Cinematography: Les Blank

Direction Les Blank

Cast Lightnin' Hopkins

Plot A portrait of the great Texas bluesman, 'Lightnin' Hopkins. The film includes interviews and a performance by Hopkins.

Direction Les Blank

Plot "Chulas Fronteras" is a documentary about the music of the Mexican community on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border, particularly of migrant farmers. It includes material about the roots of...

Direction Les Blank · Skip Gerson

Cast Alfred Franklin · Hattie Franklin · Elnora Lipscomb · Mance Lipscomb

Plot Mance Lipscomb, born in 1895, a Black Texas sharecropper, guitarist, and singer, was recorded by Arhoolie Records in 1960. About ten years later, a film crew visits to listen to...

Direction Jean-Pierre Gorin

Plot Two young twins in the USA have invented their own shared language. Scientists are wanting to study the language but social workers are trying to get the twins to leave...

Direction Les Blank

Cast Werner Herzog · Klaus Kinski · Claudia Cardinale · Jason Robards

Plot A feature-length documentary about the messianic German director Werner Herzog struggling against desperate odds in the Amazon basin to make his epic feature, Fitzcarraldo.

Direction Les Blank

Cast Antzonini Del Puerto · Kathleen Bendel · Harrod Blank · Mary T. Brown

Plot A documentary on the history of garlic. Blank interviews chefs, garlic lovers, and historians about the their love of the 'stinking rose.'

Direction Les Blank

Cast Leon Russell · Eric Andersen · Malissa Bates · David Briggs

Plot This film was not officially released in 1974 and shown only at non-profit institutions with Les Blank appearing in person. After Les Blank's death in 2013, Les'son Harrod Blank and...

Direction Les Blank

Cast Werner Herzog

Plot A film exactly described by its title. German film director Herzog had made a bet with fledgling director Errol Morris that, if Morris made a film, Herzog would eat his...

Direction Les Blank

Cast Lightnin' Hopkins

Plot Hopkins made up this song and performed it for Les Blank after deciding to make the documentary The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins.

Direction Les Blank

Cast Carrie Adell · Catherine Anderson · Natacha Aubier · Miranda Bergman

Direction Pieter Van Deusen

Cast Christopher Tree

Plot A spontaneously improvised concert by musician Christopher Tree, with his one-man orchestra.

Direction Les Blank · Gina Leibrecht

Cast Richard Leacock · Valerie Lalonde

Plot In 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...

Direction Les Blank

Cast Tommy Jarrell

Plot The long-awaited sequel to Sprout Wings and Fly (Les Blank’s first film about this homegrown Appalachian fiddler and raconteur) is a gentle celebration of mountain living, a once-thriving American way...

Direction Les Blank

Plot 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...

Direction Les Blank · Skip Gerson

Cast Lightnin' Hopkins

Plot 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...

Direction Les Blank

Plot 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...

Direction Les Blank

Direction Les Blank · Gina Leibrecht

Cast David Lee Hoffman · Werner Herzog

Plot 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...

Direction Susan Wengraf

Cast Malvina Reynolds · Nancy Schimmel · Pete Seeger

Plot A 1977 American documentary film about the (then) 76 year old American folk songwriter Malvina Reynolds, directed by Susan Wengraf. Through the film, with some camera work by Les Blank,...

Direction Les Blank

Plot Documentation of 1967 Los Angeles Easter Sunday Love-In.