{"id":19884,"date":"2015-07-18T10:46:47","date_gmt":"2015-07-18T17:46:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/?p=19884"},"modified":"2015-07-18T10:48:27","modified_gmt":"2015-07-18T17:48:27","slug":"a-poem-is-a-naked-person-film-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/a-poem-is-a-naked-person-film-review\/","title":{"rendered":"A Poem is a Naked Person — Film Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Poem is a Naked Person<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Directed by Les Blank<\/p>\n

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This is not a documentary despite the film’s pretensions.\u00a0 This is a video scrapbook or an upscale home movie.\u00a0 The video clips that have been strung together in this are pretty good quality.\u00a0 The camera crew that shot them was excellent.\u00a0\u00a0 The editing and the conceptualization are amateurish, but each small bit is interesting in itself and the music selections are outstanding.\u00a0 This film, despite its many limitations, takes hold of you and doesn’t let go.\u00a0 It is carried strictly by the power of the subject matter and the quality of the music — and there is a lot of music, and a great variety of music.\u00a0 All the time I was watching the film I was trying to figure out when it was shot.\u00a0 I recognized a brief cameo of Cass Elliot, so I knew it had to be not later than the early 1970s. It was actually shot by Les Blank in 1972-1974.\u00a0 (This is not presented in the film.\u00a0 I had to look it up.)\u00a0 Most of it was shot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, maybe some of it in Louisiana, I’m not sure.\u00a0 This film is not a presentation of the facts.\u00a0 It is a raw, informal portrait of Leon Russell from his peak years as a singer and performer.\u00a0 The title of the film is a quote from Bob Dylan’s liner notes to his album Bringing It All Back Home<\/em> (1965).<\/p>\n

There are a couple of things this film does well.\u00a0 The presentation of Leon Russell as a singer, pianist, and performer, work.\u00a0 I was impressed with what an excellent pianist he is.\u00a0 There is a wedding scene where he plays Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus” from Lohengrin<\/em> and Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” unaccompanied on the piano.\u00a0 I believe they were his own arrangements very sensitively performed.\u00a0 He has a very commanding presence on stage.\u00a0 In front of an audience he was comfortable and unquestionably in charge.\u00a0 I could also feel a hard, driving ambition in him that was very disciplined and insistent on excellence.\u00a0 Off stage he was casual and relaxed.\u00a0 He seemed to tolerate bozos well and there seemed to be a lot of them around him.\u00a0 But when it came to music and performing before an audience, he took it very seriously, and he must have been demanding of his band mates.\u00a0 The film did not make a point of this, but I surmised it from the quality of the performances and his demeanor on stage.<\/p>\n

The film gives one a good feel for the culture of Oklahoma and the various musical influences absorbed by Leon Russell from middle America and the South.\u00a0 There is a shot of some rollicking gospel in a black church, Sweet Mary Egan on unaccompanied fiddle, band member Charlie McCoy on harmonica, young Malissa Bates singing Hoyt Axton’s “Joy to the World” unaccompanied,\u00a0 a very young Willie Nelson doing “Good Hearted Woman,” some native Americans in traditional dress dancing to their native drum music.\u00a0 The film is rich in the musical culture of the American heartland.<\/p>\n

One also gets a feel for the culture and temperament of the people of Oklahoma: provincial, unsophisticated, simple and straight ahead.\u00a0 There is a clip of a precision parachute jumping competition, another of a controlled demolition of a building in downtown Tulsa, another of a man in a small boat catching a quite large catfish. \u00a0Some things you probably couldn’t get away with today, like feeding a small chick to a boa constrictor and watching him kill it and eat it before your eyes.\u00a0 The man who guzzles down a glass of beer and then bites off the edge of the glass with his teeth and chews it up and swallows it.\u00a0 That may represent the culture and mentality of the people of Oklahoma, but Leon Russell is a couple of pegs above that.<\/p>\n

He is comfortable in that provincial backwater.\u00a0 It has molded him and shaped him and he has incorporated its varied influences into his own style, and the people see him as one of their own.\u00a0 But he is able to move beyond that world that gave him birth.\u00a0 He knows of a bigger world beyond the confines of Oklahoma and he wants to be part of it and be successful in it.\u00a0 While Leon Russell can fit in with those unvarnished yokels, he is not really one of them.\u00a0 His mind, his taste, his skill, and his ambition reach far beyond his roots, but he does not repudiate his background, rather he embraces it and embodies it and forges from it a very appealing, unique personal style.\u00a0 The film does give you that much, although there is much more you will wish it had done.\u00a0 It is an excellent and interesting introduction to the music and the person of Leon Russell.<\/p>\n

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A Poem is a Naked Person Directed by Les Blank     This is not a documentary despite the film’s pretensions.\u00a0 This is a video scrapbook or an upscale home…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"yasr_overall_rating":0,"yasr_post_is_review":"","yasr_auto_insert_disabled":"","yasr_review_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[837],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-19884","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-joe-cillo"},"yasr_visitor_votes":{"stars_attributes":{"read_only":true,"span_bottom":"