Eight Presentations by James Blue

LECTURE EIGHT: August 10, 1977

THE ERA OF ACCESS: The average citizen as filmmaker: 1969—Future

James Blue begins by picking up from where the last class ended (the post-WWII “breaking down of absolutes in all areas of thinking”), and states that he will not offer any conclusions, given that we are living in Galbraith’s “Age of Uncertainty” and “being uncertain, it’s wrong to come to conclusions.”

Blue reminisces about his experience on Madison Avenue at Benton and Bowes, working as an assistant producer on Maxwell House and Ivory Snow productions. He lasted a year and then ran off to Algeria, not too long after a meeting in which “the head of the agency informed us that a very serious blow to American freedom had just occurred — the Federal Communications Commission had ruled that there must be truth in advertising.” He describes one agonizing effort to find a way of visually demonstrating that Ivory Snow washed diapers softer than Tide, “but it wasn’t photographable.” A woman in the laundromat saw him struggling with Tide and came up to tell Blue she found more success with Ivory Snow: “So it was episodes like that that gave birth to the testimonial commercial.” The lesson for Blue was that “quite often film is not up to dealing with facts. There are whole areas of information that cannot be dealt with on film and Ivory Snow just happened to run into one of them.”

The last ten years of documentary filmmaking have been filled with questions about how to address social concerns like the population explosion, how to relate to both the subjects being filmed and the audience, how to acknowledge, as scientists do, the “certainty of uncertainty” which, Blue says, “ I don’t really regret, because I think it’s more important to be uncertain than to be certain.”

Media Access in Houston (18:43 – 32:53)

With the loss of authoritative perspectives on reality, “there is a growing sense of the importance in this world of each of us.” With cheaper media equipment available, “more opportunities exist for more people to make their point of view felt.” Blue sees a related “growth of regionalism throughout the country,” which resonates for him as a Midwesterner now living in Houston, which no longer feels “like a colony of New York.” Blue has been active in the regional media art center movement: “I was director of the Rice University Media Center. And my dream for the last seven years has been to make equipment and instruction available to people from any group who want to do something, whether it’s artistic in nature or whether it has a political or social bearing. I’m sort of an old line liberal Democrat, I guess, who feels that we’re going to lose democracy if we don’t have more input into this society from various sources.”

Screens: Rice Media Center public TV show by Coalition for Barrier-Free Living

Blue talks about The Territory, the public television series the Southwest Alternate Media Project (co-founded by Blue) initiated in Houston to present work made by people in the region. He screens one of the films produced through a workshop at the Rice Media Center, made by paraplegic members of the Coalition for Barrier-Free Living.  Their film was made in Super 8 Sound for $250. “We’ve always associated ‘paraplegic’ as someone who couldn’t help themselves. They discovered that they could help themselves and they organized and began putting pressure on the city to change the design of many public buildings and the bus system so that handicapped and elderly people could get around and have a life equal to that of everyone else.” Blue continues, “I have to thank them for teaching me a lot of what access could be. They took their cameras in to the head of the Houston transportation department when they presented their grievances about the bus routes, and the mere fact of having a $300 Super 8 sound camera in that room was enough to make the city transportation official sit up and think about it. And when the film came out, a great deal changed, and they did follow the Coalition’s bus route plan. So it was an effective use of film in two ways, one for informing other people on television. And two, just the mere fact of using it in an encounter with an establishment figure.”

Screens: Architecture in the Petroleum Age (Scott Thomas, 1974)

The next Rice Media Center production Blue screens is an essay film by a recent graduate of Rice University’s  Architecture school: “It’s a film that could not have existed 15 years ago, before the shift took place toward self-initiated films…when somebody could make a film because they wanted to express themselves, without concern about raising money, and because there was an opportunity to show it on public television. Now it’s possible for people to make films like they would write books.” The Super 8 film, cited as one of the best architecture films by the American Institute of Architects, reflects the Rice Media Center’s interest in engaging scientists and people in various disciplines to share their expertise and concerns on film.

George Stoney: Media Access in Canada and NYU (32:54 – 1:36:53)

Blue then introduces the special guest who will talk about the participatory filmmaking practices pioneered by the Challenge for Change program in Canada, which he led. George Stoney, he notes, is currently running the Alternate Media Center at NYU and working on a film about Flaherty’s Man of Aran.

Stoney brings a class consciousness to the discussion of documentary history:

The films you saw from the thirties were made by an elite group. The Grierson group were upper or middle class people who saw themselves working for the people. And they felt very special. It was noblesse oblige. The same thing applied in this country, even with the most radical filmmakers, it was an elite group doing for people. Well, I and others who followed came along and we wanted to join the elite.  We were bred on the idea that a filmmaker had an obligation to his audience, but he was an artist (you notice, I keep saying “he”). And so he made the decisions.

Stoney goes on to describe how he was reluctantly convinced to do audience tests with policemen on a film about police: “And I learned that it meant a great deal that those fellows could not only tell me something when I was making the film, but they could tell me something when the film was almost finished. It would make it a much better film. So gradually I started noticing how often I was making a film for people when they ought to be making the films themselves… I was kind of glad they didn’t because it’s always fun to make a film. The idea of letting them in on the act came very slowly and I went kicking and screaming all the way through it.”

Then, in 1968, Stoney was invited by the National Film Board of Canada to work on a program called Challenge for Change. The program had begun after director Colin Low had engaged villagers in the production of a series of videos addressing the government’s plans for relocation, a series that had a powerful impact on government policy. Half-inch video was being touted by filmmakers there, including Bonnie Klein and Dorothy Henaut. Stoney, first put off by the low quality, came around. The expense of film, he realized, had been cramping his enthusiasm about projects: “You stop dreaming that much because you start thinking, well, who’s going to pay for it and who’s going to see it?” He now owns a Portapack and “I can literally pull it out and do anything I darn well please with it.” He’s become less precious about shooting footage, more willing to use raw material, when social change is the goal: “If we’re going to show it next week to prove that something needs to be done, it doesn’t have to be lit very well. You can have a wobbly camera if it’s Mrs. Jones telling about what happened to her daughter and it’s dynamite. But if you’re going to show that same tape over WNET to people who don’t know the incident and the people involved, then you need better quality and video, so far, just doesn’t have it.”

A class member asks Stoney about the availability of equipment to help tenants in her housing project organize, and Stoney is enthusiastic about bringing this to his NYU students: “My job will be to get that student group to understand the problems of the people in the housing project, and to see that their satisfaction comes from helping that group to master the technique, to say what they want to say for themselves rather than to be big daddy to them. I think that this is possible. However, I have found that that kind of filmmaking tends to attract a different kind of person.” Most students coming to NYU sign up enthusiastically for his documentary filmmaking course, but not the one on socially active video: “Our film school just doesn’t attract people who have that bent.” Even at the National Film Board, “I found that only about one filmmaker in ten had the kind of personality and dedication to work in Challenge for Change.”

Stoney talks more about the deficiencies he sees in documentarians: “We say we are doing socially useful films, but we are kind of riding along on the social approval of being in the movie business. And it can be pretty heady.” Many social issue documentarians don’t pay attention to finding and interacting with an audience; distribution is “somebody else’s worry.” He describes working with Terry Filgate at the NFB on making a film about welfare recipients designed to help middle class folks better understand people on relief. Filgate was open to testing with audiences and, although the higher-ups at the NFB loved his film, Filgate recut it based on critical feedback at test screenings.

Stoney goes on to describe his frustration with broadcasting and funding institutions here: “I have found it very hard for people who run American institutions to accept the idea that criticism from the people they serve might be of help. They always see it as an attack.”

Screens: You Are on Indian Land (Challenge for Change, George Stoney, 1969)

This Challenge for Change production was produced by Stoney. “We had an Indian film crew very badly designed by the Indian affairs department. They decreed that one Indian should come from each of nine different tribes. These people had nothing in common, except that we all called them Indians, and then we sought to make a crew of them.” Among the few Indians who remained, Mike Kanentakeron Mitchell, took an active role in the political actions and the production, and asked Stoney for help covering an action blocking a bridge: “And so we did get a white crew to go down and work with them. Now, was it important that these were white rather than Indians recording? I think, for the moment, it wasn’t. The important thing was to get it recorded. I think in the long run, it would’ve been much healthier if they could have done their own recording too, but we couldn’t do that at the time.”[1]

There is further discussion with the class on You Are on Indian Land and on current opportunities for public access. Stoney says the institutional hurdles are great: “One of the biggest problems I’ve found with video access is that you do need intermediaries, you do need media centers, you do need people to help people use the equipment and also to plan for its use afterwards. Everybody talks about access, but nobody’s found a mechanism that really makes it work, because most of the means of communications are paid for. And our part of the world is paid for by advertising….Cable TV is certainly not providing sufficient access. The FCC, which started off requiring access in 1972 has cut back so badly that…the access requirements are just minimal.”

(The tape ends abruptly, and it is not clear whether James Blue spoke again to the class).

[1] Mitchell, at the request of the white director who led the crew, was ultimately recognized as this film’s director.