Harlan County USA

United States

1976

103 Min

Color

1.78:1

English

Currently 4.3/5 Stars.
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Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award–winning Harlan County USA unflinchingly documents a grueling coal miners’ strike in a small Kentucky town. With unprecedented access, Kopple and her crew captured the miners’ sometimes violent struggles with strikebreakers, local police, and company thugs. Featuring a haunting soundtrack—with legendary country and bluegrass artists Hazel Dickens, Merle Travis, Sarah Gunning, and Florence Reece—the film is a heartbreaking record of the thirteen-month struggle between a community fighting to survive and a corporation dedicated to the bottom line. —The Criterion Collection

Director

Barbara Kopple

Barbara Kopple (born July 30, 1946) is an American film director, primarily known for her work in documentary film.

She grew up in Scarsdale, New York, the daughter of a textile executive and studied psychology at Northeastern University, after which she worked with the Maysles Brothers.

Kopple has won two Academy Awards, the first in 1976 for Harlan County, USA, about a Kentucky miners’ strike, and the second in 1991 for American Dream, the story of the Hormel Foods strike in Austin, Minnesota in 1985-86. She has directed episodes of the television drama series Homicide: Life on the Street and Oz, winning a Directors Guild of America award for the former. Kopple also directed A Conversation With Gregory Peck and Bearing Witness, as well as documentaries on Mike Tyson and Woody Allen. The latter film, Wild Man Blues, focuses on his Dixieland jazz tour and on Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi Previn.

Her first non-documentary feature film, Havoc, starred Anne Hathaway… read more

Barbara Kopple (born July 30, 1946) is an American film director, primarily known for her work in documentary film.

She grew up in Scarsdale, New York, the daughter of a textile executive and studied psychology at Northeastern University, after which she worked with the Maysles Brothers.

Her first non-documentary feature film, Havoc, starred Anne Hathaway and Bijou Phillips as wealthy suburbanites who venture into East Los Angeles Latino gang territory, and was released straight to DVD in 2005. Kopple has recently ventured into advertising work that includes documentary-style commercials for Target Stores.

She was also among the 19 filmmakers who worked together anonymously (under the rubric Winterfilm Collective) to produce the film Winter Soldier, an anti-war documentary about the Winter Soldier Investigation. She has also done films for The Working Group, directing the 30-minute short documentary “Locked Out in America: Voices From Ravenswood” for the We Do the Work series. (We Do the Work aired in the mid-1990s on the PBS television series “P.O.V.”, and Kopple’s segment was based on the book Ravenswood: The Steelworkers’ Victory and the Revival of American Labor.)

In the fall of 2006, she released a documentary, Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing, about the Dixie Chicks’ George W. Bush-related controversy.

In 2012 Kopple is set to release two new films. One is about Mariel Hemmingway. the daughter of Ernest Hemmingway, and the other is concerning the 150th Anniversary of National Magazine. The film on Hemmingway is set to be released on the Oprah Winfrey Network.

Kopple is a niece of the American playwright Murray Burnett. —Wikipedia

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Bijoux Alexanderplatz

22Apr13

My papaw was a coal miner in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, coming home to a wife, seven kids and farm work. I remember hearing stories about union issues and the often terrifying work conditions. All these things made this film very personal to me and it earned a rating of 5 stars; however, without the personal connections I might give it four. Definitely a film I'll keep thinking about.

nurrrit

18Dec12

MAS NADA

Harry Rossi

4Oct12

I feel like I know so much about coal mining politics now! Very moving, well made documentary. Would have loved it if it didn't drag its ass at the end.

Michael Harbour

6May12

Occasionally threatens to descend into a movie about assholes butting heads, but never quite falls into that trap and ultimately emerges as a powerful document of conflicts of power and opportunity at many levels. I felt claustrophobic and endangered just watching some of the footage shot in the mines. I think actually descending into these shafts would have been psychically crippling. I can't even imagine doing it.