Hot Pepper

Traveling through the Louisiana Delta for a project focusing on the black Creole and Cajun communities, documentary filmmaker Les Blank wound up making two films: one, Dry Wood (1973), that stayed true to his broader mission statement of examining the lives, folkways, and cuisine of French-speaking African-Americans and another, Hot Pepper (1973), a profile of musician Clifton Chenier, the king of the Cajun dance music known as zydeco. Committed to forging a personal bond with his subject rather than just turning a camera on him, Blank bunked with Chenier in a rooming house reserved for blacks; the documentarian's presence in a community that knew few whites drew the attention of the local authorities, who detained him for questioning. Calling on favors from friends he had made in the Louisiana government while shooting an earlier documentary - contacts made, ironically, after his arrest for marijuana possession - Blank was able to complete the film with full police participation. Though he had intended Dry Wood and Hot Pepper to serve as two halves of a single feature-length documentary, exhibitions (apart from screenings at an Austin, Texas, nightclub and the Smithsonian Museum) were limited to short subject screenings. Blank's international reputation enjoyed an appreciable uptake a decade later when he chronicled the calamitous filming of director Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo (1982) for his documentary Burden of Dreams (1982).

By Richard Harland Smith