Friday Nov. 7 - 9:00 PM
"SO YOU WANNA MAKE A ROCK DOCUMENTARY?"
Special screening and Masterclass by Les Blank
Music documentary offerings have never been sparse, but if there are over 50 feature-length music documentaries completed in any given year, why aren’t we seeing them? There are many answers, but the simplest one is that making a music documentary is fraught with not only the same problems as any other kind of documentary, but also with insurmountable copyright issues.
What happens when a filmmaker spends years of their life creating their art, only to have the finished film denied release? Les Blank is a director who has created an amazing catalogue of music films; some have gone on to become classics, such as Dizzy Gillespie (1965) and The Blues According to Lightning Hopkins (1970), but others have been buried and rarely seen. It is with great honour that we present one of the latter, a film that has been called “the greatest rock documentary ever made.”
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Les Blank is an anthropological documentarian whose camera eye frequently rests on peripheral pockets of rich ethnic culture. Blank has fashioned a dense catalogue of whimsical and adventurous documentaries including The Blues According to Lightning Hopkins (1969), Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980) and his masterpiece, Burden of Dreams (1982), a documentary about the ill-fated making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo – considered by many to be the greatest film ever made about the making of a film. Blank has also been a creative force, either as cameraman or editor, on films such as Easy Rider and Dusan Makavejev’s Hole in the Soul. In 1990, Les Blank received the Maya Deren Award for outstanding lifetime achievement as an independent filmmaker.