A Poem Is a Naked Person (1974, Les Blank) (Patreon)

51/100

Came to this largely unfamiliar with Leon Russell (unless you count George Benson's cover of "This Masquerade," which I heard ten zillion times as a little kid and still find strangely haunting) but very familiar with Les Blank (having watched the entire Criterion Always For Pleasure box set). And I gotta say that it doesn't look to me as if Blank ever quite found a coherent movie here. The absence of any organizing principle surely bugs me more than it does/will many others, and there are times when even I don't care; while there's no "reason" to show artist Jim Franklin methodically removing tiny scorpions from Russell's drained swimming pool prior to painting it, that's certainly not something I'd have appreciated being denied. But the film's first half, in particular, really comes across as Blank just sorta wandering around in vague proximity to Russell and shooting whatever eccentricities catch his eye, unconcerned with whether they illuminate his ostensible subject in any way. Presumably that's why Russell buried the film during his lifetime—it doesn't make him look bad, but it does frequently make him seem irrelevant. One could argue that I should just enjoy, for its own goofy sake, a little girl belting out "Joy to the World" at a wedding (as nearby adults impassively register that the song's initial lyrics about a friendly bullfrog segue rather speedily to "I'll make sweet love to you"), or some weird parachute barker first failing to eat a beer glass and then later successfully munching on what's apparently a slightly weaker beer glass. I'm persnickety, though, and contend that if you want to make Vernon, Florida then you should just make Vernon, Florida, not sneak Vernon, Florida into a music doc. 

Naked Person does foreground Russell more as it goes along, observing him perform at length during the last half hour. I can't honestly say that the film made me eager to investigate his catalogue, though I liked everything I heard just fine (and will at least now stop mentally confusing him with Leon Redbone, with whom he has zilch in common). And while I usually applaud minimal contextualization in docs, so little information gets conveyed here that certain interludes are just plain bewildering. The film ends on Willis Alan Ramsey (writer of "Muskrat Candlelight," now known via covers as "Muskrat Love"), for example, without identifying who he is or how he's connected to Russell. In fact, I'm pretty sure we don't even learn that Russell started his own label, Shelter Records, which released Ramsey's sole LP. The guy’s just mysteriously there, singin' and strummin' his way through the closing credits, and we're left to draw the only sensible conclusion: This must be a musician who's worked with Russell at some point, otherwise why would he be in the movie (much less in a place of such prominence)? Although god knows plenty of other random folks are in the movie, by virtue of existing within an X-mile radius of where Russell was during the shoot. You need to be more of a go-with-the-flow viewer than I am not to get mildly irked by such haphazardness, which I don't remember permeating superior Blank films like "Dry Wood" and "The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins" (though admittedly it's been eight years since I watched those—might just be that a lack of structure bothers me less at 30-35 minutes). But then, I prefer prose to poetry*, and I generally wear clothes.

* Authors are partial to their Wit, 'tis true, but are not Criticks to their Judgment too?

—Alexander Pope, 1711