Eight Presentations by James Blue

LECTURE SEVEN: August 3, 1977

Continued  DIRECT CINEMA: 1959-PRESENT: EXPERIMENTS IN UN-CONTROLLED FILMMAKING

Birth of a Documentarist: From Neorealism to Observational Cinema (0:00 – 32:36)

The class two weeks earlier was affected by the New York City blackout that had stranded some course participants (including James Blue). This week, Blue reacted to that very day’s disaster, bomb threats from the FALN, the Puerto Rican liberation group, which led to 100,000 New York City office evacuations.  This incident activated memories of the Algerian War bomb scares Blue had experienced while making The Olive Trees of Justice in 1962: 

I began making films in a similar situation in Algeria during the revolution where we lived with a daily, constant bomb scare.  That was the technique that the Algerians were then using in the city. And, of course, also the OAS, the French side of terrorism, were bombing the hell out of the place. We’d come back from our productions and go to dinner and then see our car blow up. It had been plasticated. This didn’t stop life from going on. You went to the grocery store or motion pictures and they’d have a frisk line; they’d pat you down and then you’d go on in…. For two years I lived in that kind of an environment.  It conditioned something about the way I looked at films, because life goes on. And if you want to look at the frisking as melodramatic, you’re in a sense distorting the whole nature of the experience. So I began to sense in my own work that there are significant and poisonous things that interlace, and yet don’t stick out very much from the general experience. I aimed to create a way of shooting and a way of seeing that would not insist on what is dramatic and melodramatic. 

You can see some of that kind of thinking going on in my film, The Olive Trees of Justice. It was a thinking related to Italian neorealism, very influential for young filmmakers throughout the fifties. For instance, the idea that what you try to go for is what might really happen in certain circumstances, instead of what your dramatic imagination tells you should happen. I’ll try to illustrate. I had a scene to do in which there was a bomb that was planted in a marketplace.  This is not a documentary, this is a fiction film. My imaginings of the way it would operate would be the bomb squad would come to defuse the bomb and that people would run and stay way back as the bomb squad worked.

I had that all worked out in my mind, and then I thought, well, so far everything else about real life is so contrary to the way I imagined things that I’d better not trust myself. It was at that point that I really became a documentarist and aimed to see how things happen in life. And so what we did was plant the basket with some imitation dynamite on a street corner in a marketplace, in an area where there had been a bomb scare a month earlier. We called the bomb squad, which was informed about what was going on. They came out to “defuse” it, supposedly, and we were in readiness with our cameras. We’d been around shooting other things in the marketplace so it would appear as if we just happened to be there. 

So the bomb squad and the soldiers arrive and they try to move the onlookers back, but nobody wants to go back. Everyone crowds around to see whether or not it’s gonna go up.  They had to literally push people back while they “disarmed” this fruit basket full of dynamite. And so I learned that real life can be surprising as hell and that to try to outguess it, to work with your imagination only, may be good drama, but not how things really happen in the world. It’s best to go out and look and see. So, in a nutshell, that is what the new documentary filmmakers over the past fifteen years have attempted to do– to find out how things really happen. as limiting as that may be. 

Blue, who had shifted from neo-realist fiction filmmaking to documentary after making Olive Trees of Justice, expanded on why he thought neo-realism was an influence and precursor to verité filmmaking: “Neo-realists made fiction, but it was fiction which used non-actors and in real settings and tried to organize the action so that the camera simply observed it…The emotion, if it were to happen, would come from the situation; you didn’t lay it on from the way you shot. Rossellini said it was a revolution against seduction. Zavattini, who was the writer for DeSica’s The Bicycle Thief and Shoeshine, said: ‘My ideal is to live with a person for 90 minutes, experience 90 minutes of that person’s life. And to try to see that life intimately at a time when nothing really happens. By being able to really look and see into that life, I can find meaning.’ So that was a goal that Zavattini set for himself and never really fulfilled. Twenty years later, verité and observational films are attempting to move in that direction.”

Recap of last session (32:36- 17:20)

Last week’s class addressed the emergence of cinema verité. Blue calls this the “continental divide” in documentary production—post-1959, lighter weight camera and sound equipment change everything for the documentary filmmaker.

In the work of filmmakers like Ricky Leacock and John Marshall, an exploratory, observational camera aimed to uncover what was actually going on. Other verité filmmakers, like Frederick Wiseman, still filtered their observations through preconceived metaphors and aimed for “iconographic effects,” i.e., the signifying of authoritarianism in a teacher-student exchange in High School. Iconography had excited early filmmakers, especially those influenced by Russian montage: “the face or the posture or the movement says more than just what it is. It speaks like an icon. The Russian worker on the railroad, when he brings down a stroke of that pickax, that’s all pickaxes making all strokes.” For Blue, “that was the language being used in the older documentaries — a language of icons and metaphor, of efforts to pictorialize meaning, and an organization of the action along the lines of narrative drama with suspense, climax and resolution, and a linear interlinking of actions as we saw in The Battle of Britain. Over this, quite often, was a voice-of-God narration to organize the whole thing and make it come to an exact point.”  There were exceptions, of course, such as Land Without Bread and The Spanish Earth.

After the continental divide, thanks to lighter equipment, “it becomes possible for us to try to see what is going on and how things happen.  We suddenly found that we had all sorts of problems that we had never suspected when we couldn’t do that, such as the relationship between the organization of the film and the audience.” In order to free the viewers to make judgments of their own, it was necessary to give up “iconography, metaphor, dramatic structure…old fictional modes of thinking that documentary had used as a way of putting things together. But in giving them up, you’ve got to look for something to put in its place, if you want the audience to watch and find some meaning in it. And unfortunately, I don’t think any of us have really solved that problem yet, short of resorting to stars like Jane Fonda or Paul Anka or Stravinsky (there’s a guy you’ll watch). But the goal was, how do you capture and penetrate ordinary life?”

Another problem that now had to be addressed was the question of “the relationship between the subject and the filmmaker.” Moontrap (Pour la Suite du Monde), in which the camera recorded the revival of a forgotten hunting practice at the behest of villagers, was “a new thing for film to be doing — not just telling you about a culture, but also serving the culture that’s being filmed.”

Blue summarizes the trajectory he has been tracing from early cinema: “Documentary has moved from way outside of the subject, using the traditional artifices of aesthetics, to a kind of close-up observation of the subject, and then finally turning around and handing the camera to the subject.”

Eliminating Fictional Devices: The Observational Cinema of David Hancock, David MacDougall and James Blue (17:21 – 1:13:11)

Blue had written in the course summary: “The eight presentations are dedicated to the memory of David Hancock who in a few years pushed our dream of observational cinema as far as it would go.” Hancock, until his untimely death at 30 years old, had been Blue’s and David MacDougall’s colleague at the Rice Media Center in Houston, where they collaborated in making, teaching, and advancing observational cinema.[1]

Screens: Peter Murray and Peter and Jane Flint (David Hancock and Herbert di Gioia, 1974)

In David Hancock’s work with Herb DiGioia, one gets the sense, even more than in John Marshall’s work, of the camera as participant. According to Blue, Hancock was determined “not just to observe, but to relate to those people,” and so the filming of Peter and Jane Flint took place during a long period of living and working alongside them on their farm: “And so it became natural for them to sit down and talk about things. When they sit down and talk, they talk to the camera that is not an observer or peeping Tom, but is a participant in the conversation.” The filmmaking becomes meaningful to the subjects, as it becomes “a catalyst in their discussing where their lives are going, something they hadn’t done before. And so, in a sense, the making of the film becomes the making of their lives.”

Blue demonstrates some of Hancock’s shooting and editing techniques, designed to disrupt conventional fictional devices that constrain audiences. There is a disruption of the typical shot/reverse shot convention that “folds you into some kind of fictional story,” by clearly including the filmmaker in the action. Also, cuts resist smooth continuity, reminding viewers of the filmmaker’s selectivity, and their freedom to make their own judgments from the evidence provided. 

Screens: Kenya Boran   (James Blue and David MacDougall, 1974)

Blue then turns to the ethnographic film he had made with David MacDougall, Kenya Boran. They were co-directors, with MacDougall filming, Blue on sound, and a translator “who would sit and whisper in our ear.” He contends that they were not interested in doing “salvage anthropology,” depicting traditional practices and hiding any evidence of modernity. They were particularly interested in seeing aspects that were “a little more abstract …the effects of modernity and technology on the tribe,” with an emphasis on “what was changing between fathers and sons.” 

Blue apologizes for the absence of women in the film: “We were conscious of the problem. And part of the reason is because it’s difficult for men to photograph women in traditional societies.” What little they recorded went into one of satellite films accompanying Kenya Boran, but “what dawned on me was how much need there is for women anthropological filmmakers. Our whole image of traditional societies has been formulated by men.”

Blue and MacDougall’s process aimed “to eliminate fictional devices in an effort to create an audience that will think and relate differently than a fictional audience or your traditional documentary audience.” Kenya Boran is not organized as a narrative, and so “we do not have to sacrifice scenes to that narrative. There is more to discover in scenes than what is required for a narrative.” Instead, “someone described the film as being like a mobile that hangs down and swings around, and different relationships are made.” Black leader was used to break the film into distinct segments and disrupt a linear flow. The filmmakers’ idea “was that we could see, within each scene, material that was significant. And yet in twenty years, there would be other material that we might be able to see that we weren’t aware of.  It is possible in this kind of shooting to have more than what you are conscious of because it’s coming from the real world.”

 Still, Blue warns the class that they will find the editing not as elegant as Hancock’s, and “there are fiction cuts that make me groan every time I see them. You’ll hear me groan.”  Blue’s excuse is that they were at a linguistic disadvantage, relying on a translator, and that made them miss observations. So, for example, in a scene in which the subject, Peter, is seen to be perplexed by a choice put to him, the shot of him looking puzzled “comes from earlier…. It so happens that Peter was perplexed, but we didn’t get it. By doing that, I think we shed suspicion on that scene as evidence.” 

Deconstructing the Illusion: Jean Rouch and Chris Marker (1:13:12 – 1:56:46)

Screens: Jaguar (Jean Rouch, 1967)

Jean Rouch’s Jaguar, like the neorealist The Olive Trees of Justice, is a narrative film infused with the documentary impulse, filled with documentary evidence that exceeds the narrative. According to Blue, “It is a fiction story as a pretext for getting at something essential central to the lives of three young Africans. We hear the voices of three young men. At first, we believe those voices are synchronized with the picture. And as we proceed, we realize that there’s a disjunction between the voices and the picture. What you begin to figure out is that we are at a projection of the film for the people who are in the film, and they are commenting and telling their story and having fun with it as they watch.”

Blue sees this as a participatory film, “an anthropological film made by the people themselves.”

Blue adds: “It’s been extremely interesting for filmmakers working in this area that I’m working in, looking for ways to tell narrative in a manner that does not interfere with all the other rich information that the film should be transporting.”

Screens: The Koumiko Mystery (Chris Marker, 1965)

Blue calls Rouch’s approach “deconstructive,” and applies the term again in discussing Chris Marker, “one of my favorite filmmakers.” He describes Marker’s The Koumiko Mystery as “a kind of deconstructed movie, a film that is constantly impeding your efforts to put it together into one little pocket and to explain it.” Marker filters his images, drawn from documentary footage shot in Japan, through an overtly subjective lens and produces “a personal essay … no longer hiding behind being simply a document of something.” Many in the class seem put off by the film, and Blue defends it: “You can’t say that the film doesn’t have content. It’s that Marker is steadfastly refusing to make the content what he shoots. He wants to make it those interstices between the images and the sound and his experiences…He’s working to strike sparks rather than to make everything dovetail.”

Blue then comments on his own work-in-progress, Who Killed Fourth Ward? a Houston public TV “mystery” series examining the politics of housing in Houston. As with Marker, he is anchoring his subjectivity in the film, presenting himself as a detective conducting interviews (“which are more like conversations”), “trying to discover the facts, constantly looking at them on a screen, so that the audience sees those, not as a drama that’s being played out, but as pieces of information gathered from the people you see.” Being straightforward about the subjective nature of their approach allows the filmmakers to offer analyses drawn from these fragments, “rather than simply maintaining a hands-off relationship that you have to have with the earlier observational approach.”

Blue concludes by noting that “this deconstruction, this organization of forms that do not converge, this fight against closure …is part of what we’ve been talking about since the end of World War II of the breaking down of absolutes in all areas of thinking, the notion that fact is surrounded by probabilities and possibilities and that the old positivistic way of thinking just doesn’t work anymore.”  Independent documentaries join other artistic movements breaking down the division between fact and fiction (i.e., the non-fiction novels of Truman Capote and Norman Mailer), and are even influencing mainstream TV, “as when we see Bill Moyers in The Fire Next Door taking part in the action, making telephone calls to try to help out the people.”[2]

[1] MacDougall and Hancock had been students at UCLA, where Film School chairman Colin Young had encouraged connections between filmmakers and anthropologists, and James Blue had been a visiting faculty member.  

[2] In James Blue’s final interview before his death, conducted by Anthony Bannon in January 1980 and published in Afterimage (October, 1980), he presented his most concise summary of the relationship between Leacock, Rouch and Marker: “You know the triple pun that Godard did on the whole thing. He says the problem with Leacock is that he’s failed to footnote his Rouches with his magic marker, which, I guess is a way of dealing with the whole problem of the ontology of cinema. Leacock and the American direct cinema/cinema verité group represent the thought that one can simply go out and shoot and come back with the truth. Then there’s the kind of material Rouch produces, which in the middle ’60’s, was reflexive. He tried to deal with the problem of the relationship of the filmmaker and the subject–Chronicle of a Summer (1961) was one such film. And then there’s Marker, who is always flagrantly personal about everything he does, but arrives at a certain degree of honesty by making it so flagrant that it can only be considered an essay. The tension in Marker comes from the fact that you know you’re dealing with images taken from the real world–quite often anyway–but they are being bombarded by ideas that transform them constantly in front of your eyes into something else. Marker plays with them, plays with them verbally. That kind of playfulness, almost preciousness, that Marker has is a trademark. His would represent the totally subjective attitude, Rouch being the midpoint between the subjective and the filmmaker/subject involvement in a relationship, and Leacock being the idea of simply recording it and putting it out…I like to see myself somewhere square in the middle of that triangle…” 

CONTINUE TO LECTURE EIGHT: The Era of Access: 1969 – Future