May 5th, 1931 is a day engrained in the minds of generations of citizens in a small mining community in Harlan Country, Kentucky. It was on this date that an almost century long struggle was forged in blood. On this day four miners lost their lives and several more were injured after a clash between local miners and heavily armed deputies escalated to become what would be known as ‘Bloody Harlan’. This event left a scar on the community of Harlan County that still has yet to heal. On July 29th, 2019 a group of miners from Harlan County began blocking a train carrying more than $1 million worth of coal to protest their former employer Blackjewel LLC. The reason for the blockage stemmed from the company writing 350 bad checks to miners following their July 1stbankruptcy claim. A little over two weeks later this strike is still ongoing as miners await the pay, they are owed by Blackjewel LLC. The sight of striking miners conjures memories of struggles of the past. In June 1973 an aspiring filmmaker named Barbara Kopple began production on what would become her Oscar winning documentary titled Harlan County, USA. Prior to Harlan County, USA, Kopple worked with renowned documentarians Albert and David Maysles on their film Gimme Shelter. Harlan County, USA is produced in the direct cinema documentary style. As a result, Kopple is able to become part of the community she is documenting. Through the use of the direct cinema style Barbara Kopple respects the integrity of the miners of Harlan County while allowing them ownership of their struggle.
In 1978 author Henry Shapiro wrote a book titled Appalachia in Our Mind. In this book Shapiro argues that there is an Appalachian aesthetic that has been constructed by Americans who live outside the region. The idea of Appalachia as an exotic and separate place that could be exploited both materially and culturally is explored in Shapiro’s writing. Some of the earliest surviving photographs taken of the region in the mid-nineteenth present Appalachia as an island of otherness created by nature. After the Civil War, some Americans began to interpret this Appalachian difference as a cultural and natural treasure in need of preservation. This work accelerated in the early twentieth century and continued through the Depression era. For many Americans from outside the region, Appalachia increasingly meant a place of poor people and rich culture. Sound, in the form of music played a vital role in generating the idea of Appalachia as a treasure trove of primitive and authentic culture. For example, English ballad collector Cecil Sharp rode into the mountain hollows on horseback asking families to play and sing their oldest songs. Outsiders to the community like Cecil Sharp became known by the Appalachian community as ‘Song catchers’. Visual documentation of the region also accelerated in the Depression era and peaked again in the 1960s as photography and film images exposed the material deprivation of many rural mountain people’s lives in ways that also often highlighted their indigenous cultural resources.
By the 1970s, a desire to document US working-class and rural life inspired many independent filmmakers who paid for their films with grants from the NEA, NEH, private foundations, and regional and state level arts commissions and humanities councils (Hale, 2017). Over two hundred documentary folk films were made during this time period. Harlan County, USA was one of the many documentary films of this era made in and about the rural US South from the 1950s through the 1970s. These documentary films about the South fall into roughly two categories: films made by the three major broadcast networks, National Educational Television and, after 1970, PBS, religious organizations, and local public television stations. Many of these films incorporated a strong voice-over narration and demanded some sort of reform. On the other hand, there were more self-consciously artistic films made by independent filmmakers influenced by the direct cinema movement.
What makes Harlan County, USA so compelling is Kopple’s intimate involvement with the people she filmed, the risks she took, the places-jails, courtrooms, stockholder’s meetings-into which she forced her camera (Biskind, 1977). One of the bloodiest chapters in US labor history is the struggle of coal miners. Some of the most violent episodes within this chapter took place in Appalachian Harlan County, Kentucky. Generations of families from Harlan recall the Bloody Harlan battles that took place in the midst of the Great Depression. The struggle of these miners continue to this day as a new generation of miners join the picket line to reclaim their backpay as well as their dignity. Kopple and members of her small crew, like many independent, politically oriented filmmakers of the 1970s, blurred the boundary between documentarian and activist. Like some of the other documentarians of this era, Kopple and her crew understood their work as both a means of representation and a political act. After their initial visit, the crew moved in with the families of striking miners for about a year and took part in strike activities as they filmed them. Harlan County became a part of the movement it sought to represent, a film about a strike as well as a part of the strike, an example of participatory documentary (Hale, 2017). In this way, the film doesn’t simply represent the reality or the miners but plays a role in fighting their struggle.
The soundtrack of Harlan County plays a particularly important role in evoking what it feels like to participate in a strike. From the very start, the gritty sounds of mine work and miners’ and ex-miners’ voices fill Harlan County’s soundtrack. As the film opens, we hear a male voice screaming, ‘Fire in the hole!’ three times as he prepares to detonate dynamite inside the coal mine. Harlan County’s soundscape also includes a great deal of Appalachian music, and it is here that Kopple’s use of sound is prominent. She labors to use these sounds in ways that disrupt the powerful cliché of singing mountain people. Kopple recorded even the non-diegetic music herself. This continuity of production values blends it into the overall soundscape of gritty mine work. Kopple uses the Depression era song, “Which Side Are You On” to convey a central point of her documentary. In chapter eight of the film in a non-diegetic use of music, the song’s lyrics—rewritten to fit the miners’ current struggle—function as title cards. The lyrics provide information that advances the story and explains the visuals of people picketing at the headquarters of Duke Power in Durham, North Carolina. This sequence also takes us with the miners’ as they protest on Wall Street in front of the stock exchange. Later in the film, an elderly woman named Florence Reece is introduced. Reece is well known to the community of Harlan County as a life-long union supporter. As she begins speaking, the sound of her age-weakened voices evokes the memory of a long history of labor struggles in Eastern Kentucky. Instead of stock footage of armed men clashing with miners, the visual stays with Reece. Her voice, her words, her tone, her Appalachian accent, and her expressions all provide the historical context that is central to the film. This is not the quilt-making granny of Appalachian stereotype, but a militant labor leader.
While the film is about men’s jobs, women are just as important to the strike as men are. The women of Harlan County may or may not have considered themselves as feminists, but in the context of the documentary that is irrelevant (Elliott, 2016). They lived the struggles that second wave feminists were trying to make the rest of the country aware of. Because of their efforts they played a key role in the eventual success of the strike. These women are shown taking vital leadership role throughout the film. Through organizing picket lines, forming support committees, and directly confronting the violence of scabs and company thugs, these women are the engine at the heart of the strike. Their effort is indicative of the dilemmas that still afflict women’s labor to this day. Lois Scott stands out as a charismatic agitator who embodies the film’s most troubling and enduring question: how to fight against corporate intimidation without jeopardizing the goals or moral capital of the union cause (Arthur, 1976). After a Judge limits the number of pickets allowed, Lois Scott and the other women pour out onto the roads to block the passage of scab workers. We see the women facing down the state troopers, forcing the sheriff to arrest the mine foreman, dealing with their own personal drama, and gearing up for one confrontation after another. An elderly woman preparing to go out on the picket line is heard saying: “They may shoot me, but they can’t shoot the union out of me.”
Through the introduction of strikers like Lois Scott and Florence Reece the audience knows that the film’s heroes are living out the same scenes as their parents and grandparents had before them. The struggle to organize, the quality of life afforded from low mine wages, and the hardship and violence of the picket line are facts of life for the citizens of the community. In Harlan County, the struggle continues. The overly familiar images of broken-down shacks, outhouses, and malnourished children suggest that time does not matter. Murders and mine accidents and victims of black lung pile up year after year. Yet the repetition of songs, and stories and other sounds in the film also suggest the opposite, that time does matter and all these pasts and these people who cannot quite get a firm grasp on the present are nevertheless not going to disappear and thus must have a future. In this struggle, Kopple has found an important and compelling subject. One that is resonant with history and feeling. She participates with the strikers but maintains enough distance to stay out of their way. The film comes to a couple of false endings which suggest the sense of never-ending struggle. This decision helps the audience relate that much closer to the miners’ plight. At one point, one of the miners’ can be heard saying: “Once a victory is won, you gotta move onto the next one, or you’ll lose the concession. You gotta take. If you expect them to give you something, you’ll find ‘they don’t give nuthin’ for nuthin’. You gotta give somethin’ in return.”
Harlan County, USA showcases the poverty lived by mine workers in Appalachia. The struggle of these workers can be felt through not only the images produced by Barbara Kopple and her crew but also in the sound scape of the film. The exclusion of a voice-over narrator allows the story of the miners to be their own. While documentarians like Michael Moore frame themselves as an advocate of change the message of those who are struggling can get lost unintentionally. Barbara Kopple doesn’t frame herself as an advocate of change like so many other documentarians. She takes a participatory role in the struggle she is attempting to illuminate. I find this approach much more effective than the personality-based approach utilized by other filmmakers. This style of direct cinema tells the story of the subjects more or less in their own words. This lets the audience empathize with them as opposed to being distracted by a host or narrator. Because of this, we have a direct connection between the workers and the intended audience. This style of filmmaking allows those under the microscope to keep their dignity as opposed to being exploited.
This Week in Labor 