A Noble Vision

The director of various documentaries, including Who Killed the Fourth Ward?, Blue was hired by John and Dominique de Menil, who decided in 1969 to support a new media center at Rice.

After hiring Blue, they funded the construction of two barnlike buildings to house the media center and an art gallery. The second building eventually became the home of the School of Continuing Studies.

Geoff Winningham, photographer and professor of visual arts and part of the original group, remembers John de Menil as the true force in getting the Rice Media Center off the ground. “He saw film as a vital and important form of expression that, up to that point, had not gotten its place in academia,” Winningham says. “There were great film schools, but there weren’t many art departments teaching film.”

One of the first persons hired by Blue was Huberman, who started teaching filmmaking at Rice in 1975. Huberman says that John de Menil was interested in the idea that, in a democratic society, the people should be provided with the necessary information to allow them to make moral decisions. Thus the media center was never intended to be a journalism program offering radio and television courses, Huberman says. “Not at all. Its goal was to be a medium or a conduit for the necessary information.”

The crucial changes that the Rice Cinema has undergone recently will certainly position it as one of the leading art cinemas in Houston. Along with the Aurora Picture Show and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Rice Cinema provides a venue to see movies that are otherwise inaccessible in Houston—out of the ordinary foreign films, small-scale films, and avant-garde presentations. As Naficy puts it: “The Rice Cinema gives a voice to the unheard.”

— David D. Medina