How to Smell a Rose: A Visit with Ricky Leacock in Normandy
Description
Documentary filmmakers Les Blank and Richard Leacock were stubborn iconoclasts and kindred spirits. (Their friendship dated at least to the early ‘70s, when Leacock convinced his fellow NEA panelists to fund Blank’s application to film Creole musicians.) Direct cinema pioneer Leacock sought no more and no less than to capture “the feeling of being there,” and Blank embraced the same impulse steeped in indigenous food and song. In 2000, Blank and his associate and partner Gina Leibrecht trekked to the north of France to visit Leacock and his wife Valérie Lalonde. This disarming portrait captures Leacock’s wisdom and wit through informal conversations primarily (and unsurprisingly) in the kitchen of his ramshackle farmhouse. Leacock’s insights into filmmaking are augmented with clips from Robert Flaherty’s poetic Louisiana Story (1948) and Robert Drew’s vérité Primary (1960), which Leacock shot in radically different styles. Completed after Leacock’s death in 2011 and Blank’s in 2013, A Visit With Ricky Leacock in Normandy (the film’s subtitle, reflecting Blank’s typical understatement) honors a uniquely intuitive and artful approach to nonfiction filmmaking. —Michael Fox
Screens with:
Ed & Pauline (Christian Bruno, Natalija Vekic, USA 2014, 19 min)
Christian Bruno and Natalija Vekic lovingly revisit a pivotal moment in Bay Area and US film culture when Cinema Guild founder Ed Landberg and Pacifica Radio reviewer Pauline Kael helmed the first repertory theater in Berkeley in the ‘50s. This touching ode to movie love and the joy of discovering (and turning others on to) new directors, is graced with interviews with Ernest “Chick” Callenbach, Tom Luddy and other local luminaries. This film is competing for a Golden Gate Award.
Bay Area filmmaker Gina Leibrecht (left) co-produced, co-directed and edited All in This Tea (SFIFF 2007) with Les Blank. She is currently in production on the feature-length doc, Les Blank: A Quiet Revelation. Leibrecht has edited numerous documentaries, including Karina Epperlein’s Phoenix Dance, David L. Brown’s Of Wind and Waves: The Life of Woody Brown and Owsley Brown’s forthcoming Ké Kontan (Joyful Heart).
Les Blank (right), who died in 2013, made dozens of films including The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins, Garlic is As Good As Ten Mothers and Burden of Dreams. He was the subject of a special tribute at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1995.
Trailer
//player.vimeo.com/video/122129425?autoplay=1Film Details
Language English, French
Year 2014
Runtime 65
Country USA
Director Les Blank, Gina Leibrecht
Producer Les Blank, Gina Leibrecht
Editor Gina Leibrecht
Cinematographer Les Blank, Gina Leibrecht
Music Gina Leibrecht