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passings

Les Blank, filmmaker, November 27, 1935-April 7, 2013

Always For Pleasure (1978)

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lagniappe

Les Blank, whose sly, sensuous and lyrical documentaries about regional music and a host of other idiosyncratic subjects, including Mardi Gras, gaptoothed women, garlic and the filmmaker Werner Herzog, were widely admired by critics and other filmmakers if not widely known by moviegoers, died on Sunday at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 77.

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Mr. Blank, who received lifetime achievement awards from the American Film Institute and the International Documentary Association, did not think of himself as a documentarian, his former wife Chris Simon said, but rather as a filmmaker whose work happened to be about real people.

And his films are hardly standard documentary fare, dominated by archival footage and interviews with talking heads; nor are they of the Frederick Wiseman-D. A. Pennebaker fly-on-the-wall exposé school. Rather, the films, most of them less than an hour long, are “brilliantly sympathetic, well-crafted essays,” as John Rockwell wrote in The New York Times in 1979, rife with deftly framed portraiture, cunningly observed social scenes, beautiful nature photography and the poetic juxtaposition of imagery and sound.

“I think he’s a national treasure,” the director Taylor Hackford said in a telephone interview. “Although his films are not well known at the moment, they’ll take their place. Films are great when they live a long time, and I think Les’s will live.”

Mr. Blank trolled for subject matter on the American periphery, in cultural pockets where the tradition is long but the exposure limited. His films often have a geographic as well as cultural specificity, and food and music are often the featured elements. His musical subjects included norteño bands of the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, Cajun fiddlers of Louisiana and polka enthusiasts from across the country.

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“You could call him an ethnographer; you could call him an ethnomusicologist or an anthropologist,” Mr. Hackford said. “He was interested in certain cultures that Americans are unaware of. He shot what he wanted, captured it beautifully, and those subjects are now gone. The homogenization of American culture has obliterated it.”

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In 2007 Mr. Blank received the Edward MacDowell Medal, presented annually since 1960 by the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H., to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the arts. Its previous winners included Thornton Wilder, Robert Frost, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein and only two film directors, the avant-gardist Stan Brakhage and the animator Chuck Jones. Mr. Hackford was the chairman of the jury, which included the directors Ken Burns, Steven Soderbergh, Mira Nair and Spike Jonze, as well as Thomas Luddy, a founder of the Telluride Film Festival.

“We all met in New York City, and I was expecting that we’d be discussing names like Francis, Marty, David Lynch and so on,” Mr. Luddy wrote in an e-mail. “Taylor Hackford spoke first and said we’d be talking about many of the obvious great names, but his candidate was Les Blank. He said that in 100 years his own films and many of the films by the big names may well be forgotten, but Les Blank’s films will be revered as time-capsule classics. I said ‘Amen,’ as did all the other members of the committee. We never even discussed another name, and our meeting was over in less than an hour.”

—New York Times, 4/8/13