The Greatest Music Docs You Haven’t Seen: 10 Essential Les Blank Films

This month, 11 more Les Blank documentaries are available on the Criterion Channel. Blank's subjects included Cajun and Tex-Mex music, the blues, polka, Dizzy Gillespie and Huey Lewis. All together, they reveal Blank as perhaps America’s greatest music documentarian.

Since August of 2020, one of the reliable pleasures of the Criterion Channel has been the playlist Documentaries by Les Blank—16 films from 1968 to 1995, most of them under an hour, many about rural American folkways. This month, 11 more of Blank’s titles have joined that list. Not all of them are about music, but many are, and all together, they reveal Blank (1935-2013) as perhaps America’s greatest music documentarian.

Music was hardly Blank’s only topic. The Bay Area filmmaker, who specialized in regional cultures of the rural U.S., also made beloved shorts and features about food (Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers, 1980), drink (All in This Tea, 2006), and his fellow director Werner Herzog (the feature Burden of Dreams, 1982, and the short Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, 1980), not to mention the self-explanatory Gap-Toothed Women (1987). 

But music was Blank’s lodestone, imbuing all of his work—see this delightful Spotify playlist, heavy on blues, Cajun, and zydeco, of music from his films. Even a travelogue like Blank’s Innocents Abroad (1991) boasts a killer soundtrack: Jonathan Richman, Sandy Denny, and, oh yeah, Bob Dylan—not a guy typically given to licensing his works to small filmmakers, though perhaps it helps that Blank had made films involving people whose work Dylan knew and loved: Lightnin’ Hopkins (The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins, 1968) and Leon Russell (the previously unviewable A Poem Is a Naked Person, 1974).

Among music documentarians, only D. A. Pennebaker compares. Pennebaker’s methods are similar to Blank’s on the surface, but their effects are different. Pennebaker offers the ultimate spectator’s view, even when backstage—whether behind Otis Redding’s head in Monterey Pop (1968) or peering through the control-room glass at the tense, invigorating all-night recording session of Original Cast Album: Company (1970). Pennebaker gets the big gestures, the grand arching overview—this is history, and you are there. But with Blank, you are in there, the camera an active participant in the performances captured. Blank’s tighter framing gives him, and us, unprecedented intimacy. The little gestures matter.

Les Blank’s movies are gourmandizer’s delights—they will make you hungry—and they introduce us to unforgettable characters. But it’s the music that brings the viewer back again and again. Here are ten great entry points into the Blank filmography, with notes on others. All are available on the Criterion Channel.

Dizzy Gillespie (1965) 

This sparkling 24-minute study captures a key figure in full flight: By the mid-’60s, Dizzy Gillespie had already co-founded bebop and been a key emissary of Cuban music to the U.S. Blank catches the trumpeter rehearsing for a guest spot at a Stan Kenton concert in Los Angeles. Blank’s playfulness is showier here than it would become. The 30-year-old director, an industrial filmmaker in love with Italian Neorealism, approaches music documentary as a kind of art film—his crisp black-and-white photography and deliberately arty angles are clearly stamped by their time. But Blank’s framing is instantly mesmerizing, instantly him. If his palate became more refined, his toolkit is already firmly in place. 

God Respects Us When We Work, but Loves Us When We Dance (1968)

The title could stand in for much of the Blank oeuvre—this is a filmmaker who loves bodies in motion, captured on the fly. This is a 20-minute epic depiction of Los Angeles’s Love-In on Easter Sunday of 1967. It has a big disadvantage—Blank shot the film on silent stock and overdubbed a lame “psychedelic” rock combo over it —but you don’t listen to a film, you watch it, and the ersatz music works: as these overwhelmingly white kids boogie orgiastically, they look not a little corny. But Blank also captures a genuine moment of generational embrace among those enough in the know to be there, its moments of stoned contemplation. The kids’ innocence is total, blessed, and never to be regained, and no other documentary sees it all coming quite like this one.

The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins (1968) 

In the late ‘60s, Blank began hanging out at L.A.’s Ash Grove folk club, where he became enamored of the Houston bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins. With his second marriage falling apart and his future as a serious filmmaker looking dim, Blank later wrote, “I found that really listening to blues music provided a kind of comfort not experienced since my younger days as a believer in organized religion.” During one interview, Hopkins’ wife had left him the same evening and her cousin was “lurking outside the apartment door with a loaded pistol. Lightnin’ also had a large loaded gun stuck down the front of his pants . . . Thus, the style of the film”—in which “sequences are threaded together with stitches of feeling that move the film along much like the structure of music itself.” It would become Blank’s signature. Letting his subject extemporize, Blank recorded one bar of gold after another: “The blues come so many different ways, until it’s kind of hard to explain,” Hopkins says. Or try: “I didn’t mean to do the snake too much harm, but I did it by breaking his neck.” Blank’s montages of the life surrounding Hopkins in Black rural Texas—potent everyday images of fishing lines being baited, young boys and their grandfathers in church, and all-Black rodeos—are exactly the right baseline for performances by Hopkins shot up so close that he’s nearly falling on you. Hopkins’ fellow singer-guitarist Mance Lipscomb, who appears in The Blues, got his own superb Blank film with A Well Spent Life (1971).

Spend It All (1971)

Cajun life and music were a Blank bedrock, subjects he returned to again and again. An early classic, Spend It All is 44 minutes of vivid and empathetic immersion in French-derived rural southwest Louisiana, full of great tunes. It contains two of Blank’s most indelible images: an old man in a hat and tie, holding a beer, intently dancing alone, and an infamous tooth-pulling scene, which takes place at a backyard party. During the last 10 minutes, the Cajun accordion maker and player Marc Savoy appears. Tall, forthright, and magnetic, Savoy would recur in Blank’s filmography. He and his wife, Ann Allen Savoy—author of Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People—would be the subject of Marc and Ann (1991), a half-hour featuring the couple complaining a lot about modernity. And Marc is the first voice we hear in I Went to the Dance: The Cajun and Zydeco Music of Louisiana (1987), an overview of the terrain co-directed by Chris Strachwitz, the founder of the roots-music label Arhoolie Records, that is brimming with good performances.

Hot Pepper (1973) 

A deep look at the zydeco accordion master Clifton Chenier and the Black Creole culture he came from, Hot Pepper works as a companion piece to both Dry Wood (1973), a Creole-focused doc made at the same time, and Spend It All, about white Cajuns from the same area. Chenier is a genial presence in the interview segments—particularly on the porch of his childhood home—and electric onstage, in scintillating juke-joint performances where Blank catches the dancers coolly appraising one another.

A Poem Is a Naked Person (1974) 

For decades, little was known about this film outside of a handful of written pieces, among them Robert Christgau’s 1979 encomium to Blank in The Village Voice, in which he called A Poem Is a Naked Person “an arty horror movie of a documentary” in which “Blank abandons subtlety for an overstated visual gadgetry that screams repulsion out of control.” It also screams spending someone else’s money—namely, that of its subject, Leon Russell, who also co-produced with then-manager Denny Cordell, then opted not to release it during Blank’s lifetime. When it came out in 2015, two years after Blank’s death, it was a revelation—not just a black-comic side-eye to the rock-star circus enveloping Russell during the two years Blank and editor/camerawoman Maureen Gosling spent making the film, but a work as genuinely free-associative and gonzo as so much of the era’s art aspired, and failed, to be.

Chulas Fronteras (1976)

This hour-long history of Norteño music, produced by Chris Strachwitz, is one of Blank’s most programmatic films. A lot of classic recordings are illustrated in fairly obvious ways, e.g., a corrida exhorting workers to join the union over footage of Tejanos manning food-production factory lines. But Chulas Fronteras is also one of Blank’s most visually ravishing films. Taking in the Texas and Mexican coast along the Gulf of Mexico, Blank gets stunning shots of enormous skies over brushland and over cities. Some of the music’s giants are seen in their pomp: Flaco Jiménez effortlessly commanding a small club stage, Los Alegres de Terán shoving an obstreperous horse out of the camera’s way mid-song, a resplendently bejeweled Lydia Mendoza mesmerizing a crowded bar as well as preparing tamales with her family. Food is central, of course: One intrepid cook is seen pulping guacamole with a wine bottle inside a decommissioned shortening tub—an archetypal Les Blank image. If you crave more, go to Del mero corazón (1979), a half-hour highlighted by some electric dancing footage; both films are subtitled, as required, in both English and Spanish.

Always for Pleasure (1978) 

The self-titled 1976 album by the Wild Tchoupitoulas is an essential document of New Orleans music, but it sounds tame compared to the raw jubilance with which the band sinks its teeth into “Meet De Boys on the Battlefront” onstage in this, Blank’s most enthralling work. Not to mention the segment in which the Wild Tchoupitoulas lead the percussion jam of your dreams at Dot’s Bar, joined in by everyone in the room, kids included. Those sorts of moments would be Everest-like peaks for most works of direct cinema; here, they’re elbow-to-elbow with nearly everything surrounding them. It’s a nonstop, hour-long highlight reel, a testament to partying as mass release valve, city-bred lifestyle, and historical reenactment. Blank had gotten his undergrad degree at Tulane University, and his intimacy with the city’s byways, as well as his willingness to get into costume along with everyone else (we get a brief glimpse of the director and his collaborator Maureen Gosling in jester-like makeup, carrying heavy 16mm cameras, during Mardi Gras) gives this one an extra-vivid quality. Depicting and offering joy with bottomless depth, Always for Pleasure is, plain and simple, one of the great American films.

In Heaven There Is No Beer? (1984) 

Polka has such a square old rep that it’s a genuine shock how lively and zestful Blank’s treatment of it is. Focusing on the East Coast and upper Midwest, whose Polish communities form much of the music’s American audience, Blank shows packed dance floors teeming with people of all ages going for it, sometimes for hours at a time; we even see a couple icing one another’s feet. The sheer physicality on display—the dances have complicated footwork, and the tempos are very fast—is breathtaking. As someone who came of age in the upper Midwest rave scene, it was stunning to see polka as a very real ancestor.

Huey Lewis and the News: Be-FORE! (1987) 

Yes, really. As in: Yes, Les Blank really did make a behind-the-scenes documentary about the shooting of a Huey Lewis and the News video—for “Stuck with You,” no less, a song that is late-’80s pop torpor incarnate. And also as in: Yes, we really are recommending that you watch this, and not just as a novelty. It’s fascinating. False cheer is everywhere, from the song itself, to Lewis trying to sell his colleagues on a bit, to the video director Edd Griles’s manic insistence that any of this is worth doing. Blank’s camera roves, per usual, capturing the high-spirited nonsensical ‘80s-ness of it all. It’s as time bound as a ZZ Top video, and equally emblematic of the artistic ideals of the ‘60s adjusting to ‘80s corporate realpolitik—a film that tells us more now than it did at the time.