
“Food is sensual,” he said in an interview for Folkstreams, a documentary screening site. “It keeps bodies alive. And people together.”
Through the years, Blank’s films have thoroughly, effortlessly integrated views of the culinary traditions of a specific population with their musical idioms:
- The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins (1970) and A Well-Spent Life (1971): The East Texas country blues of Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb / Home-cooked pots of greens and the regional style of barbecue
- Spend It All (1971): The French-speaking Cajuns of Louisiana / Shrimp, crab, gumbo made with venison, sausage, and rabbit
- Dry Wood (1973) and Hot Pepper (1973): The music and daily life of the state’s white Cajun population and the Black Zydeco culture / A hog-butchering party from the kill to the making of sausage (not for vegetarians or faint-hearted carnivores)
- Chulas Fronteras (1976): The Tejano (Tex-Mex) music of the U.S./Mexico border / Tamale making from preparing salsas, masa mixtures, meat, and spices to steaming and serving
- Always for Pleasure (1978): The spirit of New Orleans (Second line parades, Mardi Gras Indians, public celebrations) with the music of Professor Longhair, Allen Toussaint, the Neville Brothers and more / Preparation and consumption of red beans and rice and a lesson in the proper way to cook and eat crawfish
- In Heaven There Is No Beer? (1984): The music, dancing, social bonds, and religion of the devoted lovers of Polka / Grilled chicken, pierogis, and community fish fries
- Ziveli! Medicine for the Heart (1987): Lesser-known gem made by Blank and long-time collaborator Maureen Gosling about the Serbian-American communities of California and Chicago / Their practice of laying plates of fruit, glasses of wine, even cans of Budweiser on a grave; the abundant homemade funeral buffets; huge hogs roasting on multiple spits for large outdoor gatherings; homemade sausages and baked goods; the morning tradition of ingesting a sugar cube, Slivovitz brandy, and strong coffee.
Over the years, food in Blank’s work took on greater and greater significance and more screen time until he finally started making pieces strictly about the food itself. Films like All This in Tea (2006) and the unfinished Durian zero in on single ingredients. Yum! Yum! Yum! (1990) delves even deeper into the “Taste of the Cajun and Creole Cooking of Louisiana” as its subtitle says. There’s even a culinary angle to the humorous Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980), in which the German director does exactly that to settle a bet. Perhaps the best of these, and the most widely known, is a tribute to a single ingredient, Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers (1980), which along with Chulas Fronteras was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of The Library of Congress. (Frederick Wiseman and the Maysles Brothers are the only other documentarians to be honored with multiple entries.)
The film touts the virtues of this universally used ingredient. It introduces us to some little-known facts and mythology about garlic and to great proponents of its use, among them author Lloyd John Harris, founder of the alliophiliac organization Lovers of the Stinking Rose, and Alice Waters, pioneering advocate of organic, locally grown food and one of the most influential figures in the culinary world of the past half-century. It prominently features Waters and her landmark Berkeley, California, restaurant, Chez Panisse, opened in 1971. Blank incorporates footage in Waters’ restaurant during her annual Bastille Day event featuring an all-garlic menu and at the Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California, one of the largest food festivals in the U.S. at the time. Even Herzog turns up in this one, grilled about why he didn’t include garlic lore in his film Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979). (In Burden of Dreams, Herzog and his Fitzcarraldo crew can be seen wearing Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers t-shirts as they work.)
In the early days, Blank was known for having some of the food featured in his films prepared for the audience during screenings, creating a delicious “smell-o-vision” that added to the experience. For Garlic, he recommended that a toaster oven containing several heads of garlic be turned on at the beginning of the screening to fill the auditorium with the aroma of “stinking rose.” At one screening, when Alice Waters says in the film, “Can you smell the garlic?” the audience yelled back, “Yes!”
Blank treats his food subjects the same as the music and other cultural details he captures, without comment, preferring to let the talking be done by the people on screen and showcasing the music as a primary means of expression. His is an art of observation, not an attempt at exposé. The films don’t step outside the environment to impose a point of view or cater to audience perspectives. (Although he did express late in his life that if he were to make Dry Wood today, he might leave out the cringe-inducing hog slaughter.) This approach yields cinematic works of rough humanity and lush beauty and does valuable service to preserve the folkways and lifestyles that were already starting to disappear when he created his films.
Herzog put it best: “Les has put stakes into the ground literally all around America. I have the feeling I do now know more about America than anyone who has read 500 books about the country.”
The films of Les Blank are streaming this month on the Criterion Channel.
