A POEM IS A NAKED PERSON - #805

One of cinema’s most observant documentarians meets the ramshackle world of rock ’n’ roll in the 1974 film A Poem is a Naked Person. Part concert movie, part journalistic portrait, part travelogue, Les Blank trains his camera on singer-songwriter Leon Russell, an Oklahoma native, piano player, and revered session musician who, in the early 1970s, transitioned into solo work, performing swampy rock jams and writing a few classics along the way, perhaps most notably “A Song for You.”

Blank joins up with Russell’s camp at the apex of the performer’s career, when success has allowed him an opportunity to build a recording studio in his home state. Blank’s team follows Russell throughout the construction, though they don’t always stay around to watch the hammers swing. Interspersed with these scenes are snapshots from the road, including full performances and dalliances backstage. For much of A Poem is a Naked Person, these are our only real glimpses of Russell. Probably unsurprising to anyone who knows Blank’s work, the director spends much of the movie looking at the world around his subject, getting reactions from the locals regarding their famous new neighbor or watching as Jim Franklin, the man painting a mural on the bottom of Russell’s pool, catches scorpions before putting brush to concrete. Or stepping away from people altogether to look at the natural environs.

This impulse to cast his glance sideways keeps A Poem is a Naked Person from being a great music documentary, but Blank makes up for it by basically inventing something that is its own beast. Throughout his work, he has been fascinated by Americana and folk art, and there are subtle touches here, like the Hank Williams façade on the front of a building, or the accidental visual echo of the man with the butterfly tattoo hearkening back to the butterfly imagery in that painting on Russell’s pool.  Even the rootsy music that Russell covers in his concerts remind us of a musical tradition that stretches back to the earliest days of our nation. Not to mention added performances by George Jones and Willie Nelson, themselves legends in the country music field.

The downside is that if you’re looking to learn more about Leon Russell, you’re probably going to be better off reading his Wikipedia entry alongside the film. He doesn’t step out from behind the piano and start to emerge as a character until about halfway through the movie. And even then, since Blank never interviews him directly, he remains an enigma, almost entirely in control of what he shows the camera lens. One is quickly reminded of Bob Dylan in Don’t Look Back [review], especially so in a scene where Russell sarcastically dresses down a musician using his studio who steps to him in the wrong way. The way the elder statesman verbally bats around the young newbie (Eric Andersen) and puts him on the defensive is up there with Dylan’s humiliation of Donovan, right down to the lesser’s naïve sincerity.

But then maybe the code to this thing is right there in the title: A Poem is a Naked Person. Blank is creating something evocative of the man and his art, and through these captured impressions exposing something about both. He doesn’t exactly strip Leon Russell bare and show him off to the world, but perhaps he exposes more of the personage by suggesting the image dominates all that may be underneath.

For more local color, Maureen Gosling’s, Poem’s sound recordist and assistant editor has put together a montage of some of her own footage taken during the shoot, adding commentary using excerpts from letters she wrote to her parents. (Gosling is one of the director’s of the recent This Ain’t No Mouse Music [review], which shows Blank’s influence quite heavily.)

There are also supplements looking back at the making of the film, including a more recent conversation between Russell and Les Blank’s son Harrod, in which Russell discusses why he initially disliked the film and kept it out of circulation for years. Turns out, he didn’t think it was about him enough either! So is the naked person being put on display really Les Blank after all? Leon seems to think so.

This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 9/13

IN THEATERS...

* Adore. You heard of wife-swapping? How about son-swapping? Naomi Watts and Robin Wright are best friends who start having sex with each other's sons. It's all very literary.

* Don Jon, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's slick directorial debut. You will be asked to believe that porn is better than Scarlett Johansson. I remain unconvinced. There is nothing better than Scarlett Johansson.

* Gravity. See this in the biggest, loudest theater you can. Then again, if you need me to tell you that, you must be living somewhere no one can hear you scream.

* Inequality for All, a documentary about the widening gulf between the 1% and the working poor, as well as the disappearing middle class. Luckily, your host for this sobering journey is the affable Robert Reich.

* Rush, a middle-of-the-pack racecar movie from Ron Howard.

* Short Term 12, one of the year's best. Brie Larson stars in this potent drama about counselors for troubled teens who find some of the kids' problems hit a little too close to home.

My Oregonian columns...

We're shaking things up a bit. Online, the column I write will now be broken up and the individual movies listed on their own; the Friday paper will still print them all together. These first few, naturally, are the old way.

* September 6: go on pilgrimage in the documentary Walking the Camino, see Richard Elfman introduce a colorized Forbidden Zone, and watch the Everything is Terrible! website come alive.

* September 13: Two from Charlie Ahearn, the Trent Harris retrospective, and a dreadful Portland-made documentary. 

* September 20: two documentaries--the art-themed Herb and Dorothy 50X50 and Rise from Ashes, about the Rwandan bicycle team--alongside a revival run of Tarantino's Elmore Leonard adaptation, Jackie Brown.

* Cutie and the Boxer, a documentary about two Japanese artists who have been married and living in New York for four decades.

* Gideon's Army, a personal look at public defenders and the Herculean nature of their professions.

* Salma, the true story of an Indian poet who transformed confinement into art.

* The Trials of Mohammad Ali, a documentary looking at what happened to the champ when he stopped being Cassius Clay and started to stand up for what he believed.

* A Tribute to Les Blank: Three nights of Southern culture, music, and food. 

* Plus, two creative, off-the-beaten path screenings: From Nothing, Something asks a variety of artistic types why they do what they do, and Vanessa Renwick shows us what it is she does in the Wild Beasties program.

ON DVD/BVD...

* Between Us, a smart indie drama with Julia Stiles and Taye Diggs.

* Going Hollywood, a charming pre-Code musical with Bing Crosby and Marion Davies.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 7/13

The rest of my reviews from July...

IN THEATRES...

* Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp, an interesting man overcomes the conflicting message of the commentary his profilers give him, proving personality always wins.

* I'm So Excited, a light-hearted trifle from Pedro Almodovar. As Duran Duran once said, "doesn't have to be serious."

* Only God Forgives. Hey, Gosling, hurry up with my damn croissants.

* Pacific Rim is here to save your summer.

* Red 2, the old men need some Viagra, but the ladies have a good time anyway.

* The Wolverine, just the kind of do-over we were hoping for. Go get 'em, bub!

My Oregonian columns...

* July 5: The Chinese drama Beijing Flickers and the documentary A Girl and a Gun, alongside Rossellni's "Solitude Trilogy"

* July 12: Augustine, a historical drama; Survival Prayer, a meditative documentary; and V/H/S/2, a total piece of crap.

* July 19: A documentary on Big Star, a tribute to Les Blank, and the Serbian gay rights comedy The Parade.

* July 26: Hava Nagila: The Movie traces the history of the famous song; Men in Suits looks at the actors who dress as our favorite movie creatures; and the not-so-fantastic Fantastic World of Juan Orol is a biopic of the Mexican Ed Wood.

* August 2: Get In Bed With Ulysses and let James Joyce put you to sleep; or look at dramas based on real life, the human trafficking story Eden and James Cromwell in Still Mine. 

ON BD/DVD...

* The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec, Luc Besson's botched adaptation of the beloved Jacques Tardi comic book.

* Foolish Wives, the silent classic from Erich von Stroheim, newly mastered in HD.

* In Another Country, a romantic triptych teaming French actress Isabelle Huppert with South Korean director Hong Sang-soo.

 * Mayerling, the 1957 television production with Audrey Hepburn, long thought to be lost, finds its way into the world at last.

* Niagara, featuring Marilyn Monroe's sole turn as a femme fatale.

* Summer and Smoke, a minor adaptation of Tennessee Williams distinguished by a fantastic performance from Geraldine Page.

* Twixt, Francis Ford Coppola's mess of a vampire movie. 

* Wuthering Heights, Andrea Arnold's stripped down take on Emily Brontë.

BURDEN OF DREAMS - #287/GARLIC IS AS GOOD AS TEN MOTHERS

"I am running out of fantasy. I don't know what else will happen now.."

Werner Herzog speaks those lines at a juncture in Burden of Dreams, Les Blank and Maureen Gosling's 1982 behind-the-scenes exposé of the making of Herzog's film Fitzcarraldo, when his appreciation of irony is rapidly depleting. The Peruvian natives he has hired to be extras and crew on the production have left the location to go answer tribal violence and territorial threats, and Herzog is beginning to realize that, despite his best intentions, his presence in these people's lives has started to affect them in unforeseen ways. In that, he is no different than the rubber barons his script vilifies. He has come to this land to take something from the indigenous people.

It's one of many unfortunate cross-overs that the filmmaker has with his subject. Fitzcarraldo is the story of a European immigrant who went to South America to make his fortune, and once he had, squandered it in hopes of building an opera house to bring his beloved Caruso to sing in person. Klaus Kinski stars as the baron, while Claudia Cardinale co-stars as his love interest, a madame running a brothel. The film's climax details Fitzcarraldo's biggest and most fatal hurdle: getting his boat over a mountain, taking it from one river to another on the opposite side. It's a perilous act, one that is achieved in mud and blood, and at the expense of the lives of the local people he hires to pull it across.

What Burden of Dreams chronicles is how this went from being a written metaphor in a screenplay to an active and lengthy mishap for its author. Over the four years that Herzog tried to make Fitzcarraldo, shooting stalled twice before finally getting underway the last time--only to become elongated by the director's misguided insistence on realism. He shot his movie deep in the Peruvian jungle, far from where it would have been more safe and secure, and then proceeded to demand that his crew pull a boat up a mountain for real. No faking it here!

It's fortuitous that Blank and Herzog chose this particular production for the documentarian to follow. Honestly, the real-life story of Burden of Dreams is far more compelling that Herzog's finished film. It's one thing to create a fiction where a man's goals become a disease and his vision is blinded by obsession and even madness; it's another to watch it happen for real. Herzog, who is infamous for pontificating about his experiences and narrating documentaries where he theorizes about the lives of others, is caught in a philosophical and literary whirlwind of his own design. Burden of Dreams charts the decline of his artistic optimism. As the production becomes increasingly unmoored, so too does the man who would presume to orchestrate it. The last scenes quite literally show Herzog setting one of his boats adrift and trying to capture the chaos on film as he smashes into the rocks, taking his cameraman and star with him.

At the same time this is all happening, Blank and Gosling are also getting to know the local crew that have come on board to assist the crazy German. There is a lot of downtime during the production, and this allows Burden of Dreams to examine local politics, question how white society is encroaching on tradition, and even record some of the customs that still exist amongst the native peoples. There is an interesting contrast between the resilience of an ancient culture and the mutable whims of modern man.

Burden of Dreams was not the only collaboration between Les Blank and Werner Herzog. In the early 1980s, two more of Blank's films featured the director, either directly or tangentially. Herzog makes an appearance in Blank's mid-length feature Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers. (Not included on the Burden of Dreams DVD, but it is on the Criterion Hulu channel.) The director's cameo is a brief side trip in the documentary. Blank's study of the quirky cult of the clove eventually leads him to ponder its place in vampire lore. He asks Herzog about its absence from his remake of Nosferatu. Perhaps more interesting than the answer is Werner's own puzzled query, "Why did you ask me that?" It demonstrates why the two likely got along: they are both endlessly curious about what motivates people.

Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers's main thesis is to understand why garlic had long lacked in popularity in America, and what was at that time causing a change in its reputation. Blank centers his study on the annual garlic festival in Gilroy, a Northern Californian town where much of the country's garlic is grown. (I've driven through there. It will cause you to wonder if people can truly become acclimated to any smell, the day-to-day coping with that odor must be a real challenge.) The odd nature of the gathering, where people dress in costume and sing songs in honor of their chosen spice, sets the tone for the rest of Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers. Garlic is an intense vegetable that inspires intense devotion.

Blank finds a colorful cast of characters. There is the gypsy singer and connoisseur who tells of garlic's important history amongst the Spanish poor; there is the man who literally wrote the book on what he calls the Stinking Rose (and opened a restaurant of the same name); and there are a variety of cooks from many different cultural backgrounds. Blank has tremendous affection for kooks, and his movies gleefully respect that, even if maybe sometimes you wish he'd drop some of the quirks and tighten up the narrative.

Facts emerge as the movie progresses, and the title begins to make sense once we hear testimony of the herb's restorative powers, but this is really secondary to the collage of humanity that Blank has cut together. He moves back and forth through different commentators, comparing customs and culinary techniques, letting the central plant be the common thread between them all. It seems no matter where you are in the world, be it China, Mexico, or the American South, garlic will at some point reach your taste buds. It's the main seasoning in the melting pot of life.

It's no surprise then, that Blank focuses on the big clove of garlic Herzog uses as central flavor when cooking his boot in Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. Based on the fact that the two shorter films (Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe is only 20 minutes long) were released the same year, and how Herzog looks in both, the Nosferatu Q&A in Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers likely happened on this shoot. For Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, Blank films the German auteur making good on a bet: if Errol Morris could finish his first film, The Gates of Heaven, his mentor promised to literally eat his shoe. Ever the hardline poet, Herzog eats the one he was wearing when the wager was made.

Having seen Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe before, I came back to it thinking it a trifle that did not live up to its reputation. You see a man eat his shoe, and that's that. What a documentarian chooses to show you, however, is telling. For Herzog, this is a bold act. He is confirming for all neophyte and wannabe film directors that the dream is real. Yet, Blank shows how far the man can take such symbolic acts by connecting the leathery meal to the director holding court and quite literally justifying such an absurd event by denigrating his own profession and creating pretentious theories that connect his own perceived shallowness with larger social issues. It's like the folly of Burden of Dreams in microcosm.

What is fascinating, though, is how Blank deflates his subject while also showing more of himself. As a pair, Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers and Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe reveal Les Blank in a way Burden never can. His choice of subject and the cuts he makes in the editing room, as well as the music he lays over the top, demonstrate a sense of humor and a general positive attitude about life's happy accidents that, in Burden of Dreams, gets rolled over by that big boat just like everything else. Burden of Dreams shows Les Blank in service to Herzog's madness; Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers and Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe effectively turn the tables so that the servant becomes the master.

Les Blank died this past April. The NW Film Center in Portland, OR, will be showing all three of these films as a tribute to his legacy on Friday, July 19, and Satuday, July 20. Check their website for times.