Who Killed Fourth Ward?
WHO KILLED FOURTH WARD? A Non-Fiction Mystery in Three Parts
WHO KILLED FOURTH WARD? is a documentary produced and directed by James Blue, with cinematography by Brian Huberman, and sound and editing by Ed Hugetz. It was produced with support from the Media Center at Rice University in Houston, Texas; Southwest Alternative Media Project (SWAMP); the National Endowment for the Arts; and KUHT-TV, Channel 8, Houston, Texas. The film was originally produced on Super-8 film.
Part One: Witnesses, 54:30 min
Part Two:Suspects, 61:20 min
Part Three: The Guilty, 57 min
WHO KILLED FOURTH WARD? is a non-fiction mystery in three one-hour episodes, WITNESSES, SUSPECTS, THE GUILTY. It follows the efforts of three super 8 filmmakers who set out to discover why it is that a historic black neighborhood built by freed slaves at the heart of booming downtown Houston is now a slum. A black journalist tells the filmmakers that there is a conspiracy between the city government and big business to drive the people out and take over the area for development. The Filmmakers try to find out the truth and in the process become involved in the effort to save the neighborhood. What happens raises some crucial questions about the nation’s fastest growing city and the say people have in the decisions which affect their future.
James Blue on WHO KILLED FOURTH WARD?
Click below for a PDF of Mark Mikolas, Crises in the Fourth Ward: An Interview with James Blue in Super-8 Filmmaker (July-August, 1979) reprinted in Gerald O’Grady (ed.), James Blue. Scripts and Interviews. Celebrating SWAMP 25 Years – Honoring Founder James Blue, SWAMP, 2002, pp. 25-28.
From a letter to Robert Hookey dated April 22, 1978 :
The documentary form, I believe, has difficulty dealing with complex intellectual issues. It has traditionally turned to the useful but eroded recipes of TV journalism or to the pedantic stance of the information film. Often the documentarist is tempted by emotional appeal, organized around assumptions held by the audience. Often the filmmaker abandons the effort to communicate the difficulties and complexities of a problem simply because it is hard to do so and to hold an audience. The first approach loses an audience, the last loses meaning.
This is a problem I and my associates have been working on at the local level in Texas for some time. The Fourth Ward series is really our first rather awkward attempt at joining complex meaning to a form that will hold and inform a lay audience without making hidden use of social myths.
In fact the decision we made was to make use of myth openly–in this case the detective genre– in order to make the audience question everything.
To a certain degree, I think the use of the genre helps pull in the audience. but it also causes the audience to question the material, to see it·entirely as a set of perceptions rather than authoritative truth.
My major subject matter these days is social/economic systems. I think we should find ways for the lay public to have a more accurate picture of the forces which shape its existence. And where it is impossible to have an accurate picture, the public should be aware of that and not taken in by one or another myths about the subject. I cannot forget John Grierson’s early concern which lie at the begining of British and Canadian documentary that the .role of cinema in a democracy was to improve the public’s understanding of what is going on. The great fear then and now is that things have become too complex for meaningful participation on the part of the public in the decisions which effect their lives. It maybe that the marriage of Super 8 and television will give us the last chance to move toward Grierson’s goal. It appears to me certain that the high cost of technology which can only be utilized by establishment institutions will never deal with complex issues in their complexity. They will only produce answers. Those information sources that seem to have a hold on the “truth,” in my personal view, announce the end of democracy.
Brian Huberman and Ed Hugetz on Filming WK4W?
Article by Brian Huberman and Ed Hugetz, co-creators of Who Killed 4th Ward? with James Blue
Reprinted from: Art Lies, Volume 37, Winter 2002-2003, periodical, 2002; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228066/: accessed October 28, 2022), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu
Colin Young on WHO KILLED FOURTH WARD?
Filmed in 2002 by Brian Huberman
ARTICLES AND REVIEWS
Richard Brody in The New Yorker
How “Who Killed Fourth Ward?” Challenged the Nature of Documentary Filmmaking by Richard Brody (The New Yorker, January 21, 2022)
Elmer Ploetz on the Complex Urban Documentary
“James Blue and the Complex Urban Documentary” from The Work of James Blue: A Retrospective (Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center and Burchfield-Penney Arts Center, Buffalo NY, 2005, pp. 21-23)
