A Poem Is a Naked Per­son (1974)

Singer-song­writer Leon Rus­sell and his howl­ing, gospel-twanged vocal stylings are the nucle­us of this amblin’, ram­blin’ and long, long lost film por­trait by the late Les Blank. The footage in the film was cap­tured between 1972 and 1974, though a mine­field of music and per­for­mance rights meant that it remained hid­den from pub­lic eyes dur­ing the inter­ven­ing years. Plus the fact that the star him­self didn’t think the film was real­ly about him, so opt­ed to halt all pub­lic exhi­bi­tion of it. Though Russell’s own per­for­mances make up the lion share of the run time, Blank expands his focus in an attempt to cap­ture the cul­ture that spawned the artist, and the artists that spawned the culture.

The film begins with shots of ran­dom wildlife swim­ming in a riv­er close to Russell’s Okla­homa record­ing stu­dio, a har­bin­ger of the strange crea­tures to whom we’ll soon be intro­duced. Hopped up ses­sion play­ers, hip­py-dip­py artists, wide-eyed buskers, over-tac­tile groupies, and right in the mid­dle of it all, a snake who stran­gles and then chows down on a cute lit­tle chick, make up the rogues gallery of side-play­ers. Blank breaks out from tra­di­tion­al con­cert movie or docu-por­trait forms to pro­duce a film that’s more an exper­i­men­tal cross-cut of a time and a place. His cam­era is trained on hand-paint­ed signs, on old build­ings and dive bars lost in time, and in the mid­dle of it all, Rus­sell, who con­stant­ly looks like he’s exist­ing in two sep­a­rate astral planes at once.

The music is incred­i­ble, and Blank films the per­for­mances as if he’s a long-term mem­ber of the road crew rather than a super-fan pogo­ing in the pit with a cam­era. He shoots into the spot­light, giv­ing Rus­sell and ethe­re­al glow as he sits at a piano and ham­mers the keys for all he’s worth, always with a bev­er­age or, on one occa­sion, a half-eat­en plate of tex-mex fix­ins’ close at hand. But Blank is always look­ing to flesh out the scene rather than the per­son. Rus­sell comes across as an excep­tion­al tal­ent but an unex­cep­tion­al man – his vaunt­ed star sta­tus is only revealed through toad­y­ing col­lab­o­ra­tors. It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing film which mix­es the cul­tur­al ethnog­ra­phy of Wern­er Herzog’s ear­ly doc­u­men­tary work with the blood, sweat and snot of music films like Gimme Shel­ter or The Last Waltz.