Blank’s entry into filmmaking was almost by default. His previous exploits could have passed for a colorful montage from a 1930s adventure movie: He played football, studied trumpet, shipped out on a Norwegian freighter, wrote poetry in San Francisco during the Beat years, and was on his way to pilot training at naval flight school when he changed his mind at the last minute. He financed part of his first film, a 1968 short about the early love-ins—God Respects Us When We Work But Loves Us When We Dance—through a two-year stint of writing, editing, and directing industrial and promotional movies for products like Shakey’s pizza and Smucker’s jam. He found the industrials soul crushing. “I always wanted to be creative, to communicate to people, to round up my various abilities and put them into something that’s going to be lasting,” says Blank. “The industrial films were like a slap in the face.”
As a young man, in fact, he wanted to become a surgeon (Blank’s older brother, Richard, was a heart and lung specialist), but his dream was scrapped forever when he flunked chemistry while attending Tulane University, in New Orleans. “Without chemistry, you can’t go to medical school or go very far in any of the life sciences,” says Blank, who has a way of compressing most pivotal pieces of his life—his three failed marriages, how he ended up in the Ph.D. film program at the University of Southern California in the early ’60s—into a sentence and a shrug. But if you ask him about the first time he ever went to a Cajun dance hall, he’ll devote 20 minutes to recounting every aspect of his college-era experience, from the girlfriend he brought to the way the club’s wooden floor heaved up and down under the weight of a hundred customers dancing the two-step. “No one spoke any English and the waiters wore revolvers. It was very crowded, very hot,” he says, wrapping up the anecdote by vividly recalling the temperature of the beer. “It came in these little bottles and was extremely cold,” he says, with a sound in his voice like he can still feel the glass, moisture-beaded and superchilled, in his grip. “You couldn’t find any beer that was as cold as they got it.”
In each of Blank’s mostly narratorless documentaries, tiny vibrant details like these pile one on top of another. His films are soft and meandering in structure, and you get a sense that he doesn’t preplan them (“I think that would take the life out of it,” he confirms). Instead, he shows up with his shoestring crew, turns on the equipment, and proceeds to fade into the woodwork. The finished movie doesn’t have to feel finely wrought—it just has to feel. “He has the perfect sense of when to pick up the camera and when the situation is ripe for filming,” says Herzog. “It’s very misleading to see him as someone who is brooding and not speaking much—he’s very much alive inside. But he’s not monosyllabic, he’s zero-syllabic.” Every conversation about Blank’s technique eventually gets around to examining his trademark silences. “Les is like Mount Rushmore,” says producer-director Vikram Jayanti, who produced Blank’s journey into the Serbian-American music scene, Ziveli! Medicine for the Heart, and collaborated on the quirky European travelogue Innocents Abroad. “He just sits there like a rock; it’s quite wonderful. I think it makes him invisible. After a while people just go back to what they were doing.”
For me, just to get into Blank’s home involved enduring a period of those silences. Though we’d prearranged via telephone to meet, he never responded to a string of messages I left on his office voice mail hoping to confirm our appointment. For all I knew on the morning I arrived at the door of Blank’s woodsy house in the Berkeley hills, I was the only one there. I knocked, waited five minutes, then knocked and waited some more. It was during my last-ditch flurry of pounding that the front door finally swung open. There stood Blank, tall, bearded and dressed in a brand-new pair of blue jeans, a loose-fitting short-sleeved print shirt and a black baseball cap emblazoned with a Slow Food insignia pulled low on his forehead. He led me through a cookbook-lined kitchen and out to a back deck. Just a few days earlier, Blank had returned from the Slow Food On Film DOC festival in Bra, Italy. He’d entered Yum, Yum, Yum!, one of the six films he’s made about the lifestyle of southwest Louisiana.
Made in 1990, it’s classic Les Blank fare: In 31 unwasted minutes, we meet Cajun musicians Marc Savoy and “Queen Ida” Guillory and New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme and receive folksy but graceful tutorials in seafood crêpes, dirty rice, frogs’ legs, okra étouffée with shrimp, and candied yams. As with at least a half dozen other Blank films I’ve seen, there’s a lesson in sausage making, following the procedure from the grinding and spicing of the stuffing to the crazy quick ballooning of slippery casings as they fill with extruded meat. The last image is a moment Blank obviously thinks is an easy laugh, but it’s also more than that. “It’s an essential part of people’s foodways,” says Blank when I ask him why an almost identical record of this process shows up in so many of his films. “The Polish would be lost without Polish sausage. In Louisiana, you can’t be a Cajun if you don’t eat boudin.”
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