How “Who Killed Fourth Ward?” Challenged the Nature of Documentary Filmmaking

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.tnyfrontrow reviews a 1978 documentary that centers around Houston’s oldest Black neighborhood, the Fourth Ward—and who’s making the decisions leading to its destruction.

One of the great modern documentaries is hiding in plain sight. “Who Killed Fourth Ward?,” directed by James Blue, from 1978, is available on YouTube,devoted to his work. It’s also part of a Blue retrospective at Metrograph, starting Friday, along with his most celebrated movie, the rarely screened and newly restored dramatic feature “The Olive Trees of Justice,” from 1962.

Blue, a white man in his mid-forties, was living in Houston and teaching film at Rice University in the mid-nineteen-seventies. As he drove past the neighborhood, he noticed that one side of the highway was part of the city’s gleaming downtown business district and the other side was a series of small run-down shops and houses, and—as he had a commission to make a film on a subject of his choice—he decided to investigate.

Blue quickly became aware that he was in a position to offer the poor residents of Fourth Ward their only chance to be heard publicly. But he also saw himself and his crew as “three white jerks with a camera parachuting in for ten minutes asking for the truth in twenty seconds and then dashing back to their middle-class neighborhoods.

The filmmakers gain remarkable access to government officials , business leaders, real-estate developers, and local landlords. The extended and incisive questioning of these representatives of power and moneyed interests yields copious answers, but those answers prove, in their generous fullness, nonetheless evasive.

 

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