The Importance of James Blue

Citizen Blue: The James Blue Story is a documentary film about an important contributor to the history of documentary film in the twentieth century.  He is remembered fondly by the great generation of independent artists that arose in his lifetime, especially those who studied with him, but when he died early in 1980, his legacy also nearly vanished from the view of American audiences.    

So this film, Citizen Blue, tells the story of James Blue and his work. It is a revelation in image and theory that helps us to understand the era of American and World cinema after World War II, when films began to reveal the profound social, cultural and political transformations of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. James Blue was at the center of this, an artist in his own right, but also a teacher, a touchstone and guide for a new kind of filmmaker. He was a witness, and he aimed to help audiences and artists alike understand these profound changes, and the worldwide rise of struggles for social justice.

Life begins in poverty

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma into a family suffering from hunger and the depression, he was deeply affected by those experiences and never left their influence far behind. After the war, his family moved to Portland, Oregon, and he graduated as a well-known actor and young filmmaker from the University of Oregon, where he and James Ivory starred together in a play, in French.   

He goes to Paris to study film and then he goes to Algiers, a city at war

The talented young James Blue was persuaded by his speech and drama professors to apply to the internationally renowned French Cinema School, IDHEC, at the height of the French New Wave. He was accepted and his friendships there--and the debates of the "new wave"--changed him.  From there Blue journeyed to Algeria and Studio Africa, where the city and countryside were filling with the increasing violence of their war.  Sympathetic to the victims on both sides, living in an apartment in the middle of Algiers and between the two cultures, he made the first American film to capture the Cannes Critics Prize,  The Olive Trees of Justice, filmed on the streets and among the people of the conflict there. 

Filmmaker and Scholar

The connection to an international audience was important to James Blue. At Cannes, he took George Stevens, Jr.'s offer to come back to the US, but he was not abandoning the rest of the world--he began to produce films for the USIA, working with Edward R. Murrow and George Stevens Jr. He made films in South America, and in 1963 directed the civil rights documentary masterpiece, The March, which faced a battle for distribution and against censorship at home. Legislative political resistance was afraid that the truth of the civil rights struggle would reveal a negative view of the U.S.A. Like other USIA films, it was not allowed to be distributed at home.  But in the end, the film became one of the most successful USIA films, seen by millions of people abroad. It was restored by the National Archives in 2013 for the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and placed on the National Historic Registry; it preserves a record of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, and remains an important cinematic achievement of American film. 

A Renaissance Person

Joan Churchill says in the film, “I have always felt that life and cinema are not about the places where you are but about the people and communities of people you are part of. That is true of myself and certainly true of James Blue” James understood this and was always at the heart and the center of the communities of people he was with.” Cinema Professor and Scholar Gerald O'Grady says in the film, "Quite Simply, He was the best there was." 

James Blue was a profoundly important and contributive cinema maker, scholar, teacher and director. He was also, in every sense, a citizen of the world. This film is his story and through him, the story of cinema, media and society in the transformative twentieth century times, in which he lived. It is told by those who knew, loved, and were influenced by him. They include George Stevens Jr., James Ivory, Sir Colin Young, Joan Churchill, Gerry O’Grady, Richard Herskowitz, Adele Santos, Richard Blue and many others. It features his profoundly evocative, poetic, groundbreaking, and socially responsible films. It has now premiered at the Houston International Media Arts Festival as an opening night feature. I hope it will go on to serve and enrich students, scholars, and makers of cinema around the world, who experience and learn from it and from James Blue and his life and cinema. And there could not be a better time, in my opinion, to revisit this period in history and be reminded of all that is at stake today, in the practice of art, cinema and citizenship.