MUBI

I don’t know why I put off renting the Criterion DVD of Harlan County, U.S.A. for so long. All I was missing was a gripping, irresistible document of an Appalachian coal mining community’s more than year-long strike against Duke Power in the early 1970’s. Director Barbara Kopple took the time and care to immerse herself in the world of her film by living in the community for an extended period. Such an approach might well have risked putting the director “too close” to her subjects, but Kopple is not a journalist — she’s a filmmaker, a storyteller. Her empathy for the people of Harlan is exactly that, because she experienced these things with them. You could almost say that the film is simply one woman’s home movies from a period of 1973-74, and the woman in question just happens to be a professional filmmaker.

Kopple’s camera gets itself everywhere you would hope it could, such as inside families’ homes, union meetings, planning sessions by the miners’ wives (who show at least as much grit as the men), and Duke Power shareholder meetings. Her camera makes its way a mile underground into the mines themselves, and it is rolling on the picket lines when the strikebreaking gun thugs attack. Unforgettable characters emerge, and are underscored by the visceral honesty of the area’s indigenous bluegrass music sung by subjects of the film.

Parallels to recent West Virginia mine explosion that killed 29 miners are, unsurprisingly, present in several instances. However, to evaluate Harlan County, U.S.A.‘s relevance in such simple, one-to-one correlative terms is to diminish the breadth of the film. As Harlan’s old timers recollect to the camera the dark days of the 1930’s, we see archival footage of mine explosions and violent labor clashes that earned the area (and later, that era) the moniker “Bloody Harlan.” All of this is to say nothing of the environmental efficacy of coal, the health effects of mining it on the miners and their families, the wage-earning stranglehold the power companies exert over the residents, and the lobbying stranglehold they exert over the relevant elected officials. Suffice it to say, plenty for a viewer to chew on.

Bottom line: Harlan County, U.S.A. is a passionately constructed and crafted piece of storytelling, made at no small personal risk. It richly deserved the 1976 Academy Award for Best Documentary that it won, and it is absolutely among the great documentaries of the last 50 years. See it.

Death is in the air as you watch Harlan County USA. The film follows the miners of Harlan County as they go on a strike. The last time there was a strike in Harlan County, the situation caused a lot of bloodshed, and as the new strike develops it looks like history is about to repeat itself. The capitalist company are playing every trick they got to crush the miners cause, and they got dirty cops and gun thugs to help them with that. The tension of the sitiuation is so well captured that it jumps out of your screen, and its hard not to feel with the inhabitants as they are pressured by bigger powers.

One of the reasons this is such a great documentary is that the camera crew always seem to be where stuff is happening. This is not one of these documentaries where people are telling about the dramatic events, they are captured on film. Its easy to see the filmmakers dedication to their subject and that they care about the people involved. The story is very captivating and well told. A nice storytelling grip is that the director sometimes lets the story be told through political songs.

I think its important that this documentary was made, because the miners story will not be forgotten. It was not in wain. Its important to raise awareness about corruption and breaking of human rights. Even though this film is 33 years old, its themes are still relevant. Injustice done, captured on tape.