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- High schooler Greg, who spends most of his time making parodies of classic movies with his co-worker Earl, finds his outlook forever altered after befriending a classmate who has just been diagnosed with cancer.
- A documentary following German auteur Werner Herzog as he deals with difficult actors, bad weather and getting a boat over a mountain, all in an effort to make his film Fitzcarraldo (1982).
- A short documentary in which directors Werner Herzog and Errol Morris make a bet which results in Herzog being forced to eat his own shoe.
- A Filipino jeepney driver (Kidlat Tahimik) who idolizes America's space program comes to reject the rapid encroachment of technology.
- Les Blank's first feature-length documentary captures music and other events at Leon Russell's Oklahoma recording studio during a three-year period (1972-1974).
- A documentary on the history of garlic. Blank interviews chefs, garlic lovers, and historians about the their love of the 'stinking rose.'
- A portrait of the life, culture and food surrounding the lovers of Polka music. The title is taken from an old Polka standard. Stars of the Polka world are highlighted.
- "Chulas Fronteras" examines the origins and social significance of the traditional Tejano (or 'Tex-Mex') music that developed along the U.S.-Mexico border.
- A portrait of the great Texas bluesman, 'Lightnin' Hopkins. The film includes interviews and a performance by Hopkins.
- A charming valentine to women born with a space between their teeth.
- During the 1990s, David Lee Hoffman searched throughout China for the finest teas. He's a California importer who, as a youth, lived in Asia for years and took tea with the Dali Lama. Hoffman's mission is to find and bring to the U.S. the best hand picked and hand processed tea. This search takes him directly to farms and engages him with Chinese scientists, business people, and government officials: Hoffman wants tea grown organically without a factory, high-yield mentality. By 2004, Hoffman has seen success: there are farmers' collectives selling tea, ways to export "boutique tea" from China, and a growing Chinese appreciation for organic farming's best friend, the earthworm.
- A look at the spirit of New Orleans. First a funeral: Allen Toussaint explains that you arrive slow and cut up afterwards. Then it's food, with a lesson in eating crayfish at Frankie and Johnny's. Next, a St. Patrick's Day party: New Orleans celebrates holidays on the streets. Then it's preparation for Mardi gras, with roots in slave days, when slaves gathered on Sundays to prepare for the one holiday they could celebrate. The Wild Tchoupitoulas society makes Indian costumes to honor the help Indians gave slaves. At Mardi gras, we're with this society parading, singing, and partying. We end with the annual parade for St. Joseph, the saint of the people. More music, dance and ritual.
- Stoney Knows How is a visit with a master of the Oldest Art In The World - Tattooing. Disabled by arthritis since the age of four, confined to a wheelchair, his growth stunted, Stoney St. Clair joined the circus at 15 as a sword-swallower. A year later, he took up tattooing, and traveled with circuses and carnivals for 50 years. As we watch him at work, we see the determination which led Stoney to use his crippled hands in an art where mistakes are permanent, and we realize Stoney has overcome his handicap to heal himself and others with the magic of symbols. The film ends with a visit by New Age tattoo master Don Ed Hardy to Stoney, who gives him a souvenir tattoo.
- A deeply moving tribute to the Texas songster, Mance Lipscomb, considered by many to be the greatest guitarist of all time.
- A documentary about Tommy Jarrell, a fiddler from North Carolina. This films shows a bit of his current life and those around him and includes a lot of his Appalachian Old-Time music.
- Documentary about noted Zydeco artist Clifton Chenier. Based out of New Orleans, Chenier was the self-crowned "King" of Zydeco (a New Orleans musical hybrid containing elements of blues, folk and Tex-Mex music). Included are interviews with Chenier himself as well as relatives and friends, and scenic shots of the New Orleans area Chenier calls home, all of which is edited together by Les Blank.
- Film on the history of the toe-tapping, foot-stomping music of French Southwest Louisiana.
- Tattoo Uprising is a sweeping overview of tattooing, from Biblical references and early Christian practices to the voyages of Captain James Cook and the ever-evolving image of the tattoo in the Western world.
- Bluesman Sonny Rhodes simultaneously addresses death, cigarette smoking, and the nature of the blues.
- Portrait of the Cajun lifestyle in Southwest Louisiana.
- Using music of the genre, a short look at Tex-Mex music, how it expresses love found and love lost, and how it comes straight from the heart.
- 199031mNot Rated7.3 (307)Short"Les Blank marries his passion for spicy, down home food and his love for Cajuns and Creoles in this mouth-watering, exploration of the cooking, and other enthusiasms, of French-speaking Louisiana. Features tangy music, and food by Marc Savoy, Paul Prudhomme, and other greats". --Director's web site.
- Documentation of 1967 Los Angeles Easter Sunday Love-In.
- A lyrical recreation of Lightnin' Hopkins' decision at age eight to stop chopping cotton and start singing for a living. Folklorist/Ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax called Blank's stunning and elegiac short on Hopkins' reminiscences of his youth "one of the three most important films on the South." Color. 10 minutes. 1969.
- A documentary spotlighting "car-art" in America.
- The film follows one of the world's top rock-and-roll bands of the 80's and a crew of fifty technicians to the Bahamas for the making of a music video for their number one hit single, "Stuck With You" for their album, "FORE!"
- 1957. The Latin Quarter, Paris. A cheap no-name hotel became a haven for a new breed of artists fleeing the conformity and censorship of America. The hotel soon turned into an epicenter of Beat writing that produced some of the most important works of the movement. It came to be known as the Beat Hotel. Alan Govenar's documentary "The Beat Hotel" explores this amazing place and time.
- "La Danza de la Conquista del Gran Tenochtitlan", also known as "Los Concheros", "Danza Azteca", & "Danza Chichimeca", traces its origins to pre-Columbian Nahua ("Aztec") roots. Its adherents are organized into dance groups, each led by a "Capitan de Danza", who must obey one of the "Generales" who head distinct lineages and claim to pass traditional lore down from before the Spanish invasion of Mexico. The "Danzantes" must take part in a complex series of "obligaciones" throughout the year. At the great annual pilgrimage to the shrine of Chalma, thousands of "Danzantes" from Mexico and the US gather for four days of ritual and dance. Since the 1960's, Mexican dance teachers like Florencio Yescas and Andres Segura have brought the "Danza" to the US. The Eagle's Children follows Mexican-American "Danzantes" to Chalma, Central Texas, and San Diego, as they rediscover their indigenous heritage. Allegra Fuller Snyder UCLA Dance Department
- This documentary from Les Blank follows the indomitable Gerald "The Maestro" Gaxiola, who turned to a life of prolific art making after years as an aircraft mechanic, traveling salesman, and body builder.
- Documentary about a couple of American tourists on a two-week European tour.
- A portrait of black Creole life in the Louisiana Delta, accompanied by the hot sounds of Zydeco music.
- Enchanting portrait of Marc and Ann Savoy, Cajun musicians who are dedicated to the preservation and continuance of Cajun culture.
- The Black Tulip is what the Soviet soldiers who fought in Afghanistan called the plane that carried the bodies back to home. Opening at a Soviet army base in Kabul, the film visits an attack helicopter squadron, a firebase outside Kabul, and a guard post near Kandahar. Then the film moves to the monument to the dead of WWII beside the Kremlin wall, to a Moscow cemetery filled with dead from the Afghan war, and to the heartbreak of a mother of one of the dead soldiers.
- This little known Les Blank gem is a portrait of the Serbian-American communities of California and Chicago. At the time of the California Gold Rush, the first Serbian immigrants arrived from the rugged Balkan Peninsula to settle in the New World. Against great obstacles, Serbian religion and identity had survived five centuries of Moslem domination under the Turks, and a deep sense of loyalty to ancestral tradition lives on in America today among the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the earliest settlers. Zivelli is a film which brings to the screen all of the vitality of Serbian traditions in a mosaic of folk music, and arts, conviviality, Serbian Orthodox pageantry, and immigrant lore.
- 20141h 4mNot Rated6.8 (60)71MetascoreIn the year 2000, Les Blank, along with co-filmmaker Gina Leibrecht, visited Richard Leacock (1921-2011) at his farm in Normandy, France and recorded conversations with him about his life, his work, and his other passion: cooking! With the flair of a seasoned raconteur, Leacock recounts key moments in his seventy years as a filmmaker and the innovations that he, D.A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles and others invented that revolutionized documentary filmmaking, and explores the mystery of creativity. With the passing of both Blank and Leacock, the documentary is a moving insight into the lives of two seminal figures in the history of film.
- In the film You Don't Need Feet to Dance, African immigrant Sidiki Conde, having lost the use of his legs to polio at fourteen, balances his career as a performing artist with the almost insurmountable obstacles of life in New York City, from his fifth-floor walk up apartment in the East village, down the stairs with his hands and navigating in his wheelchair through Manhattan onto buses and into the subway. Sidiki struggles to cope with his disability and to earn a decent living, but he still manages to teach workshops for disabled kids, busk on the street, rehearse with his musical group, bicycle with his hands, and prepare for a baby naming ceremony, where he plays djembe drums, sings, and dances on his hands.
- A documentary about the music and influence that Francisco Aguabella has had on the world.
- The long-awaited sequel to Sprout Wings and Fly is a gentle celebration of mountain living, a once-thriving American way of life.
- Filmmaker Gary Keys' 1986 film of Dizzy and company live in California.
- In a world where valued traditions are threatened by globalization, the Totonac Indians of Mexico struggle to maintain the 2000 year old Los Voladores (the flyers) ritual, a visual representation of pre-Conquest Mexican Indian religion.
- The strange story of a strange guy who drives around with owl do - do in his truck trying to pick up girls. Source Balderdash
- This gentle portrait of Auntie Irmgard Farden Aluli, one of Hawaii's best loved composers, focuses on Hawaiian women's contributions to family structure, art, music and dance.
- 80-year-old Julie Lyon, sister of Old Time fiddler Tommy Jarrell, lights up this gem of a film as she spins tales of her Appalachian childhood in North Carolina - and her first romance. Color. 11 minutes. 1983/1991.
- THE TREE OF LIFE (29 min) The Tree Of Life grows In the Land of Mystery: There we were created; There we were born. There He by whom all things live Spins the thread of our lives. "Los Voladores" (the Flyers) is a 1500 year-old rite sacred to Quetzalcoatl, the Morning Star. From its origins on the Gulf coast of Mexico, the ritual spread throughout Mesoamerica: a special square was reserved for it in Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, and a variant is still known among the Quiche' Maya in Guatemala. Today "Los Voladores" is best known in its original home in the Huasteca region, especially among the Totonac, who have lived in the area for millenia. The version shown in the film is from Huehuetla, in the Sierra Norte de Puebla. The film opens with images from the Nuttall, Laud, and other Codices, and poetry from "Cantares Mexicanos", a collection of pre-hispanic Nahuatl verse from Texcoco. At the home of the Volador Captain, we watch the preparation of the characteristic seven-branched wax candles, crowned with a representation of the Volador pole (a mayordomia obligation, part of the cargo system). Intercut with the candle-making, children learn the ritual of the Voladores by re-enacting it from start to finish. In the forest, the Voladores bless the tree chosen for the rite. The tree is felled and dragged by 300 Totonacs along mule trails into the village, where it is wrapped with vines and raised entirely by hand to its new place in the churchyard. Preparations are completed as the Voladores bring the hub, the sacred symbol of dynamic change (Olin), from its place at their home altar, set it on the tip of the pole, and thread the ropes which will bear them on their flight carefully through the hub and around the pole. Dressed in costumes drawn from 18th-century European models, the Voladores join the statue of San Salvador, the Risen Savior, in the fiesta procession. As the capitan of the Voladores dances on the narrow bub, high above the flagstones, other dance groups perform: Huehues, Quetzales, San Migueles, and Negritos. Then the Voladores descend head down, arms spread, in a slow spiral, to the sound of drum and flute... Combining ritual, dance, music, poetry, and art, "THE TREE OF LIFE" is a meditation on the mystery at the heart of human life. It calls us to keep the world in balance with our lives. You have become the Tree of Life. Dying, you have been born again. Swaying, you spread your branches And stand before the Giver of all life. In your boughs our home shall be: We will be your flowers. Awards: First Prize, Festival of Films on Native Americans (Mexico); First Prize, International Festival on Culture & Psychiatry; First Prize, The American Film Festival; CINE Golden Eagle; Berlin & London Film Festivals, Musee de l'Homme, Smithsonian, Walker, MOMA, Museo Nacional de Antropologia. TV: US (PBS), Germany (ZDF), Japan (NHK), Sweden, Spain (RTE), and Mexico
- A celebration of the cultures of the world living and thriving in the United States, Extraordinary Ordinary People is a music-fueled journey across America.