THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
even hinted so much as a suspicion she was putting it on. I suspect they didn't dare. In another month the war will have been over for two years. The American people have felt all they are ever...
...In fact, aside from the conceit that they are both documentaries, their differences are at first much more noticeable than their similarities...
...Far from affirming the old values of left-wing militancy and the united front, the film seems to lay them to rest almost...
...The only thing Kopple's film really affirms is the spirit of those Harlan County women...
...Inevitably, the men reflect this...
...THOMAS POWERS WOMEN'S WORK 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN The fundamental likeness between Jeanne Moreau's Lumi~re and Barbara Kopple's Harlan County U.S.A...
...A work of careful research, it recreates a dramatic segment of recent Roman Catholic history, and rescues the pr~atagonist of that drama from the near-oblivion which seemed about to enshroud his memory...
...If you want my husband, she says, take him...
...that they were "both made by women--is not immediately apparent...
...Where Lumi~re is a documentary of the self, Harlan County is a documentary of otherness...
...In Moreau's world the people are beautiful to look at and almost all problems are mental...
...and for another, while Kopple did work on Sandra Hochman's Year of the Women, her experience was acquired predominantly on Winter Soldier and Peter Davis's Hearts and Minds...
...Perhaps because Kopple and most of her crew were women themselves, the women's committee of the strike took them into its confidence more readily than the men seem to have...
...The politics that drew her to Harlan County, in other words, must have been more Leftist than Feminist...
...The American people have felt all they are ever going to feel about this war...
...In these traditional political terms, however, the Brookside strike was a pretty discouraging experience...
...JOHN COURTNEY MURRAY: BELATED HERO PHILIP SCHARPER of the Church into the future as he strove to bring-both its principle and policy into the modern world of religious pluralism and the freedom of the individual either to believe or not believe...
...But it wasn't that at all: it was because they didn't want me to see what they was doing down there...
...And after all this, we hear an old veteran of the mines tell us as he goes back to work in the pre-dawn that he still can't retire because he would starve on his pension...
...I was discussing Moreau's film in my last column, and maintaining that it is, for all its fantasy, a record of Moreau's own life...
...More than any evidence it provides of poverty or injustice in eastern Kentucky, Harlan County turns out to be evidence of the strength that the impulse towards identification, towards "sisterhood," has among women these days...
...In covering the leadership that such a woman provides, Kopple gets shot at herself in one sequence, and her people are knocked down, kicked and beaten in another...
...All this makes the role that the miners play in their own strike seem a rather debilitated one...
...Like ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, the course of this meeting in the Kentucky wilds seems at this moment to embody much recent evolution of the consciousness of women everywhere...
...We realize that this woman has just made a greater leap than any of the miners themselves are likely to be able to make through their strike...
...They were the ones who seem, often, to have sustained the picket lines...
...fewer people are paying attention, and the number will grow smaller...
...The first gun we see a striker brandish in answer to the violence of the company thugs is one a woman pulls out of her cleavage at a meeting of the women's committee...
...The automobile workers who shared those struggles of the thirties are now bored with the benefits they won, while the coal miners are still trying just to win them...
...At one point Kopple is interviewing an old woman who was once made to evacuate her house when a nearby mine exploded...
...Now the time is long past...
...And in this regard Harlan County is, like Lumi#e, an act of self-discovery by a woman, a documentary of the self...
...We may stop paying attention, but I doubt she's ever going to stop remembering...
...She's 45 now...
...That the women at first thought of themselves as auxiliary and peripheral seems likely, for Harlan County makes us feel that they grew a lot during the time Kopple was filming them...
...O ne can only be grateful that this book has appeared...
...With no one, including himself, able to discern it at the time, Murray was earryin,g much PHILIP SCHARPER:, former associate editor o/Commonweal, is editor-in-chie...
...Foreword by Martin Marty Paulist Press, $9.95 thought theology the art of writing glosses upon glosses...
...stretching from John L. Lewis's rhetoric through Tony Boyle's conviction for the Yablonski murders to current ran:and-file disaffection with the reform presidency of Arnold Miller...
...That time the owners broke the strike and beat back the unionization attempt, so here the miners are, forty years later, still trying to win just the right to organize under the U.M.W...
...We cannot help suspecting from Kopp!e's presentation that the men are just repeating once again an endless, futile cycle, and that they tbemselves suspect as much...
...The leaders have to plead with the men to get them to picket...
...In the end, then, Harlan County is perhaps not so far removed from Moreau's Lumi#e as it may at first have seemed...
...Hanging in there with the miners' wives and mothers on the picket lines, Kopple obviously came to feel that she too was a part of t h e strike...
...Doing so now is doubly hard, too...
...The owners only decide to settle when one of their gun thugs actually kills a striker...
...It is ambiguously a dream had by someone asleep and a memory of actual events, and in so far as it is the latter, it is a documentary as much as a fiction film...
...All she cares about now is overcoming for her kids the misery and oppression of their lite...
...Or perhaps it was just that the women originally felt their actions were less significant than the men's...
...For the men, working and striking alike are filled with such danger and worry that both seem only a dispiriting drudgery...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...But then suddenly one of the women not involved jumps in with the declaration that none of those things matters...
...Murray was "vindicated," and became the principal 4 March 1977:130...
...We certainly feel that the reason Kopple became so directly involved in the strike, instead of just documenting it, was the identification she had with these Harlan County women...
...If she quits smoking she may live another 35 or 40 years...
...of Orbis Books...
...And like that general history, the story of the Brookside strike is one of obduracy, implacability, hardship and violence--of gains so late, so small, so dearly won and so easily betrayed that they hardly make any difference...
...The sequences where the gun thugs challenge her and her crew are interspliced with those where the thugs confront the strikers themselves as if it were really all the same...
...The context which the film provides for the Brookside strike is a newsreel history of the U.M.W...
...But those who think Emerson will forget and "get over" the war, as if it were a seasonal flu, are wrong...
...The only consolation or hope to be taken from what we see in the film comes from what we see of them...
...and therefore, thinking they had less to hide, they were less self-conscious, more open, with Kopple...
...They said it was because the house was in danger I had to leave," she sneers...
...Yet even when conceded to be a documentary, Morean's film seems obviously different from Kopple's---dialectically different, to put it in appropriate Marxist terms...
...As she reaches this conclusion the words crowd Commonweal 149 quicker and quicker into her throat and the breath between them becomes ever more compressed, until we see that the explosion in the mine was nothing compared to the explosion of insight and realization that has been building in her over the years...
...At least in the thirties you could feel you were part of a national effort going on in other vital industries----that the time was right...
...Where the people in Lumi~re are rich, famous and chic, those in Harlan County are poor, isolated and oppressed...
...Although Kopple's film does concentrate on the women of Harlan County, I doubt that it was her intention to do so when she first went there to cover an organizing strike at the Brookside Mine in 1973...
...2010 she'll still be dreaming about Luong and the things that happened in Vietnam...
...In Harlan County they've been through all this before, back in the 1930s...
...After that there will be only the books...
...The drama, as we can now see, was far larger than the struggle of John Courtney Murray against his theological opponents, who seemed determined that the Church in the United States would remain forever an ideological suburb of Vatican City...
...For one thing, a coal-mine strike would seem to be an affair among men...
...He conducted for a decade a highlevel debate with adversaries who John Courtney Murray: Theologian in Conflict DONALD E. PELOTTE, S.S,S...
...Otherdirected though Kopple's film is, I .think she clearly finds in the women she filmed an ideal for herself...
...Kopple's is a documentary film too, and solely a documentary, about a coal-mine strike in Kentucky...
...This is natural and right...
...In A.D...
...At one of the meetings of the women's committee, for instance, a procedural disagreement degenerates into name-calling, accusations of loose morals, man-stealing, etc...
...For a time they prevailed, Murray was silenced...
...Like the place in which they work, the whole realm of possibility in which these men live is dim, stifling and relentlessly grinding...
...All the women in Kopple's film give this impressionmthe impression of a subterranean rage bursting forth at last...
...It's a world whose inhabitants are governed in the most fundamental way by the laws of matter...
...But then, with one of those unpredictable turns which both delight and dismay historians, John XXIll convoked the Second Vatican Council...
...The argument is narrow now...
...But the role that the women of Harlan County play is something else again...
...In the world of Harlan County, from bad teeth to gunshot wounds, almost all the problems are rock-bottom physical...
Vol. 104 • March 1977 • No. 5
