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Many people may know Les Blank most for his association with Werner Herzog, who he filmed while on the brink of creative madness in Burden of Dreams and earlier in Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, in which the notoriously true-to-his-word filmmaker indeed ate his shoe after having promised he’d do so if Errol Morris managed to finish his pet cemetery film, Gates of Heaven. But those ignoring the larger majority of Blank’s overflowing oeuvre would be sorely missing out on the jubilance of life that the quietly curious documentarian managed to strike on film with just his trusty 16mm Eclair, his appreciation for cultures of all kinds, and a fervent hunger for life. Sadly, Blank passed away in the spring of last year, just weeks before receiving the Outstanding Achievement Award and a restored retrospective of his body of work in Toronto at the Hot Docs Film Festival,...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Nov. 25, 2014

Price: DVD $124.95, Blu-ray $124.95

Studio: Criterion

An uncompromisingly independent filmmaker, Les Blank (Burden of Dreams) made documentaries for nearly fifty years, elegantly disappearing with his camera into cultural spots rarely seen on-screen—mostly on the peripheries of the United States, but also occasionally abroad.

The collector’s set Les Blank: Always for Pleasure provides a diverse survey of Blank’s vast output.

Gap Toothed Women, a 1987 film by Les Blank

The collection provides a diverse survey of the late filmmaker’s vast output, including the warmly funny The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins, about the legendary Texas musician; Always for Pleasure, which captures the vivacious spirit of New Orleans; Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers, a hilarious celebration of the pungent, flavorful “stinking rose” of the title; and eleven other unexpected features, plus eight of Blank’s short films.

Seemingly off-the-cuff yet poetically constructed,...

Criterion has announced their November slate of releases and among them is Frank Capra's romantic-comedy classic It Happened One Night and Blu-ray upgrade of Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura and Sydney Pollack's Tootsie starring Dustin Hoffman. First off, and most exciting as far as I'm concerned, is Capra's It Happened One Night, which I speculated previously would be added to the collection sooner rather than later. Starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, this is an all-timer in terms of romantic comedies and Criterion is delivering it with an all new 4K digital restoration, new conversation between critics Molly Haskell and Phillip Lopate, the 1997 feature-length documentary Frank Capra's American Dream, Capra's first film, the 1922 silent short The Ballad of Fisher's Boarding House, the American Film Institute's tribute to Capra from 1982 and the film's trailer. The release arrives on November 18. The other title I'm excited about is Antonioni's L'avventura, the...

Berkeley, Calif. — Les Blank, an acclaimed documentary maker who focused his camera on cultural corners ranging from blues music, to garlic lovers, to shoe-eating artists, died Sunday at age 77, his son said.

Blank died at his home in Berkeley, Calif. nearly a year after being diagnosed with bladder cancer, Harrod Blank said.

Blank's 42 films earned him a lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute.

"I think he's a national treasure," filmmaker Taylor Hackford, president of the Directors Guild of America, told the New York Times. "Although his films are not well known at the moment, they'll take their place"

The Florida-born Blank's early documentaries focused on musicians, including 1965's "Dizzy Gillespie" and "The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins," a portrait of the Texas bluesman that won Blank his first wide renown.

He shifted to food with documentaries like 1980's "Garlic is as Good as 10 Mothers," and 2007's "All in This Tea.

On the other side of my content filled posts for Sound on Sight, I manage a semi-popular Tumblr blog called Obscure and Offbeat Cinema. There is virtually no written content and the vast majority of what I present are screenshots taken from films that I’m watching or planning to watch. Though a popular film will sneak in now and then, the focus remains on films that are off the beaten path. With over 3000 images posted in 2012, I thought it would be interesting to single out my favourite shots seen for the first time this year and share them with you. This link is quite obviously unique to my own cinematic experience of 2012, as well as my own personal quirks and aesthetic obsessions, so you might not agree with all of the choices. I also warn, this list may not be Safe for Work and in the case of objectionable...

With Insignificance (1985) out from Criterion last week (see the roundup), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) opening at Film Forum in New York tomorrow and, in the UK, Don't Look Now (1973) out on Blu-ray on July 4, following the BFI retrospective in March, there's a Nicolas Roeg mini-revival going on.

Writing about Insignificance and The Man Who Fell to Earth for Artforum, Darrell Hartman argues, "Past is present in the cinema of Nicolas Roeg. To simply call those extratemporal sequences that punctuate his work 'flashbacks' is to downplay the role that images of what came before play in his films. Such 'digressive' framing devices are, in many ways, the emotional and visual keystones of Roeg's work. In his heyday, from the 1970s until the mid-80s, Roeg was known as an envelope pusher. He employed nonlinear editing as part of an ambitious attempt to bridge space and time, cutting frames together...