The great documentarian Les Blank died last weekend, and we recall his showing a rare film at Ponderosa Stomp…

I’m proud to say that the great documentarian Les Blank nearly had me thrown out of a film showing in the fall of 2010. The occasion was that year’s Ponderosa Stomp, and Blank was at One-Eyed Jack’s to show his single most obscure work: A Poem is a Naked Person, his never-released 1974 film about Leon Russell. As the title would indicate, the movie is more abstract than most of what Blank and Russell did elsewhere: Some great live footage is intercut with scenes of hot-air ballooners, glass-eaters, hippie Jesus types and other general weirdness near his Tulsa homebase. Russell apparently wasn’t pleased; he now owns the film and Blank was only allowed to show it for non-profit venues when the director himself was present.

R.I.P. Documentary filmmaker Les Blank (1935-2013)

This only happened roughly a half-dozen times, and Blank was visibly nervous that any footage might get captured or posted online. So I probably shouldn’t have checked the time on my IPod, which brought a fast response from his freaked-out assistant, who let me stay if I let her confiscate it. During a Q&A after the film I asked Blank how he felt the various street shots related to Russell’s world; he replied that he was simply sick of waiting for Russell to grant his time and went off looking for something more  interesting to film. When I retrieved my pod his assistant said, “Les wanted me to tell you that he feels bad that he nearly asked me to throw you out, because he really liked your question.” An honor.

The great irony is that Blank couldn’t get along with Leon Russell, when his most famous film concerns a more eccentric personality, German director Werner Herzog. Burden of Dreams (1982) documents Herzog’s quest to make FItzcarraldo, and is remains one of the few documentaries that’s invariably shown alongside the work it documents. Less acclaimed, but perhaps more revealing, is Blank’s other Herzog film, 1980’s Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, in which the German director loses a bet and proceeds to do just what the title says, raising a few questions about how far one should really go for art.

Blank was a man of many interests and his films waxed poetic about whatever struck his fancy—which included Chinese tea, gap-toothed women, and a whole lot of great music. And some of his most acclaimed music films were done in Louisiana: Always For Pleasure looked at Mardi Gras culture and traditions—not something everybody was doing in 1978—and had live footage of Professor Longhair, Danny Barker and the early Neville Brothers.  Especially delightful is 1990’s Yum, Yum, Yum!, a half-hour celebration of the link between Cajun music and food. One scene shows Marc Savoy demonstrating the art of cooking a redfish on a cedar plank; Savoy lingers long over the proper spicing and grilling. Then, he calmly notes, “You throw the fish away and you eat the board.” It is quite literally one of documentary film’s most delicious jokes.