Spend It All

Great doco about Cajun lifestyle and history. Interesting to see that period caught in fun detail, including cooking, music and dentistry.

This really runs the gamut of the human experience. I was soothed watching this, absorbed, intrigued, compelled, amused, entertained, at one key point disgusted and horrified - the guy pulling his own teeth out specifically and spitting out blood like old timers spit out tobacco, Jesus Mary and Joseph - but I don't blame you if you see this and are mortified when they casually slaughter the pig while singing the equivalent of Cajun showtunes - and it is all of a piece together.

Spend it all runs only 43 minutes, and one wishes it could run longer, but maybe it is just the length it needs to he for Les Blank to get a melange of points across while never making points, if that makes sense. What I mean by that is he shows us, with this organic, unvarnished and thoughtfully soulful style (as in how the music compliments all the animals and varieties of humans with them, whether they're alive or not), and this equally wholesome and down to earth/working class community, and it's not entirely a community that is together as they used to be, despite the scenes of lovely get-togethers and musical playing and, of course, the cooking (I'm watching this late at night but it makes me want to scarf down a plate of BBQ pork, oy vey).

For all the splendor of the natural world, and how much these people are connected to the world of their Cajun roots, we hear some poignant voice-over telling us how modern money and commerce has replace how people used to immediately come to help build up this or that (like if something fell down or other), like the fracturing of the community. Blank doesn't spell it out and he doesn't have to, that this is a world that could change even further in another ten years, even five years, as more commerce and more industry and the mediums of television and ither technology comes in. But it hasn't fully, at least not yet, and maybe the accordion is enough to make things a little more varied past solely the fiddle and violins.

I don't know and frankly don't care to know what this could be like if it has a stronger narrative spine or if it followed one or two characters more completely (Im not sure I even learned one of these guys names). And... that's okay sometimes! I think with a film like Spend it All, the magical quality is that it's that documentary that works more like a sweeping melody or piece of music that carries you along from one moment to the next, and Blank and Skip Gersons' work camera and sound work gets you into every piece of food, every catch of the day of the shrimp and crawfish, like you're in the pot of critters and world weary and work-gnarled faces.

It's not that this style wouldn't work for another kind of subject, rather I don't think most filmmakers would wrap their mind around approaching the subject like Blank did, to flow from one image or subject to the next (here's child jockeys one moment, and that's a superb little interview by the way, then crab fisherman and Bean cookers the next) and combine it with that sweetly generous sounding music like this.

Maybe this is to say, and I haven't checked out his interview about it on the Criterion Channel yet, but I get why Werner Herzog in particular loved this so much; the depiction of the world is pure, and the senses to show it leans into the poetic over hard facts or an adherence to narrative. In its unassuming and low key way, this is one of the great docs of the 70s.

Portrait of the Cajun lifestyle in Southwest Louisiana from documentary master Les Blank.

Cajun music is evolved from its roots in the music of the French-speaking Catholics of Canada. In earlier years the fiddle was the predominant instrument, but gradually the accordion has come to share the limelight. This short film perfectly captures that blend (even featuring a man fixing an accordion).

This is what makes Blank's work so good. He takes the music, but rather than isolating it, shows the culture and people surrounding it. Just as with the hippies of Los Angeles or the blues of Texas, there is an upbringing -- food, activities, heritage -- that inspires this music.