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Marc Savoy knows only one way to talk about Cajun music and that is with the passion and conviction that the music itself contains. "It bit me and got a hold of me and never got out of my blood."
Legendary filmmaker Les Blank's documentary Marc and Ann delves directly into the heart of Cajun country to portray a couple devoted to the preservation of Louisiana French culture in their personal, as well as public, lives. The joy of Cajun music, its signature yelps and wails, filter through many of the kitchens, porches, and dance halls of the Savoy's Eunice, La., community.
Marc and Ann will air on public television stations in 2006 as part of the second season of True Lives, a series by the producers of POV
Ann Savoy likes to recall Marc's opening line when he first asked her to dance at a folk festival in Virginia, calling her face "freckled like a turkey egg." She flips through old photographs, recalling the mystique that first brought her to bayou country, and her continuing love affair with Cajun French, a language she calls "beautiful in its rawness, its poetry." Ann's book Cajun Music: The Reflection of a People, was the basis for Blank's 1989 film J'ai Été au Bal (I Went to the Dance).
When Marc is not busy stirring a large pot of gumbo or talking his children on a canoe trip through the swamp, he can frequently be found creating one of his beautiful squeeze box/accordions, made out of plate hangar springs, table cloth bellows, parts from commodes, and fine wood. "I play music like I heard it when I was a kid," says Marc, "and I work very hard to keep it that way."
"This is ultimately a home movie about people I like," says Les Blank, who met Marc Savoy while making his first Cajun film, Spend It All, in 1970. "In fact, I'd been putting off marrying my girlfriend (co-producer Chris Simon) for nine years and finally I said, 'All right, if you can get Marc and Ann to play at our wedding, I'll do it.' They said yes and so did I." What did they play before the ceremony? "I Made a Big Mistake (J'ai Fait un Gros Erreur)," Blank's favorite Cajun song.
Marc And Ann was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts-Media, EFG Foundation through Northwest Film and Video Center, Flower Films, and the Western Regional Media Arts Fellowship-Rocky Mountain Film Center.
(1991, 27 min.)
Marc And Ann will be shown with the short film, Plena.
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