From: The March Digital Project, University of Oregon Libraries

Still from The March by James Blue (1964).

Check out The March (themarch.uoregon.edu), a new digital exhibition about James Blue’s documentary film on the 1963 March on Washington. Explore the film’s history and meaning through archival documents, interviews, Oval Office recordings, and more.

James Blue’s The March (1964) is a humanistic and poetic 33-minute film of the August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, produced and distributed to 83 foreign countries by the United States Information Agency (USIA).

James Blue (1930-1980) was born in Oklahoma. His family moved to Portland, Oregon, when he was 13. He struggled with a racist mother who was a member of the John Birch Society. He graduated from Portland’s Jefferson High School and then, in 1953, from the University of Oregon, with majors in theater and speech. At the UO, Blue was a student of Horace Robinson in theater, Robert D. Clark in speech, and Glen Starlin in radio and television (Blue starred in several plays and worked for KWAX radio station as a producer). Blue and James Ivory (who would later emerge as a major figure in the film world) learned French in the same classes. Robinson, Clark, and Glen Starlin recommended Blue for the prestigious graduate program at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC) in Paris.

After directing The March, Blue went on to interview seventy of the most important movie directors of the 20th century and to produce, among many short films, an Academy Award-nominated film.

To learn more about James Blue’s life, check out The Making of James Blue. For more on James Blue’s creative process and how he made The March, see The Making of The March.

Bookmark & Share The March: https://themarch.uoregon.edu/

Archival Note:

Preserving THE MARCH (1963) – The Motion Picture Preservation Lab preserved James Blue’s monumental film, The March, in 2008. To mark the 50th anniversary of the The March for Jobs and Freedom we have completed a full digital restoration of the film. The original negatives assembled by James Blue were scanned and three months were spent restoring defects in the image and enhancing the audio track.

View Film: https://youtu.be/DQYzHIIQ1O4