USA,
1980, 51 min
Shown in 1995
CREDITS
- dir
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Les Blank
- prod
-
Les Blank
- cam
-
Les Blank
- editor
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Maureen Gosling
-
COMMENTS
Shown with Gap-Toothed Women and Chicken Real. Les Blank was the subject of a tribute in 1995.
Who’d have thought anyone could pull off an entire film about garlic—let alone one about women with gaps between their teeth? But Les Blank dives into his quirky subjects with enthusiasm, and comes up with some fascinating facts and stories. Blank’s inspiration for Garlic began at Alice Waters’ annual garlic festival at Berkeley’s Chez Panisse. But casual interest soon opened the door on a virtual cult, as Blank uncovered a wide range of garlic aficionados and homegrown historians: a Spanish Gypsy; a farmer at the Gilroy Garlic Festival; author Lloyd John Harris, who blames Americans’ slow-growth love for garlic on “the American puritan Anglo thing.” The film includes beautiful scenes of farm workers digging up the raw bulbs and restaurant cooks peeling, chopping, mashing and baking.
—Kurt Wolff
FACTOID #208
Before the showing of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest at the 40th SFIFF, Bay Area editor Walter Murch (who selected the film to screen in the Indelible Images series), passed out fortune cookies to the crowd with Bresson’s musings on making films.
