Les Blank has made a film or two. Closer to 40, actually, with more on the way. They’re spirited movies about passionate people keeping traditions alive. Films that’ll make your soul soar and your feet move. Profiles of Cajun (Yum, Yum, Yum!), zydeco (Hot Pepper), and Tex-Mex musicians (Chulas Fronteras). Documentaries about polka aficionados (In Heaven There is No Beer) and ardent lovers of garlic (Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers).

Oops. Maybe I shouldn’t call them documentaries. Blank, 67, thinks the word is too stuffy to describe his work—and he’s got a point. His films about the commingled pleasures of eating, dancing, and making music are anything but stuffy. While drawn into film by the influence of Ingmar Bergman, his college years in New Orleans seem to have made a more lasting impression. Now based in the Bay Area, Blank is drawn to joyful subjects and to people who exhibit at least a little divine madness.

Blank’s combination of curiosity and respect leads to a contagious, playful, even lusty spirit in his work. One of my favorite Blank films is Gap-Toothed Women in which model Lauren Hutton, folksinger Claudia Schmidt, and other gap-toothed gals describe the diastemic life.

Blank has always been drawn to people with a sense of mission. He’s now chronicling a Californian who treks annually to China to buy tea. To me, Blank’s most mesmerizing film is Burden of Dreams, a 1982 picture documenting the extreme conditions German director Werner Herzog underwent to film Fitzcarraldo, a tale about a man’s quest to bring opera to the Amazon, in part by hauling a riverboat over a mountain.