Film Feature |
A Truly Independent Independentby George Sax |
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Thirty-nine years ago, the late, great Pauline Kael observed that James Blue was among a young generation of “gifted, intelligent men outside the industry… who are attempting to make inexpensive feature films as honestly and independently as they can.”
Blue, whose only feature film, Olive Trees of Justice, cited by Kael, will be shown this Saturday as part of a retrospective of his work, died in Buffalo a quarter of a century ago while on the faculty of the University at Buffalo.
The independence Kael noted was obvious in the versatile filmmaker’s career, which, while truncated, still left behind a number of accomplished, involving, sometimes provocative works. The independence and the provocation, often expressed in examining under-addressed or even ignored social and political subjects, helped bring him to Buffalo, where he spent the last two years of his life.
Olive Trees of Justice, set in Algeria during the war for that country’s independence from France, might seem an improbable project for a man like Blue, a native of Oklahoma and a part of the “Okie” migration out of the great plains dustbowl in the ’30s. But Blue had studied at L’Institute des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques in Paris in the ’50s, and had French contacts who admired his skills.
Olive Trees is at once a nostalgic study of a French man returning to Algeria to care for his ailing father, and recalling his semi-idyllic childhood, and a picture of the bitter present when his former Algerian friends are fighting his countrymen.
The film won the Critics Prize at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival. Even more noteworthy, it was made with non-professional actors in a country at war; filming was interrupted several times by bomb explosions.
Also part of the program, co-sponsored by Hallwalls and a number of local cultural organizations, will be Blue’s Who Killed Fourth Ward?, a 1977 documentary about the city of Houston’s land acquisitions in a black district that was, in due course, decimated by what used to be called “negro removal” in order to aggrandize commercial interests.
It was work like this that led to tensions at Rice University, where Blue taught, and that sent him to UB seeking more professional and artistic latitude.
The range in subject matter and approaches in Blue’s work is manifestly evident in Hallwalls’ program of film exhibitions and discussions, which begins Thursday October 13 with a presentation by Gerald O’Grady at the Burchfield-Penny Center. A colleague of Blue’s, Brian Huberman, once said Blue didn’t seek to make “art for art’s sake. It was about art for society’s sake.”
His death, then, was a loss that affected a great deal more than film circles.
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