Kocker; Alvarez for National Park Service
Blessing of the fishing fleet at Delacroix, Louisiana, 1981. Man in hat is film maker Les Blank, wearing shirt with title of one of his films, "Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers".
Who is the Cajun? Who is the Creole? Who is the Louisianan?
Such are the questions underwriting the twenty-year ethnographic study of the idiosyncrasies and aesthetics of South Louisiana endeavored by the independent filmmaker Les Blank. A native of Tampa, Blank first came to Louisiana to study English, and later acting and playwriting, at Tulane University in New Orleans.
He’d return years later, after acquiring a masters in filmmaking from the University of Southern California, to work on the crew of Easy Rider—his last project before committing himself to independent filmmaking.
Blank championed the idiomatic and the eccentric throughout his oeuvre, making muses out of gap-toothed women, folk musicians, and the flower children of California’s counterculture to great acclaim and renown. The South Louisianan, that oddfellow, made for an apt and enduring subject for the filmmaker.
Courtesy of Les Blank Films.
A Black Masking Indian from the Les Blank Film, "Always for Pleasure"
If you didn’t know much about Louisiana folkways, Blank’s films on the subject—made between 1971 and 1990—would be a great place to start. The first of these projects, a 1971 film titled Spend it All, introduces the viewer to myriad cultural icons and preservationists resisting the Americanization of the Cajun people. From there, Blank’s projects are set in destinations from Lake Charles to New Orleans, capturing both Cajun and Creole communities in a moment of particular vibrancy, just before their cultural decline in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Early works, such Spend it All and Dry Wood (1973), see lovers fais do do-ing in since-abandoned dance halls and the townsfolk of Eunice chicken chasing on Mardi Gras Day. In Always for Pleasure (1978), Blank captures “Soul Queen of New Orleans” Irma Thomas detailing her recipe for red beans, and Hot Pepper (1973) documents Clifton Chenier’s introduction of zydeco to the world. Such iconic tableaux exist alongside a plethora of other gemmy relics—a man pulls a sore tooth from his mouth with pliers as men play fiddles behind him; Dewey Balfa drives a school bus in Acadia Parish and sells insurance policies.
"Blank’s efforts to safeguard Louisiana’s heritage may prove as enduring as any other cultural reconstruction effort, on account of their expansiveness and proximity to the cultures at risk. The portraits he made are refreshingly uncommercial, and now especially tender, considering that many of those depicted within them have reached their twilight years or passed on."
Blank’s touch is light, his tone humorous, and his approach observational, rendering a holistic portrayal of these cultural groups despite his status as an outsider. Though subjects were certainly aware of Blank’s creative objectives, they are said to have no recollection of a camera in their midst while the artist accumulated raw footage of their customs, accruing lasting artifacts of vintage South Louisiana which, to this day, have survived the threats of hurricanes, decay, and floods.
Courtesy of Les Blank Films
Nathan Abshire with a baby, from the Les Blank film, "Spend It All".
As such, the recordings also preserved the idiolects of the Cajun and the Creole languages, entrenched in organic contexts wholly foreign to the voyeur or the academic. In pastorals like Dry Wood and J’ai été au bal (1989), Blank fashioned encyclopedic portraits of Southwest Louisiana’s cuisine, lifestyle, celebrations, and musical talent, preserving images of the microcultures as they existed in a particular point in time.
Blank’s epitome of “the Cajun,” is personified by Marc Savoy, an accordion maker and the proprietor of Savoy Music Center in Eunice, who is featured alongside his wife, Ann, in several of the aforementioned works, including their namesake film, Marc and Ann (1991), which captures the couple’s idyllic domesticity in rural Louisiana. The duo are determined preservationists, committed to the maintenance of a traditional Cajun lifestyle into the present and, hopefully, future. For Blank, they served as guides into the heart of the region, introducing him to the classic characters who would come to represent their people for all time.
[Read more about Marc Savoy in this story about his book, "The Acadian Accordion"]
Courtesy of Les Blank Films.
Clifton Chenier, captured the Les Blank film, "Hot Pepper".
Blank’s efforts to safeguard Louisiana’s heritage may prove as enduring as any other cultural reconstruction effort, on account of their expansiveness and proximity to the cultures at risk. The portraits he made are refreshingly uncommercial, and now especially tender, considering that many of those depicted within them have reached their twilight years or passed on.
Following Blank’s death in 2013, the filmmaker’s son, Harrod Blank, began remastering a handful of these works, including restorations of the classics J'ai Été Au Bal and Marc and Ann, which will be rereleased in coming months. The labor of love is one he sees as instrumental to the persistence of his father’s legacy into the digital age, similar to the elder Blank’s prescience of the need to establish a record of traditional Cajun culture in advance of the group’s homogenization into the present.
Courtesy of Les Blank Films
Cover for the Les Blank film, "J'ai Été au Bal".
The images, stories, and ephemera we make and pass down are what establish the mythology of a people—hence the primacy of cookbooks, tall tales, and musical standards in Cajun lore. Blank’s films offer a refreshingly modern look at heritages endemic to South Louisiana while memorializing that which has already been lost, or forever changed.
Les Blank’s works can be streamed on demand on the Criterion Channel, on Kanopy (via your local public library), on Amazon, and on Vimeo.
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