Directing the Non-Actor

Volume Three of filmmaker and educator James Blue’s interview project gathers together the wide-ranging conversations he conducted with some of documentary cinema’s most influential voices, from British pioneers Paul Rotha and Basil Wright to cinéma vérité revolutionaries Richard Leacock, the Maysles Brothers, and Jean Rouch.

This final volume of the series turns the central question of Blue’s interview project—how do filmmakers coax authentic, compelling performances from non-actors?—toward the documentary tradition itself, revealing that the boundary between staging and spontaneity has always been more porous than purists admit. Across three sections spanning classical and staged documentary, faux documentary, and observational cinema, Blue’s probing dialogues illuminate the passionate ideological battles of the 1960s and ’70s between “Protestant” vérité absolutists and those who embraced a more “Catholic” openness to interviewing, reenactment, and provocation. The result is an unparalleled record of filmmakers grappling honestly with questions of truth, performance, and craft—and an indispensable resource for anyone who wants to understand how documentary cinema thinks about the real.

Directors and critics interviewed: John Boorman, Kevin Brownlow, Shirley Clarke, David Hancock, Stanley Jackson, William Klein, Gerald Krell, Richard Leacock, Terence Macartney-Filgate, Louis Marcorelles, Albert and David Maysles, Edgar Morin, Paul Rotha, Jean Rouch, George Stoney, Johan van der Keuken, Peter Watkins and Basil Wright.

Volume 1 here. Volume 2 here.

James Blue (1930–1980) was a groundbreaking filmmaker, educator, and advocate for public, accessible media. Born in Oklahoma, he studied at the University of Oregon before earning a scholarship to Paris’s prestigious IDHEC, where his classmates included Costa-Gavras and Johan van der Keuken. His debut feature, Les Oliviers de la Justice, received the Critics’ Prize at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival. His USIA documentary The March (1963–64), documenting the Civil Rights March on Washington, was later added to the National Film Registry. A Few Notes on Our Food Problem (1968) earned him an Academy Award nomination. As an educator, Blue taught at UCLA, the American Film Institute, Rice University, and SUNY Buffalo, where his students included Paul Schrader, Joan Churchill, and Jim Morrison. With initial support from a Ford Foundation grant, he conducted and recorded over 75 interviews with major international filmmakers, considered one of the most important film history archives of the 20th century. He died of cancer in 1980, just before turning 50.

Richard Herskowitz is a media arts curator and administrator who has served as director of Cornell Cinema, the Ashland Independent Film Festival, Virginia Film Festival, and Houston Cinema Arts Festival. He has been a programmer multiple times and president of the board of the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar as well as chair of its 50th Anniversary Committee. He has taught film studies and curated media art museum exhibitions at University of Virginia, Cornell, and the University of Oregon, and has written extensively on film and other cultural subjects in Social Text, Wide Angle, and other publications. He leads the James Blue Project, affiliated with the University of Oregon Libraries’ James Blue Archive, and oversees its website at jamesblue.uoregon.edu.