Film-maker behind intimate, rounded portraits of musicians including Dizzy Gillespie and Lightnin' Hopkins
Les Blank and Werner Herzog: strange dreams and sole food
The film-maker Les Blank, who has died aged 77, explored the margins of America's music, capturing and framing idioms such as Louisiana Cajun and zydeco, the norteño music of the Texas-Mexico border, blues, polka, and Appalachian old-time music. He was also fascinated by traditions of eating and cookery, and when screening his film Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers (1980) he sometimes created what he called "smellovision" by cooking garlicky dishes in the auditorium.
Blank made more than 40 films, including Burden of Dreams (1982), about the shooting of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo. While few of his documentaries were known to a wide public, many were admired by other directors. In 2007, he received the Edward MacDowell medal, an annual award for achievement in the arts, only twice before given to film directors, and never to a documentary maker. One of the panel, the director Taylor Hackford, called Blank a national treasure.
Uninterested in conventional linear histories and their well-worn patchwork of archive footage and talking heads, Blank preferred to make intimate, rounded portraits. His role was that of the quiet guy in a corner who melts into the shadows. His favourite subjects were people who lived on cultural frontiers: the Texas songster Mance Lipscomb (A Well Spent Life, 1971), the zydeco accordionist Clifton Chenier (Hot Pepper, 1973), the old-time fiddler and banjoist Tommy Jarrell from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina (Sprout Wings and Fly, 1983). Many of his film projects were made in collaboration with Chris Strachwitz, founder of the roots-music label Arhoolie Records and co-founder with Blank of Brazos Films, their interests coalescing in superb studies of Tex-Mex music (Chulas Fronteras, 1976, and Del Mero Corazon, 1979) and the Cajun culture of the South Louisiana bayou country (J'ai Été au Bal, 1989). "He had a wonderful, extraordinary eye," says Strachwitz. "His aesthetic was to just sit calmly back and watch people do what they do."
Born in Tampa, Florida, Blank studied English at Tulane University in New Orleans, a city whose vibrancy he celebrated in Always for Pleasure (1978). He thought of becoming a writer, but while at graduate school in Berkeley saw Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal and decided, "This is what I want to do. I want to be working around people that do this kind of work." After film school he made a number of educational and industrial movies before taking on his first musical subject, the jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, in 1965. Two years later he created his own production company, Flower Films.
The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins (1968) introduced his name not only to lovers of American vernacular music but also to fellow film-makers and other cinéastes struck by his ability to film what one of them called "stuff that nobody else gets – he really gets close to the people, and you actually feel how they live". Steve Dollar, writing in the Wall Street Journal in 2011, said Blank "may be one of America's greatest journalists working without a laptop".
His longtime sound recordist and editor Maureen Gosling describes his films as "celebrations – looking at the way people survive in their lives above and beyond the struggles. [Many] of his films are about people that are poor, marginal or struggling, but there's something else going on there … the other human qualities that make life worth living, the music and the food that help these groups and cultures survive".
Blank's last movie, co-directed with Gina Leibrecht, was All in This Tea (2007), about an American tea importer. As well as receiving many prizes over the years for individual films, Blank was honoured by the American Film Institute with its Maya Deren award for his achievement as an independent filmmaker. In January 2013 the city of Berkeley honoured him with a Les Blank Day.
Blank was married and divorced three times. He is survived by his sons, Harrod and Beau, his daughter, Ferris, and three grandchildren.
• Leslie Harrod Blank, film-maker, born 27 November 1935; died 7 April 2013