Les Blank Movies

The Ways of Water was made with the Earth Science Curriculum Project and the Environmental Studies Project of the American Geological Institute. A...

From Worldcat: Presents new musical sounds and new ways of treating old sounds. Includes examples of chance music, tape music, synthesizer music, and...

Set in the North Carolina Appalachians, Sprout Wings and Fly honors the fiddle playing of 82-year-old Tommy Jarrell of Toast, NC. Tommy was quirky,...

This film, photographed and edited by Les Blank, produced and directed by Pieter Van Deusen, documents a spontaneously improvised concert by musician...

The definitive film on the history of the toe-tapping, foot-stomping music of French Southwest Louisiana. Includes many Cajun and Zydeco greats,...

A lyrical journey through the heart of Chicano culture as reflected in the love songs of the Tex-Mex Norteña music tradition. Performers...

When you think of Latin percussion, think of Francisco Aguabella. Perhaps the finest Afro-Cuban master percussionist still living, he has become...

Directed by Terry Nowak. This early film about the Southern California Renaissance Fair, with Les Blank as cameraman, is shot in sensuous detail on a...

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...

In this short film, blues musician Lightnin’ Hopkins performs an improvised song inspired by a card game he played with filmmaker Les Blank and...

Les Blank brings us the life and work of self-taught, visual artist Butch Anthony, who hails from the small town of Seale in Southeastern Alabama....

One of Les Blank's industrial films, which follows a Holly Farms "broiler" chicken from factory incubation to the county fair barbecue pit. A...

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...

Conjoined fables are told, one Japanese, the other African, a ghost story colliding with farcical folklore.

Another short documentary of "Real Food, Roots Music, and People Full of Passion for what they do!", Spend It All is Les Blank's spirited look at the...

In 1967 Les Blank and Skip Gerson were hired to work in Thailand on a documentary about the B52 Bomber and its use in bombing campaigns over Vietnam.

This little-known Blank gem is a portrait of the Serbian-American communities of Chicago and California, highlighting their history in this country,...

Oakland bluesman Sonny Rhodes sings “Cigarette Blues”: a musical warning that compares cigarette smoking with playing with a loaded gun.

In a mountain village in southwestern China, just south of Tibet, one of the last remaining traditional bearers of the Lisu ethnic group is amid the...

This softball umpire training film was one of Les Blank's early industrial films made in 1962 prior to his independent filmmaking career. He made...