Screens August 8, 12

Like Nashville on peyote, Les Blank’s A Poem is a Naked Person is an itinerant mosaic of life on the bayou. Made in 1973, the film was unreleased for decades due to differences between Blank and his subject, country singer Leon Russell. Though it eventually coalesces into the sweaty and intimate concert documentary it was intended to be, A Poem takes an ecstatic detour of the American south en route, stopping to linger over peripheral imagery with the curiosity of a Werner Herzog, Blank's subject in The Burden of Dreams (1982). Russell remains the primary subject, but his reticence and inscrutable presence gives the unseen Blank the freedom to look beyond him, pooling a panoply of fascinations together into a mural that is both eyesome and insightful about Russell’s milieu: a hippie painting a frieze on the walls of an emptied swimming pool, a man raising a toast to the people of Oklahoma before literally eating his pint glass, and a fleshy sojourn in a drugged-out hotel room. Most imposing is a snake’s harrowingly slow digestion of a helpless chick, invoked, with the help of narration, as an arcane metaphor for American consumerism. Poem’s expansive gaze reveals multitudes about country music’s wholesome facade and the peculiar characters hiding behind it, but best of all it reveals a master documentarian, obscured by film history, finding magic in the chaos and disunity of life.