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Les Blank (November 27, 1935 – April 7, 2013) was an American documentary filmmaker best known for his portraits of American traditional musicians. ==Life and career== Blank attended Phillips Academy Andover, and Tulane University in New Orleans, where he received a B.A. in English literature and a Master of Fine Arts in theater. He also studied communications at the University of Southern California.〔(Notable Alumni, USC School of Cinematic Arts ).〕〔(About this Person: Les Blank ), Allmovie, NY Times.〕 Following his university education, he worked for a production company called Operation Success, making films that he would later describe as "insipid films that promote business and industry." He founded his own production company, Flower Films, in 1967 with the release of ''God Respects Us When We Work, but Loves Us When We Dance'', a short colorful document of Los Angeles' Elysian Park Love-in. This was followed by ''The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins'' (1968) and ''The Sun's Gonna Shine'' (1968) about Houston blues musician Lightnin' Hopkins. He never went back to work making industrial films and all of his films were independently produced, often with the assistance of grants from cultural agencies, both governmental and non-governmental. Most of his films focused on American traditional music forms, including (among others) blues, Appalachian, Cajun, Creole, Tex-Mex, polka, tamburitza, and Hawaiian music. Many of these films represent the only filmed documents of musicians who are now deceased. Blank's films focusing on musical subjects often spent much of their running time focusing not on the music itself but on the music's cultural context, portraying the surroundings from which these American roots musics come. Other notable films on non-musical subjects include a film about garlic and another about gap-toothed women, as well as two films about German film director Werner Herzog: ''Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe'' (1980) and ''Burden of Dreams'' (1982), the latter about the filming of Herzog's ''Fitzcarraldo''. ''The Maestro: King of the Cowboy Artists'' (1994) and ''Sworn to the Drum: A Tribute to Francisco Aguabella'' (1995) were Blank's last two films using 16mm film. He later worked in digital video. His last film, ''All in This Tea'', which was co-directed by Gina Leibrecht, was a profile of the western Marin County-based tea importer and adventurer David Lee Hoffman. In 2007 Blank was awarded the prestigious Edward MacDowell Medal in the Arts. Les's son, Harrod Blank, has also become a documentary filmmaker. Blank lived in the Berkeley Hills. For more than 30 years he was a resident of Berkeley, which celebrated Les Blank Day on Jan 22, 2013. His company, Flower Films, is based in El Cerrito, Contra Costa County, California. Blank died of bladder cancer at his Berkeley Hills home on April 7, 2013. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Les Blank」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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