Eight Presentations by James Blue

LECTURE FIVE: July 20, 1977

THE AFTERMATH: 1946-1959: A RE-EXAMINATION OF RECEIVED VALUES AND OF OURSELVES? 

Blue begins the lecture apologizing for letting people out late last week, causing some to get stuck in the subway during the New York City Blackout (July 13, 1977). Blue spent most of the night in Grand Central Station where, because of the heat, he passed out and cracked his head. The Red Cross was there swiftly and sent him by ambulance to a hospital where he was tested and told by the doctor that, like the four head injuries he’d treated that night, they were all “turkeys” (in other words, nothing serious). “I enjoyed being a turkey for once.”

Recap and Elaboration of Last Week’s Lecture (1:17 – 5:20)

The absolute patriotism manifested in Capra’s The Battle of Britain didn’t last as World War II dragged on. War was no longer portrayed as exciting, but an endurance test, with soldiers enduring hell and doing as good as job as possible. Battlefield photography lost its privileged point of view and felt as vulnerable as the soldiers, shooting from wherever it could.  –

Post-war Darkness (5:21 – 33:08)

Blue describes a fragile post-war culture. World War II ended with the dropping of a horrific bomb, leaving us with self-doubt more than glory. We feared Russia, and we feared ourselves. A return to Depression was dreaded, but instead came affluence, thanks to a military-big business-government alliance. The underlying dread was reflected in the other-directed, organization man behaviors identified by David Riesman, William Whyte, and others. 

But the rising affluence made filmmaking tools available to more people, and documentarists had other options beyond government agencies. And the best documentaries of the 1945-60 period came from non-government sources, with the exception of films produced by the National Film Board of Canada, originally headed by John Grierson and still committed to presenting Canada to Canadians and the world.

Screens: Night and Fog (Alain Resnais and Jean Cayrol, 1956)

 Alain Resnais’ film was financed by a number of private non-profit organizations and remains one of the major films of the post-war era. With Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, you have a diptych of the Bomb and the Camps, “a two-panel presentation of the shadow that fell over the world after World War II.” The film’s intellectual framework is rooted in Bergson and Proust, “the idea of finding the past so that it becomes a useful tool for us.” It reflects the rise of existentialist thought, the awareness of moral responsibility for both ourselves and others, and for history’s nightmares.

When the narrator intones: “Those of us who look around and refuse to hear, deaf to the endless cry.” Blue responds: “I think that was more than poetry. It seemed to be something that most of us felt somehow toward the end of the Forties, horrified as we were about the discoveries of both the Holocaust and of the atomic bomb.”

Post-war films began to interrogate humanity and its capacity for horror. The goal was nothing less than “driving a nail into our value systems” and “destroying our mythologies,” so that we would reexamine what we accept. Georges Franju’s Hotel des Invalides, inspired by surrealism (which also influenced Night and Fog), takes us through the museum celebrating France’s military might.  Blue explains: “Because it was so absolutely outrageous all one needed to do was take a picture of it and be carefully selective so that each shot tended to strike a spark next to another shot. As you were seemingly glorifying the place, you could be destroying it totally.” In fact, the military loved the film until it came out, and audiences would hoot.

Screens: Blood of the Beasts ( Georges Franju, 1949)

Georges Franju’s Blood of the Beasts confronts viewers with the operations of a meat slaughterhouse. Bunuel’s surrealist imagery of dead animals in Land Without Bread is shown to be absolutely real. Franju’s message is that romanticized denial of our everyday violence is what allowed war and destruction to take place.

The Emergence of Verité (33:09 – 1:10:13)

Screens: In the Street (Helen Levitt and James Agee, 1948)

In America, the self-examination took the shape of something a little different from surrealism, although sharing some of its values, as in Robert Frank’s The Americans. It was an effort to look at who we were by examining: “Who are the people on the street?” Blue notes that Agee’s opening text links the streets to “a battleground,” connecting them to World War II. With a 16mm camera, street photographer Helen Levitt applied her talent at capturing a feeling of a place and people through “little events,” the kind that lighter-weight cameras had only begun to capture late in the war on the WWII battlefields. The camera was not making statements but allowing us to look into the frame and discover pieces of life, as James Agee said of The Battle of San Pietro, “clear of urging or comment, and so ordered that they are radiant with illimitable suggestions of meaning and mystery.” 

Blue claims this silent film, made in 1948 but not released until 1952, and rarely screened since, “meant so much to many of us who saw it and then wanted to get into making documentaries in the fifties.”

Lightweight cameras and portable tape recorders were about to revolutionize documentary. And at the forefront of the emerging cinema verité movement was Leo Hurwitz, who saw the potential of the equipment and made the earliest verité films. The first was Emergency Ward, which took advantage of the fact that people were too caught up in the urgency of their work to pay attention to the cameraman. 

Screens: The Young Fighter (Leo Hurwitz, 1953)

Leo Hurwitz returns to introduce the 1953 film: “The basic idea of this film was to find a moment in the arc of somebody’s life, the end of which we don’t know, but that has interesting enough elements in it to know that it will go somewhere. We only had six weeks to shoot this and mostly once a week, therefore we had to find a situation that would develop quite quickly….He [the fighter] might have lost. He might have won…But it looked like a situation that would develop into something interesting in which the lives of real people would be revealed. And that’s the reason for selecting him. That he was typical or atypical was not my concern.”

The film is followed by a Q&A with Hurwitz in which he discusses his relationship with Fons Ianelli, who developed the light-weight sync sound equipment Hurwitz employed, and with CBS, who presented the two films on the Omnibus series without realizing at first that they were working with Hurwitz, a blacklisted filmmaker. Once the cat was out of the bag, they dropped him. Cinema verité’s further development would be passed to Robert Drew and Ricky Leacock, to be discussed next week.

The March: A Sixties Film with a Thirties Form (1:10:14 – 1:50:59)

Screens: The March (James Blue, 1964)

Blue introduces his own film, The March, with some reluctance. He says he was asked to show one of his own films, and this one “doesn’t quite fit into this period, because it was made in 1963, but in a way it does.” The dread and discontent just below the surface of postwar prosperity culminated in the Camelot era of JFK, “when we thought things were going to change immensely. I was one of those people who was infected with that vision and I don’t regret it. I was asked to make a film, which I made with all my heart.” 

That film presented to the world, through the United States Information Agency’s global distribution, one of the most significant protests in American history, the 1963 March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Blue was sent out with a team of thirteen newsreel camera persons shooting with 35mm, mostly non-synch cameras. He had only two weeks before the March to prepare for the production. It was expected to be a 10-minute film, but he told George Stevens, Jr., head of the USIA Motion Picture Service: “I think if we just stick to the event, I can pull together something that works. And so he said go for it. And I worked on the material for five months without any kind of interference. Of course, during that time Kennedy was shot, and it was traumatic.”

Under the LBJ administration, the film ran into trouble. There was some pressure to show the US government more favorably, i.e., by adding a photo of JFK and Martin Luther King shaking hands, “which would have been a total misrepresentation of the feeling of the March.” Blue says in order to block that image, he gave in and allowed the ending to be more hopeful than he originally intended, ending the narration with “This was a day of hope,” rather than “No one could yet say whether this was a new beginning or only a day of hope.”  There was tremendous pressure on LBJ from Southern senators to suppress the film. Carl Rowan, who succeeded Edward R. Murrow as chief of the USIA, went to bat for the film and, ultimately, the film’s opponents “said that they would approve of the film’s distribution if Rowan himself would come on at the head of the film and tell the audience what it was supposed to think.” Blue credits Rowan for “making it possible for this film to be shown.” It was released, finally, in June of 1964.

Blue says that his “idea was to make a half an hour film that would lead up and give King as much as power as possible.” Nearly seven minutes, roughly half of the speech, plays near the end of the film, and King is shown in the center of a long shot, “an angle which would avoid having to cut” and which “allows you to see the reaction [of marchers] within the same shot without having to cut away.” 

One person in the class criticizes the film for giving very little sense of the people in the film and what they were experiencing, making them (as Blue had been criticizing in 30s documentaries), more icons than individuals. Blue says that Haskell Wexler, with his film The Bus, covered that perspective, while leaving out the march itself. But he admits that the film reflects “ an older aesthetic. It comes more out of the Thirties and Forties… I think it, in some ways it is a film that is more dated today than a film that you saw of Leo’s (The Young Fighter) made 10 years earlier.”

Blue further explains that the dated style of the film was in part due to the fact that the footage was shot by newsreel cameramen with 35mm wind-up cameras, with 30-second shooting limits. “We had very limited synchronous sound at our disposal,” partly because the USIA discouraged sync sound in its films, relying on narration in different languages and minimizing dubbing and subtitling for international distribution. Blue says he had to fight for the sync sound he used, including the King speech.

Class members question whether the film, made for the USIA, was compromised, and Blue responds defensively: “I don’t think it came off conservative for 1964. I think the fact it got in so much trouble was a measure of it. Today, I recognize that it looks very conservative.” As for the USIA, “I don’t think I ever lied for them. I had to decide whether or not, within the context of the limitations, could I make a film that I felt would be true to me? Once you agree upon the parameters, they’re much easier to work for than Hollywood and the networks, and you were totally left alone if they respected you as a filmmaker. I’m talking about the George Stevens, Jr. period.  I don’t know what’s happening there now.” Blue says he made five movies he’s proud of there, although they can’t be shown, by law, in the USA:   “If you ever want to see those pictures, go to Montreal.”

CONTINUE TO LECTURE SIX: Direct Cinema: 1959 – Present