In Heaven there isn’t only Beer, there’s also Garlic
“Documentaries by Les Blank, Sixteen Films”
Written by Daniel C.
In an interview about his friend Les Blank, German director Werner Herzog (himself the subject of two of Blank’s documentaries) tells a story to illustrate his personality. On one occasion, Blank got on a boat only to realize right after leaving shore that he didn’t like the company he was going to have on the trip, so he simply jumped into the water and swam back the couple of miles they’d already covered to return to the coast. Watching his movies, it’s easy to believe this story. Why would he waste his time?
His movies don’t criticize anything except indirectly, offering alternatives. Perhaps this is the strongest kind of critique, in the same way a bit of humor can be a much more profound form of rebellion because it represents not just a rejection of this or that argument, but of the entire code that sustains it. It’s a decision to not participate and instead to show it from the outside. What it shows is a different way of seeing things, ideally a less limited way.
That’s the feeling these movies give us. When he interviews the people in a kind of subculture that praises the use of garlic almost religiously, in Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980), some using a garlic hat or flamenco dancing while wearing collars of garlic, none of them really spens much time criticizing the people who don’t “believe in garlic”. We simply see them so enthused that it would make us feel like idiots not to participate in that joy. They look for biblical, historical and literary references on the importance of garlic, and they cook—with garlic, lots of garlic. When, at a certain moment, sounding like a false note in the music (and Les Blank’s documentaries always have music), a certain organic farmer tells us he likes garlic, but no more than any of the other things he grows, that he’s not a garlic fanatic, it almost feels as if, by that innocuous but passion-less comment, he’s blaspheming. We don’t want to hear his sobriety. We want to go back to the fanatics. We want to be one of the fanatics.
The artist Gerald Gaxiola, who calls himself The Maestro and is the subject of the documentary The Maestro: King of the Cowboy Artists (1994) can also be described as a fanatic, in his case an art fanatic. He became an artist after a series of jobs that couldn’t satisfy him. As soon as he picked up a brush he felt he had died and been reborn. The only problem is that he doesn’t believe in selling his art because he thinks it would corrupt him as an artist. He spent thirteen years organizing an event he called Maestro Day, where he showed his creations (but didn’t allow their sale), sang live music and organized a series of competitions for the public. He cancelled it when he realized he was becoming more of an animator or a circus performer, instead of an artist. Still, we’re not sure how he makes his living, or that he’s not in fact more of a character than an artist. He dresses like a cowboy, he has a kind of fight to the death (we imagine it’s rather one-directional) with Andy Warhol and other artists like Christo, whose temporary installation he visits in California with a paintball revolver, intending to let him know that the Maestro wants to challenge his place in the artistic apex.
The enthusiasm, the joy, overflows and infects us, like it does in all his movies, including—or rather, especially in—the ones that document entire communities. The music, always live, accompanies dancing. It also accompanies the food. These are the elements of a celebration. The people in Les Blanks’ movies are always celebrating, always dancing, always cooking. We know they must work, that they have to earn a living. We sometimes see people working, but we feel they’re only waiting for nightfall, so they can celebrate.
To celebrate is what the community of Cajuns does in Spend it All (1971). This southern community—descended from the French who had established themselves in Nova Scotia and been chased out by the English—if we believe Les Blank, seems not to do anything besides horse racing, coooking different types of crustaceans and fish and pigs with lots of spices, drinking beer and dancing to the rhythm of the accordeon and the violin. The little money they have they spend it all on that. Hence the name of the movie. The lives of their black counterparts, a community that also lives in Louisiana and speaks a French creole, which he documents in Dry Wood (1973), seems to consist of more or less the same, except that they’re a little more destitute. In one scene from that movie we see a man walking across a field during the daytime with a shovel over his shoulder. The man whistles. The melody he’s whistling is then stolen by the violin which begins the party at nighttime, the one he’d likely been anticipating.
To celebrate is what the inhabitants of New Orleans do in Always for Pleasure (1978). Two weeks before Mardi Gras, even though the businesses are still running, they’re already in a celebratory mood, one guy tells us: “The businesses are still open, but everybody’s finger-poppin’ and havin’ a ball!” The people follow the procession of musicians playing the trumpets and the drums, jumping around and twisting their bodies at the hips and throwing their arms up in the air, as if possessed. On St. Patrick’s day, one inhabitant of Irish origin tells us that this city is the only one in the country where you can still drink beer outside and then throw the can right in the street, that is, the only city in the country where you’re still free to live. The last half hour of the movie deals with the Mardi Gras celebrations of certain African “tribes” which honor the indigenous populations which gave shelter to runaway slaves. (Blank focuses on a specific one called the Tchopitoulas.) To this day (or at least up to the time of the filming) competitions still take place for the best indigenous dresses, which turn out to be extremely elaborate, colorful and decorated, and which they make every year from scratch, throwing away the ones from the year earlier. Why engage in all that effort and all that labor which turns to nothing as soon as the party’s over? Purely to celebrate. Why else be alive?
In the same documentary a cook shows us the method for separating the live crawfish from the dead, letting the living walk themselves until falling into a pot where they’ll be cooked, while the dead stay behind. Then we see the somewhat ironic intertitles: “When you’re dead you’re gone. Long live the living!”
If we ask ourselves occasionally whether we’re not seeing paradise on earth, we might, for the same reason, begin to doubt. Paradise does not exist, at least not down here. In other words, could Les Blank be giving us a false idea of what these communities are really like? When the music stops, when the food is all eaten, when they wake up hungover and broke, how miserable are their lives, really? When we see a night celebration of the creoles in Dry Wood, in that moment consisting only of men (perhaps the women had things to take care of in the morning) throwing themselves on the floor, torturing a turtle and acting in general like badly behaved adolescents, we notice how very, very drunk they are, and we wonder whether this makes, in fact, for a functional life.
One might plausibly write a thesis for an economics degree about how the mentality and the lifestyle of the Cajuns does not allow them to accumulate wealth and become integrated to the industrialized, modern world (if they even exist 50 years after the film). Wouldn’t they be better off with more comforts, more technology, better medicine? In one moment in the film we see a woman toasting her own coffee grains over the stove. We see people making their own sausages or their own hogshead “cheese”. In general, they seem not to possess more than the very basic. As to medicine, there’s one very striking image from Spend it All. In the midst of a daytime celebration in the open air, with the usual live music in the background, a man grabs some pliers and simply puts them in his mouth and pulls out a molar, one of the few teeth he has left. Then he laughs. Those around him barely notice, as if this were the most normal thing in the world. Wouldn’t he be better off seeing a dentist?
We might ask these questions, but we feel that just by doing so, we’ve already lost. Or rather, that we’re playing an entirely different game. Moreover, the films leave one thing clear: if some things to which we are accustomed are missing from the lives of these people, there are many missing from a modern society like ours that might be more important. We realize that we’ve gradually lost the ability to celebrate life in the way it’s being celebrated here.
Celebration is a stance towards life. It doesn’t ignore the existence of pain the rest of the time, in all the other things we have to do to stay alive, in the fact that life is accompanied by so much loss—of loved ones, of pleasures, memories, youth or simply time. It’s a stance in the face of all that, the only one that truly makes sense. Is your job tough? Play the guitar, play the blues like Mance Lipscomb. Did you lose your woman? Sing and throw yourself on the floor, letting it all out while playing the harmonica like the guy who accompanies Lightnin’ Hopkins in The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins (1968). One of your best friends died in a senseless accident? Make a joke about it and then play the violin, like Tommy Jarrell in Sprout Wings and Fly (1983). Were you a victim of police racism, as the same Lightnin’ Hopkins tells us he was? Not that it isn’t worth fighting for what can be changed—there is pain in life that can be made better and then there is pain that can’t—but, at a personal level, even though we see how it affected him and even marked him forever, his sense of humor, his decision not to let it ruin his capacfity for enjoying life is what’s most admirable.
Pain is transformed through art. The portraits Blank makes of musicians, from folk violinists to blues singers and Afro-latin percussionists, are a testament to that. These people are capable of searching, digging deep until finding both a personal and communal wellspring, and deriving music from it which sublimates whatever they’ve been through and squeezes the beauty out of it. But this desire to celebrate life, instead of to lament things, is also made evident to us in Blank’s obsession with cooking. We’ve all felt the power of cooking at some point. Especially in moments when we least feel like cooking, when we might want to not eat anything or just eat whatever before going to bed, it’s precisely in that moment when we may have felt the curative power of simply preparing some food, adding spices, of putting some care and love into something, and the time, particularly if we can bring more people to the table. Music and cooking are not, in that sense, very different.
We all experiment music and cooking equally. We all have access to these things. This is another basic element of a celebration. The level of expenditure or extravagance might vary, but we all have the capacity to celebrate. Even if it is only a pretense—as in carnivals like Mardi Gras, when for a few days the social order is turned upside down and the revellers have the right to demand anything from anyone—in the moment of celebration everyone is equal. If anything, there might even be an inverse relationship between wealth and the capacity to celebrate, in the sense that the more riches we have the harder it is to really let go of everything, even if for a moment, and not think of the next day. Perhaps that is what we have lost in our modern socieity. Existential pains don’t disappear with the accumulation of wealth. Perhaps, up to a certain point, the way of properly curing them, even if only temporarily, does.
We feel a profound respect on the part of Les (we feel like we can also call him by his nickname, as the subjects in his films do) towards the people he films. They invite him over to their houses to watch them cook, they tell him stories, they make jokes, they play music for him, they dance in front of his camera. Someone said that we feel that he always has a camera in one hand and a beer in the other. They make him part of the community. There’s something very intimate in that. Sometimes his presence is felt from behind the camera. He even asks questions once in a while. But, other times, he seems to disappear and become completely unintrusive, capturing people without their noticing, like a true fly on the wall. He can only achieve this after winning over their confidence and making them feel entirely at ease in his presence, knowing that he wouldn’t betray them. Because he doesn’t. We don’t feel him ever judging, only observing, only admiring and thereby absorbing at least a little of the enthusiasm for life these people show.
At the moment he was shooting In Heaven There is No Beer? (1984), a frequent collaborator tells us Les was going through a period of depression. What was his response to this difficult period in his personal life? Not to spend his time ruminating or making depressing movies, but rather to make a movie about communities of Polka dancers throughout the country, communities whose infectious euphoria also borders on the religious, as in the case of the garlic lovers. These people get together in an annual festival called Polkabration in the state of Connecticut, which attracts thousands of people and lasts eleven days. There, people dance and drink beer (“In heaven there is no beer, that’s why we drink it here,” goes the song) and talk about the different types of Polka—according to one, the American variety has become a sort of international Polka—and of how belonging to a community such as this one gives meaning to their lives. During the credit sequence, we see a young girl strolling through the legs of the dancers which are jumping to the rhythm of the Polka. Breaking with the more or less stationary style we’ve seen in the rest of the movie, the camera decides to chase after her as soon as she starts to run and hop among the dancers, as if under a sudden inspiration, as if he can’t contain himself, as if indefensive in the face of so much joy.
When he makes a movie like Gap-Toothed Women (1987), he isn’t really making a commentary on the tyranny of certain standards of beauty which leave some people out. The women interviewed for the film talk about this, of course, but the subtext is really the same as in all his movies: how to find joy in life, how to do something with what fate gives you. Some of these women are objectively beautiful (despite, or perhaps because of their diastema—the scientific term for it), some perhaps less so. But they all transmit an energy that is contagious in the way they’ve found for dealing with their “problem”, mostly through art, but also in the way they express themselves, in the way they laugh. This makes us want to be in their company so we can also benefit from such joy and beauty in person. Blank simply had a particular attraction towards women with this characteristic and decided to explore it, in a respectful manner—it never feels lascivious or vulgar.
It’s this kind of particularity that gives color to life. If Les Blank’s films have anything, it’s color. I don’t know anything about cinematography, so I don’t know why in the (mainly) descendants of polish people of the Polka movie their eyes look so light that we don’t know if they’re green or blue. I do notice that this trait makes them seem as if possessed by some ancestral spirit of Polka. There is color in the pots where the whole variety of soups are made, in the cayenne pepper, in the crustaceans. There is color in the costumes of the Tchopitoulas. Also, hopefully clear from all that’s been said, there is a lot of musical color.
This is all a way of saying that these films are very personal products. They’re not Netflix productions. They aren’t very structured episodes in a series about talented chefs and their personal histories and their journeys of self-discovery. They also are not analyses or breakdowns of the components of a universal kitchen. They are also not sociological studies. They’re not trying to transmit little bits of knowledge for us to take with us and spit out at a party. They’re personal expressions, more like poems, trying to transmit something deeper, something to do with the totality of things and where we fit in it. How this is done is always a mystery. There’s no unique formula and every artist will find his own, distinct language, even if it falls inside a tradition.
If there is a single thread throughout all these films it is, possibly, the value of tradition. I think that’s a point worth examining one last moment. What is common to any tradition, be it food, music or art, is the impossibility of really explaining where it comes from, or why it took on this particular form. Traditions emerge as if by spontaneous generation. We might trace a history retrospectively, we might find many of the influences, we might know what basic materials existed to work with, but we can’t know why one possibility won out over all the others, and developed and was constructed upon, over and over, until reaching the present moment. The people who participate in these traditions don’t know any better than people external to them where the knowledge they have really comes from. If we step back and reflect for a moment, we find ourselves simply in a state of wonder by the fact that a community with no education of any kind is able to coax the maximum flavor out of a fish by using a combination of spices and ingredients in just a pot over a fire in the middle of the woods. Likewise, we find ourselves in a state of wonder by the power a musician has to look deep within his own tradition and come up with something which allows him to express himself in such a way that with his drum he can “make the walls sweat.” We find ourselves in a state of wonder by the capacity of art to take some inert material and transform it into a “work of art”, into an occasion to feel wonder.
Watching these movies, we feel wonder, specifically, that someone like Les Blank, searching with an open mind in often invisible American traditions and in the people who interpret them, was able to carve for himself a refuge in a sometimes cruel world, his own bit of paradise, a very personal paradise, consisting of garlic and crawfish and hogshead cheese and polka dancers and gap-toothed women, of blues singers and bluegrass violinists, of Werner Herzog and the Maestro, of the costumes of the Tchopitoulas, and the Cajuns and the Creoles, specifically at the end of their workday, of Mardi Gras and St. Patrick’s, and of people who want to talk to him, spend time with him, cook, play music, and dance.
We end up in a state of wonder for simply existing. That’s something to celebrate.
When you’re dead you’re gone. Long live the living!
Los documentales de Les Blank están disponibles en la colección “Documentaries by Les Blank: Sixteen Films” del Criterion Channel, así como en el boxset “Les Blank: Always for Pleasure” de la colección Criterion.
¹ Werner Herzog Eats his Shoe (1980) y Burden of Dreams (1982)
² Cajun cooking is the subject more directly of another documentary: Yum, Yum, Yum! A Taste of Cajun and Creole Cooking (1995)
³ Sworn to the Drum: A Tribute to Francisco Aguabella (1995)