Harlan County, USA

Harlan County, USA is a 1976 documentary film covering the "Brookside Strike",[1] an effort of 180 coal miners and their wives against the Duke Power Company-owned Eastover Coal Company's Brookside Mine and Prep Plant in Harlan County, southeast Kentucky in 1973.[2] It won the Oscar for Best Documentary at the 49th Academy Awards.

Harlan County, USA
Directed byBarbara Kopple
Produced byBarbara Kopple
Music byHazel Dickens
Merle Travis
David Morris
CinematographyKevin Keating
Hart Perry
Tom Hurwitz
Edited byNancy Baker
Mary Lampson
Production
company
Cabin Creek Films
Distributed byCinema 5
Release date
  • October 15, 1976 (1976-10-15) (New York Film Festival)
Running time
103 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish

Directed and produced by Barbara Kopple, who has long been an advocate of workers' rights, Harlan County, U.S.A. is less ambivalent in its attitude toward unions than her later American Dream, the account of the 1985–86 Hormel strike in Austin, Minnesota in 1985-1986.

Narrative

Kopple initially intended to make a film about Kenzie, Miners for Democracy and the attempt to unseat Tony Boyle. When miners at the Brookside Mine in Harlan County, Kentucky went on strike in June 1973, Kopple went there to film the strike against Duke Power Company which the UMWA had helped to organize. The strike proved a more interesting subject, so Kopple switched the focus of her film.

At first, no one in Harlan County knew what Kopple was doing when she showed up on the picket line. Rumors said some "hippie crew from New York" was sniffing around the strike. Which side were they on? Kopple soon asked a striker "Why are you telling people not to talk to me?" "Girl", she was told, "you gotta tell people here what you're doin'."[3]

Kopple and her crew spent years with the families depicted in the film, documenting the dire straits they found themselves in while striking for safer working conditions, fair labor practices, and decent wages; following them to picket in front of the stock exchange in New York, filming interviews with people affected by black lung disease, and even catching miners being shot at while striking.

The most significant point of disagreement in the Harlan County strike was the company's insistence on including a no-strike clause in the contract.[4] The miners were concerned that accepting such a provision in the agreement would limit their influence over local working conditions. The sticking point was mooted when, a few years after the strike, the UMWA folded the agreement that was eventually won by this group of workers into a global contract.

Rather than using narration to tell the story, Kopple chose to let the words and actions of these people speak for themselves. For example, when the strike breakers and others hired by the company show up early in the film—the strikers call them "gun thugs"—the company people try to keep their guns hidden from the camera. As the strike drags on for nearly a year, both sides eventually openly brandish their weapons. Kopple felt it was important to continue filming (or pretend to, when they were out of film) because their presence and support actually kept the violence down.

Kopple also relays statistics about the companies and the workers to support the strikers, such as the fact that Duke Power Company's profits increased 170 percent in a single year. Meanwhile, the striking miners, many of whom are living in squalid conditions without utilities like running water, received a 4% pay increase despite an estimated 7% cost of living increase for that same year.

Joseph Yablonski was a passionate, populistic union representative who was loved by many of the miners. Yablonski challenged W.A. "Tony" Boyle for the presidency of the UMWA in 1969, but lost in an election widely viewed as corrupt. Later that year, Yablonski and his family were found murdered in their home. Tony Boyle is shown early in the film in good health. Later he is seen frail, sickly and using a wheelchair, being carried up the courthouse steps to face a conviction for giving $20,000 to another union executive council member to hire the killers.

Almost a full year into the strike a striking miner named Lawrence Jones is fatally shot during a scuffle. Jones was well liked, young and had a 16-year-old wife and a baby. In the documentary, his mother can be seen breaking down during his funeral, screaming in agony and being carried away by male attendees. This moment, more than any other, finally forces the strikers and the management to come to the bargaining table.

A central figure in the documentary is Lois Scott, who plays a major role in galvanizing the community in support of the strike. Several times she is seen publicly chastising those she feels have been absent from the picket lines. In one scene, Scott pulls a pistol from her bra. Associate director Anne Lewis compares Scott to Women's Liberation activists in the film's 2004 Criterion Collection special feature The Making of Harlan County, USA.

In an interview with Variety, Kopple was asked if she was in danger while working on Harlan County, USA. She reveals that the head scab, Basil Collins, wanted to hire someone to shoot her; however the most dangerous things were the acts of violence by the mine owners to the miners. The mine owners would hire "local prisoners to beat people up, [shoot] at houses. The people had to line their walls with mattresses."[5]

Interviews
  • Norman Yarborough - Eastover Mining president
  • Houston Elmore - UMW organizer
  • Phil Sparks - UMW staff
  • John Corcoran - Consolidation Coal president
  • John O'Leary - former Bureau of Mines director
  • Donald Rasmussen - Black Lung Clinic, WV
  • Dr. Hawley Wells Jr.
  • Tom Williams - Boyle campaigner
  • Harry Patrick - UMW secretary-treasurer
  • William E. Simon - U.S. Secretary of Treasury

Reception

Critical response

When the film was re-released, critic Roger Ebert praised the film, writing "The film retains all of its power, in the story of a miners' strike in Kentucky where the company employed armed goons to escort scabs into the mines, and the most effective picketers were the miners' wives -- articulate, indomitable, courageous. It contains a famous scene where guns are fired at the strikers in the darkness before dawn, and Kopple and her cameraman are knocked down and beaten."[6]

Film critic Dennis Schwartz liked the documentary, yet believed it provided only one point of view. He wrote "One of the better and more rousing labor strike films that calls attention to class war in America, though it doesn't offer enough analysis or balance on the issues (it sees the struggle solely through the miners' eyes)...The film does a good job chronicling the plight of the miners and telling their personal stories in a moving way, and the meaningful catchy coal mining songs add to the emotional impact of the historical event. Hazel Dickens's folk song lyrics of 'United we stand, divided we fall' and Florence Reece's lyrics for "Which Side Are You On?" give one the full-flavor of the miners' mood and the union fervor sweeping the mining community in the black mountains of Appalachia."[7]

Jerry Johnson, one of the striking Eastover miners, attributes the ultimate conclusion of the strike to the presence of Kopple and her film crew: "The cameras probably saved a bunch of shooting. I don't think we'd have won it without the film crew. If the film crew hadn't been sympathetic to our cause, we would've lost. Thank God for them; thank God they're on our side"[8]

Music

The music used in Harlan County, USA was very important. The music reflected the culture of the people of Harlan County and demonstrated to the audience the importance of folk music. Their stories were often told through the songs.

The music used from the film:

  • "Dark as a Dungeon", written by Merle Travis, sung by David Morris
  • "Forty-Two Years", written and sung by Nimrod Workman, instrumental by Kenny Kosek
  • "Come All You Coal Miners", written and sung by Sarah Gunnings
  • "Mannington", written by Hazel Dickens, sung by David Morris
  • "Black Lung", written and sung by Hazel Dickens
  • "Cold Blooded Murder", written and sung by Hazel Dickens
  • "Miners Life", traditional, instrumental performed by David Morris's Band
  • "Which Side Are You On", written and sung by Florence Reece (as Florence Reese), additional lyrics by Joshua Waletzky (as Josh Waletzky)
  • "This Little Light of Mine", written by Harry Dixon Loes (uncredited), sung by Bill Worthington
  • "Coal Tattoo", additional lyrics and sung by David Morris
  • "Trouble Among Yearlings", instrumental by Country Cookin
  • "Lone Prairie", by Roscoe Holcomb and Wade Ward
  • "They Can Never Keep Us Down", written and sung by Hazel Dickens, accompanied by Lamar Grier, John Katarakis, John Otsuka, and Gary Henderson

Awards
Wins

Other distinctions
  • In 1990, the film was selected for the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." [9]
  • In 2014, Sight and Sound published a list of it Greatest Documentaries of All Time, and Harlan County, USA was ranked 24th, tied with two other movies.[10][11]

Preservation

Harlan County, USA was preserved by the Academy Film Archive, in conjunction with New York Women in Film & Television, in 2004.[12]

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See also

References
  1. Pollitt, D. H. (1991, April 17). In: A. McColl. Oral History Interview with Daniel H. Pollitt, April 17, 1991. Interview L-0064-9. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007). Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Library.
  2. Harlan County, USA on IMDb
  3. "Back to Harlan County, USA". The Attic. Retrieved July 25, 2018.
  4. Biskind, peter. Jumpcut: A Review of Contemporary Media, "Harlan County, USA, The miners' struggle", no. 14, 1977, pp. 3-4. Last accessed: February 14, 2011.
  5. Gaydos, Steven (July 24, 2015) "Barbara Kopple Reflects on Joys and Dangers of Filming ‘Harlan County, USA’", Variety.
  6. Ebert, Roger. The Chicago Sun-Times, February 17, 2006. Last accessed: February 14, 2011.
  7. Schwartz, Dennis. Ozus' World Movie Reviews, film review, September 3, 2008. Last accessed: February 14, 2011.
  8. Interview with Jerry Johnson. The Making of Harlan County U.S.A. DVD extra; appears on Harlan County U.S.A. DVD. New York, New York: Criterion Collection, 2006.
  9. "Complete National Film Registry Listing | Film Registry | National Film Preservation Board | Programs at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress". Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. Retrieved April 30, 2020.
  10. Inkoo Kang (May 15, 2016). "Sight and Sound Publishes Top 50 Documentaries List | IndieWire". Blogs.indiewire.com. Retrieved February 28, 2017.
  11. "The Best Documentaries of All Time | Sight & Sound". BFI. January 5, 2017. Retrieved February 28, 2017.
  12. "Preserved Projects". Academy Film Archive.

Further reading
  • Gail Pellet, "The Making of Harlan County, USA: An Interview with Barbara Kopple," Radical America, vol. 11, no. 2 (March–April 1977), pp. 32–42.
  • Tom Hansell, Patricia Beaver and Angela Wiley, "Keep Your Eye upon the Scale," .
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