Spend It All (1972) is a less obvious title for a film equally enthusiastic about the delights of finding, preparing, sharing and relishing good cuisine. And cuisine is the right French-derived word, since Spend It All is a hearty celebration of the French-derived Cajun community in southern Louisiana, which has styles of language, music, camaraderie and cookery found nowhere else.
The movie starts with a crash course in Cajun history, noting the group's origins in Acadia, a French colony in eastern Canada, and its migration to the American south when British conquerors expelled it in the mid-eighteenth century. Blank then pivots to his real interests, which are Cajun-style food, fun and frolic, usually accompanied by the zydeco music that's synonymous with the community. Mostly a matter of fiddles, accordions and plaintive male voices, zydeco at its best has the infectious beat of a rock tune, the physicality of a military march, the seeming simplicity of a Philip Glass piece and the emotional tug of a bluegrass song. It's the ideal companion for the good times documented by Blank's camera.
The people having these good times are plainspoken, down-home folks who value their working-class roots as highly as the friends, neighbors and visitors they always seem to be surrounded with. Although the film puts more energy into showing than telling--we see activities much more than we hear about them--it's peppered with brief conversations and monologues that provide background about individual lives and highlight the affection and respect that bind the community's members together. A musical-instrument maker expresses the pride he takes in his scrupulous hand-crafted work, for instance, and states his extremely strong attraction to the rural environment; dwelling in a big city would be like being in jail, he says--and he knows whereof he speaks, because the 24 hours he once spent in jail were the worst 24 hours of his life. Spend It All isn't a compendium of facts, it's a mosaic of impressions, as colorful as a kaleidoscope and as gentle as a spring breeze from the bayou.
Just as the movie's main focus is people, the people's main focus is food--always à la Cajun and usually of a crustacean nature. Surely no other 43-minute film contains so many shellfish! Shrimp, crabs, clams and crayfish crowd the screen, sometimes heaped up by the zillions in a boat, other times partnered with fish heads, tomatoes and additional ingredients in a stew or bouillabaisse. Fine wines and spirits play a less important role but beer is a beverage of choice.
The folks portrayed in Spend It All are so consistently, contagiously cheerful that one soon realizes this is a very selective account of Cajun life, leaving out the dark sides that every community must have. This raises the larger question of whether Blank is aiming at visual anthropology or just cooking up a diverting entertainment where presenting ethnographic truth is less important than maintaining a sunny atmosphere.
Blank never claimed to be a social scientist, but his best films are informed by such keen observational detail that ethnographic truth emerges spontaneously and organically from the material. Spend It All doesn't try to fathom Cajun psychology or plumb the Cajun soul. Instead of trying to portray people as they truly are, Blank portrays them as they probably like to think they are, and as they want to be seen by those around them. Blank's documentaries look very different from those of Errol Morris and Frederick Wiseman, two of his most gifted contemporaries, but he shares their ability to find truth in the surface of things, to capture realities that hide in plain sight until the camera comes along to tease them out.
Blank had a longtime association with Werner Herzog, a great director who moves easily between documentary and fiction. Their relationship culminated with Blank's most famous documentary, the feature-length Burden of Dreams (1982), which chronicles the making of Herzog's epic Fitzcarraldo, the story of a crazily ambitious man (Klaus Kinski) determined to build an opera house atop a rugged South American mountain. Herzog has an aura of dogged individualism, but Blank has clearly influenced him. For evidence, see the moment in Spend It All when an amiable Cajun extracts one of his own teeth with a pair of pliers, anesthetized by nothing stronger than beer--and compare this with Herzog's tragicomic Stroszek (1977), where the title character meets an American who does the same, adding a documentary flourish to an otherwise fictional film.
Blank was a shy, quiet man who relied on collaboration with other filmmakers and good vibes with the people he depicted. This helps explain why the opening credits of Spend It All call it a movie by Les Blank with Skip Gerson and the final credits call it a movie by Flower Films, his California production company. His most important teammates included Gerson and Maureen Gosling, his usual film editor.
Few of Blank's pictures have found huge audiences, but they're treasured by the viewers who come across them, perhaps attracted by a quirky title--the foodfest Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980) stands out in that regard--or by the prospect of encountering sights and sounds (and imagining tastes, smells, and textures) that we're not all fortunate enough to experience first-hand. All of which means that spending time with Spend It All is spending your time very well.
Director: Les Blank
Cinematography: Les Blank
Film Editing: Les Blank
Music: Dewey Balfa and the Balfa Brothers, Nathan Abshire, Marc Savoy, Adam Landreneau, Cyprien Landreneau, Pee Wee Broussard
With: Lurlin LeJeune, Don Guillory, Russell Thibodeaux, Benton Daigle, Marc Savoy, Nathan Abshire, Pee Wee Broussard, Dewey Balfa, Will Balfa, Rodney Balfa, Drew Balfa, Tony Balfa
Color-43m.
by David Sterritt
