A Filmmaker’s Presence

Viewers of Houston’s PBS affiliate KUHT must have done a double take in 1978 when they tuned in to the locally produced film Who Killed the Fourth Ward?

Rather than finding the urbane Alistair Cooke, they saw a tall, somewhat rawboned “host” named James Blue, a handsome man who was dressed rather absurdly in a classic detective trench coat. What’s more, the man was standing in a slum, and he seemed puzzled as he directed the viewer’s gaze to the row of dilapidated shotgun houses that extended down the street behind him and then to the city skyline just blocks away. How, he wanted to know, was it possible for a neighborhood situated this close to Houston’s celebrated downtown to be so impoverished? Blue wasn’t angry, simply confused.

Blue, the Rice Media Center’s founding director, had come to Rice in 1969, and over the years, his students and colleagues had learned not to be surprised by anything he did. In fact, his career had begun in a much more glamorous fashion, and if he hadn’t been such a thoroughly unconventional character, he never would have wound up in Houston at all, starting a fledgling film program.

James Blue was born in Tulsa in 1930. As part of the great “Okie” migration west, the Blues wound up in Oregon, where James graduated from college in 1955. By this time, he’d decided to become a filmmaker, but few, if any, academic filmmaking programs existed in the U.S. So Blue applied to the acclaimed Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques (IDHEC) in Paris, and he arrived there just in time to catch the first crestings of French film’s New Wave, a philosophical and aesthetic movement that would profoundly influence him. Surrounded by classmates such as Roman Polanski, Blue graduated in 1958, then moved to New York. He didn’t have much luck there, so when another IDHEC alum called to ask if he was interested in making a film in Algeria, then in the violent throes of breaking away from France, he packed his bags. Working for only $250 a month but given a free artistic hand, the young American director shot the only French film actually made in Algeria during the war, The Olive Trees of Justice.

The film, which was recently screened at the Rice Media Center during a symposium honoring Blue and his work, kept the daily violence of the war mostly in the background as it told its story of an expatriate French–Algerian who returns to Algiers to tend to his dying father. But in fact, Blue and his crew experienced the war first-hand—ultraright French nationalists bombed their offices and facilities five times.

Even under these extremely difficult conditions, Blue demonstrated the qualities that would make him an internationally, if not exactly widely, recognized filmmaker. He worked very well with nonprofessional actors, an approach he would take to its ultimate conclusion in Who Killed the Fourth Ward?, when he literally turned his story over to the people he was filming and made no attempt to direct them at all.

In Olive Trees, Blue also showed his grasp of film poetics as he composed scenes of prewar Algerian farm life in a manner that would have made John Ford, who was one of his heroes, proud. The documentary was a surprise hit at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival and shared the Critics’ Choice Palme d’Or. But the film was not widely distributed because the French public was simply not ready for a film about the still-raging war.

Blue returned to the U.S. and began making films for the United States Information Service. In artistic documentaries made for foreign audiences, Blue demonstrated the mastery of visual composition that he had learned in Paris. His films The March on Washington, documenting Martin Luther King’s celebrated civil rights protest march, and A Few Notes on Our Food Problem, an examination of the possibility of an international food crisis, were both visually striking—especially the highly poetic Notes, in which images from one scene bleed into images in the next in a way that emphasizes the unity between the film’s subjects, farmers in Brazil, India, and Africa who were falling behind in their efforts to feed local populations.

But now Blue had begun to interject himself into his films. Both March and Notesfeatured Blue as narrator, his rich, measured, voice sounding like a somewhat less-hammy Charlton Heston—that is, like the voice of a rather concerned God.

Notes was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1968. With this honor and his Palme d’Or in hand, Blue took a short-lived crack at Hollywood. He taught filmmaking at the American Film Institute and directed the credit sequence for the big-budget film Hawaii. But just when it seemed that it was only a matter of time before he made his mark on Tinseltown, Blue had a radical change of heart. He said goodbye to California and, in 1969, accepted the invitation of Jean and Dominique de Menil to come to Houston and start a media center.

The call of the Menils—with their invitation to a well-funded aesthetic adventure—was notoriously seductive, but still, Blue was giving up potential fame and fortune to come to the cinematic backwater of Houston. He might have been a member of that group of early-’70s American directors—Scorsese, Altman, Spielberg, Bogdanovich—that for a few years, at least, made Hollywood a wide-open place to make personal movies. Why did he give all that up?

First of all, as even a cursory reading of the interviews that Gerald O’Grady, the former Rice medievalist and film professor who actually hired Blue on behalf of the Menils, put together for the symposium reveals, Blue was a true intellectual who felt comfortable lecturing on both film history and technique. But perhaps the more compelling reason is that Blue, for all of his good looks, voice, and charisma, was anti-Hollywood to his very core.

Brian Huberman, associate professor of art, was brought to the Media Center in 1977 after his graduation from the National Film School of Great Britain specifically to help film Who Killed the Fourth Ward? He was immediately aware of Blue’s charisma and generally larger-than-life qualities, and he remembers asking him why he hadn’t stayed in Hollywood, where presumably he would have thrived. “I got the impression that he couldn’t stand the people,” Huberman says. “And he was not interested in formulaic filmmaking. As an artist, he was a free man.”

At Rice, Blue began implementing what Huberman refers to as “Jean de Menil’s vision” for the Media Center. At this time, there were only three film schools in the U.S.: the University of Southern California, the University of California at Los Angeles, and New York University. These programs all trained students to become commercial feature filmmakers. But Menil and Blue had a different vision for Rice. “It was supposed to be a ‘media’ center, but not in the sense that media is used today,” Huberman says. “Instead the center was supposed to be the ‘medium’ through which filmmakers connected with people.”

Following Blue’s lead, Rice filmmakers were not interested in teaching Hollywood techniques or approaches. Rather the Rice Media Center was to be a laboratory for training students to make documentary films about the conditions and stories of their own communities. “Menil and Blue shared this democratic vision of film,” Huberman says. In this vision, the purposes of filmmaking were more social than aesthetic. “For James, it was not about ‘art for art’s sake,’” Huberman says. “It was about art for society’s sake.”

That is, the social concerns that Blue had evidenced throughout his career had won out over aesthetics. So by the time the trench-coated Blue and his crew (including Huberman and Edward Hugetz, a colleague of Blue’s who is now a vice president at the University of Houston) reached the Fourth Ward, Blue’s highly controlled visual techniques had given way to a totally improvised portrait of a community that was in large part scripted by the community itself. Also, Blue had discarded 35mm filmmaking in favor of the cheaper, more accessible, and therefore more democratic, Super 8 camera—which simply couldn’t produce as beautiful an image as 35mm. At the symposium, Hugetz remembered Blue saying, “This is going to be an ugly film.” The statement was made, however, simply as a matter of fact, not of complaint.

After Who Killed the Fourth Ward? Blue went on to make The Invisible City with Rice architecture professor Adele Naude Santos. Invisible City went beyond its predecessor to look at the crisis caused by substandard housing throughout the apparent boomtown of Houston—a crisis that went unremarked by the city as a whole and was therefore “invisible.”

Blue’s approach in Invisible City was as democratic as ever, and ultimately Blue’s social commitment caused problems for him at Rice. The administration felt he was spending more time with, and making equipment more available to, the community at large rather than with his students. Blue soon left to take a teaching position with SUNY Buffalo, and he was, in fact, already living in Buffalo when he returned to make Invisible City.

In truth, Huberman muses, Blue may simply have been too large and powerful a figure to fit comfortably into academia. “It was terrible that he left,” Huberman recalls. “I was very angry with him for not staying and fighting.” He adds, “It’s a shame that he didn’t have a chance to work with the current Rice administration, which is much more interested in working with the community.”

After Blue left, many of the Media Center’s actual filmmaking activities were taken over by the Southwest Alternate Media Project (SWAMP), which was first directed by Blue’s protégé, Ed Hugetz. Under current director Mary Lampe, SWAMP is still going strong today, as is the Media Center, which is directed by Professor Hamid Naficy, chair of the Department of Art and Art History.

As for Blue, he died suddenly of cancer just two years after leaving Rice. His time in Houston may have been relatively short, but it is a testament to the power of the influence he had on filmmaking here that, even a quarter of a century later, people still gather to discuss his philosophy and work.

— David Theis