Les Blank

Blank also received a 10,000 Euro prize for "Yum, Yum, Yum" for best film in the International Ethnographic Film Festival, Nuoro, Sardinia, Italy, 2002In 1990, Les Blank received the American Film Institute's Maya Deren Award for outstanding lifetime achievement as an independent filmmaker.

In 1989-1990, Blank was the distinguished filmmaker-in-residence at San Diego State University and, in 1991, adjunct assistant professor in film at the University of California, Berkeley. He was also the Louis B.

In 1986, National Public Radio aired a half-hour special on Les Blank's work and, in 1991, CNN aired a special on him, worldwide.

(Sundance) Film Festival, 1985 ("In Heaven There Is No Beer?"); Grand Award, Houston Film Festival, 1983 ("Burden of Dreams"); Golden Hugo, Chicago Film Festival, 1969 (The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins (1970)).

In 1984, Blank co-edited the "Burden of Dreams" book, which included journals written during the making of Burden of Dreams by him, sound recordist-editor Maureen Gosling and Werner Herzog, plus an article by legendary journalist Michael Goodwin.

Mayer filmmaker-in-residence at Dartmouth College and a directing fellow at the Sundance Institute in Utah (both in 1984). His work has been supported by The National Endowment For the Arts, The American Film Institute, The National Endowment For the Humanities, The Ford Foundation, The Guggenheim Foundation, PBS and the BBC.

Among Blank's numerous awards are the British Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary, 1982, (Burden of Dreams (1982)); the Golden Gate Award "Best of Festival", San Francisco Film Festival, 1982 ("Burden of Dreams"); Grand Prize, Melbourne Film Festival, 1985 (In Heaven There Is No Beer? (1984)); Special Jury Award U. S.

Major retrospectives of Les Blank's films have been mounted in Los Angeles at FILMEX in 1977; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1978 and 1984; New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1979; the National Film Theatre, London in 1982; Cineteca Nacional, Mexico City in 1984; the Cinematheque Francais, Paris in 1986; the Independent Film Week, Augsburg, Germany in 1990 and the Leipzig Film Festival in 1995 and the Sofia Music Film Festival, Bulgaria in 1998. Feature articles on Blank have appeared in American Film, Film Quarterly, Take One, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Image Magazine, Mother Jones, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Premiere, Downbeat and Video Review.

He has directed two films that have been selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant: Chulas Fronteras (1976) and Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980).

To finance these and other of his own films, he continued to make industrial and promotional films for such organizations as Holly Farms Poultry, Archway Cookies and the National Wildlife Federation until 1972. Blank's first independent films began a series of intimate glimpses into the lives and music of passionate people who live at the periphery of American society - a series that grew to include rural Louisiana French musicians and cooks.

film program at the University of Southern California, and five years of freelancing in Los Angeles, he began his first independent films, on Texas blues singer Lightnin Hopkins (The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins (1970)) and the newly forming sub-culture, known as flower children, (God Respects Us When We Work, But Loves Us When We Dance (1968)).

In 1967, after two years in the Ph. D.

Born in 1935 in Tampa, Florida, Les Blank attended Tulane University in New Orleans, where he received a B. A. in English literature and an M. F. A. in theatre.