The Blues Accordin' to Les Blank

Join us for a 16mm screening of two early works by eccentric American documentarian Les Blank (1935-2013), hosted in conjunction with LondonFuse's CYOA festivities.

PROGRAM

THE BLUES ACCORDIN' TO LIGHTNIN' HOPKINS
1968 | 31 minutes

"The blues is just a funny feelin', yet people call it a mighty bad disease."
-Lightnin' Hopkins

In his own words and music, Lightnin' Hopkins reveals the inspiration for his blues. He sings, jives, ponders. He boogies at an outdoor barbecue and rodeo and takes you with him on a homecoming visit to his boyhood home of Centerville, Texas. Blank got up close to the man with his camera, brilliantly capturing Hopkins’s engaging personality, his fierce music, and the textures of his life and community.

A WELL SPENT LIFE
1971 | 44 minutes

In his midseventies, musician Mance Lipscomb commands the screen in Blank’s vivid sketch of a man some consider the greatest blues guitarist who ever lived. A glowing spirit and armchair philosopher, Lipscomb spent all his days working as a sharecropper on Texas’s hot plains, even after his music was discovered by folk enthusiast Chris Strachwitz and he became the first person signed to Strachwitz’s Arhoolie record label in 1960. A quietly poetic film, set to the tranquil rhythms of daily routine, A Well Spent Life is a testament to the pleasure Lipscomb took from his simple existence, as well as a touching and wry portrait of his marriage to Elnora, his wife of nearly sixty years.

Artist Bio

An uncompromisingly independent filmmaker, Les Blank (1935-2013) made documentaries for nearly fifty years, elegantly disappearing with his camera into cultural spots rarely seen on-screen—mostly on the peripheries of the United States, but also occasionally abroad. Seemingly off-the-cuff yet poetically constructed, these films are humane, sometimes wry, always engaging tributes to music, food, and all sorts of regionally specific delights.