Coming to theatres today, Wednesday, July 1: A POEM IS A NAKED PERSON
Les Blank’s Leon Russell music doc, completed in 1974, recently made its debut at SXSW. It has since screened at AFI Docs and BAMcinemaFest prior to its theatrical release.
Originally commissioned by folk rocker Leon Russell but caught up in legal troubles, likely due to the artist’s dislike of the final film, Blank’s unruly portrait went unreleased for over four decades. After the filmmaker’s death, his son brokered an agreement with Russell to remaster and finally release the film, long heralded as a “lost” classic by Blank fans. While I’m generally an admirer of Blank’s work, I remain generally uninterested in music docs, and I have no idea who Russell is – following viewing this portrait, that hasn’t changed much: as far as music portraits go, this one is an odd duck. Fans of Russell will likely appreciate the performance footage, but bristle, perhaps as Russell himself did, at Blank’s seeming lack of focused concentration on his ostensible subject – the filmmaker is as likely to train his camera on the demolition of a building in Tulsa, a sunset, or a group of parachuters as he is to following the musician around. This free-association, slice of Americana approach yields some lovely moments of local color – such as an early interview with an older neighbor couple, or a little girl insisting on singing Three Dog Night at a wedding – but in the end proves more frustrating than not compared to Blank’s other, better-known works.
what (not) to doc 