Harlan County, U.S.A.

1976's HARLAN COUNTY, U.S.A., is a deeply involving, justifiably celebrated documentary of great urgency and power.  One that is as human as any such endeavor.  It will seem unique to contemporary viewers as it does not employ the standard "talking head" style or voiceover.  Director Barbara Kopple and her crew went to live in the titular southwest Kentucky county to cover the attempt to usurp United Mine Workers president Tony Boyle, who would later be convicted of organizing the murders of union rep. Joseph Yablonski and his family. In 1973, the Brookside Mine and its surrounding towns became the site of a massive strike that involved nearly two hundred miners and lasted for over a year, and the real subject of Kopple's film.

Folks are interviewed, but not in that contrived contemporary style, where one breaks the fourth wall and offers vacuous takes on others' behavior.  We get a strong cinema verite style, as the workers and especially their wives take up the cause, rallying the weary troops, collecting donations for the out-of-work.  Meetings in living rooms and town halls.  Forming picket lines, hissing at the scabs who drive through, escorted by hired thugs who do not hesitate to use their weapons against the local workers, many of whom were dirt poor, without even running water in their homes.  Basil Collins was a footman for the Duke Power Company, and is caught on film firing his revolver at the picketers.

HARLAN COUNTY, U.S.A. does occasionally display printed explanations of the past, present, and post-documentary events involving the strike, a desperate plea for better wages and working conditions, the latter near impossible in the caverns of a dark, hellish labyrinth where "black lung" is about guaranteed.  I feel that this method is more effective, as narration might serve to bias, though there is no mistaking the bent here.  Kopple is an advocate for the working man, and her film, in all its grime and unpleasantness, is a record of the good fight.  The corporate guys expectedly come off as cold, or at least clueless.

At one point, some of the miners picket in front of the Stock Exchange in NYC, to bring the fight against Duke Power to a more visible venue.  One of them has a chat with an NYPD cop, who can't believe how dismal the wages and benefits are for these poor men to the South.

One can always nitpick such a partisan bit of cinema.  Editing can do wonders for your thesis.  But the terrible events in Harlan County, by many accounts, would've been much worse if Kopple and company had not been there.  Their presence tempered the violence, and was instrumental in the ultimate victorious outcome for the Eastover miners.  Sometimes documentaries incite the social change/justice they trumpet, note also Errol Morris' THE THIN BLUE LINE.

The struggle was and remains real, no matter how one feels about coal mining and its ultimate effects on the environment, which of course would be another potential impassioned documentary.

P.S. - Folk music is used throughout the film and, with its vivid storytelling in the lyrics, serves as a narration of its own.