Listen: Les Blank on the Art, Evolution and Pleasure of Film

By Seonaid B. Campbell, 2-20-07

"What do you think the title should be?" Les Blank asked the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival audience after the Saturday night screening of The Tea Film.

The film, Blank's 40th, chronicles an American importer's pursuit of the finest teas in China, and is a work in progress. So too is Les Blank. At 71, the legendary filmmaker continues to challenge himself with new digital technologies, an ever-expanding cast of quirky film characters, and a travel schedule that would exhaust the most die-hard jet setter.

Audience members, giddy at being queried by the filmmaker, shouted out suggestions like "Tao of Tea" and "Steeped in Tradition," but I preferred Blank's own choice, "For all The Tea."

The cool man with a white beard and black cap listened closely to all the suggestions and criticisms, no matter how outlandish. Audience reaction is important to Blank's creative process, so on Sunday afternoon he held a workshop to screen his most recent works: Being There, about legendary documentarian Richard Leacock, and Butch Anthony, which profiles an outsider artist from Alabama. Both are short works designed to woo investors, who would provide the funds to turn them into feature-length films.

	Click here to listen to Seonaid B. Campbell's interview with legendary director, Les Blank.

The films were a hit with the Wilma Theater audience who emitted audible notes of empathy for both characters and nearly bust a gut laughing at the final scene of Butch Anthony, in which an overall-wearing Anthony romps in a pas de deux dance cum wrestling match with his donkey. The self-taught folk artist lives by the credo, "I don't go by no rules with my artwork."

A rule breaker himself, Blank's artistic method seems to be embodied by his early film title, Always for Pleasure. He has spent a lifetime documenting the passion that drives human pursuits, and although filmmaking, particularly cinéma vérité documentary, is hard work, Blank's own creative process is a collaboration with his subjects. He can be seen, for example, camera in hand, amidst a pack of Mexican polka dancers, in Chulas Fronteras. In A Well Spent Life, we hear his voice ask a question or two. His presence in the films, however brief, is always thoroughly unselfconscious, as if everywhere in the world filmmakers are casually lurking -- and that is normal.

Blank has also chronicled characters whose lives exemplify the joy of creative living—people for whom creating art, films, music, or fine cuisine is a process that's essential to their existence. In Being There, Blank's loving look at his 85-year old friend, filmmaker Richard Leacock, who now lives in France with his wife, we watch Leacock prepare a feast of ham and fresh vegetables. Making the meal, Blank explains, is analogous to making a film. "You gather things that appeal to you," he says, "and you serve them to an audience. It's enjoyable."

As I give the tired Mr. Blank a ride to his hotel, he tells me that he is off to the Oscars after a brief stint at home in California. Before coming to Missoula he attended the International Film Festival, in Berlin, and throughout this flurry of activity he has continued to juggle his own projects.

"Doing a film is a means of having an experience," Blank says. After my experience of viewing a quarter of his films, I believe that they are akin to Butch Anthony's dance with a donkey. Blank's films are passionate, playful, a little edgy, and contain a tinge of Fellini: people sing, dance, and eat to defy the burdens of life. [End of article]