"HARLAN COUNTY, U.S.A."

...Howe argues— implicitly and explicitly—that Harlan County must be viewed as a "documentary laying claim to the disciplines of reportage...

...but we aren't given specific information as to the terms proposed or the terms desired...

...The camera hones in on 307 one boy, his nose so blackened that it obscures the rest of his features...

...I think he is judging Harlan County with only partially adequate standards...

...There is something almost fragile about the way the men look...

...That's what a scab does to a person when they're not working . . . . shot in the goddamn head...

...The noise is deafening...

...E.g.: ( I ) A flashback to John L. Lewis speaking...

...It's a stirring film, and some parts are splendid, especially those that show the workers and their wives talking among themselves about the strike...

...I think, however, that in the final analysis what this failure points up is not that Kopple chose to avoid "the pressures of historical complexity" but that she chose to accept the confines of "new journalistic" documentary...

...What might have been a solid, but limited, documentary became instead Harlan County, U.S.A., a portrayal of the Brookside miners that records not only the details of their strike but, like the best of the new journalism, captures the viewpoint of the participants themselves...

...But the short film clip we get of Lewis is there to show that the old strike issues are the new strike issues in Harlan County...

...But the noise drowns out his words...

...Rather she emphasizes what most concerns them—union recognition and a hated no-strike clause...

...A ruddy-faced former miner is talking about his life as a breaker boy...

...His lips are moving...

...They have the glazed, unfocused look that in this century we have come to associate with the concentration camp...

...But not so with Lois Scott...

...This is the opening of Harlan County, and it sets the tone for the entire movie...

...Without recourse to glibness or melodrama, Barbara Kopple has made us see Harlan County in such a light...

...The Brookside strike, in which safety standards, medical insurance, the right to a union are at issue, is not a 1970s strike...

...raises as a film: by what standards are we to judge it...

...But only toward the end of the film, when we see a long line of old cars heading toward the mine, do we realize that these "scabs" are not imported strikebreakers but local workers who refused to join the strike...

...It is the need for resourcefulness that she wants to demonstrate, and she succeeds...

...The result is a movie that holds our attention the way James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men does—by its ability to slow our gaze, to make us forget about narrative line and turn instead to scenes that focus on a single subject—or less than that, a face, an object, the sound of a voice...

...0 I largely agree with Nick Mills...

...If so, which...

...But there are also, I think, some serious evasions and failures, mostly having to do with the director's ideological preconceptions...

...It is the 1930s all over...

...Victory • The camera closes in on the Brookside changing room...

...Then the camera closes in on Lois Scott...

...Then we jump to the present...

...Fifteen cents more an hour, 50 cents, $5...

...But Kopple's real point here is that the value of a contract to the Eastover miners lies primarily in the sense of control they believe it gives them over their lives...

...There is an explosion...

...2) There is much talk among the workers about the need for a contract—it's very impressive...

...An explanation of Lewis's past at this point would be distracting...

...We hear a warning cry...

...True, Harlan County is reportage in that it tells of real people and actual events...

...The women have a warrant for the arrest of Basil Collins (an Eastover foreman accused of threatening one of the strikers with a gun), and Lois Scott insists that the sheriff serve the warrant now...

...A stalled car sits in the middle of the road...

...We never learn who is speaking, but what we are being show is part of the brain of Lawrence Jones, a young striker with a child and sixteen-year-old wife, who has been murdered in a shotgun ambush...

...Might not the film have been richer in moral content if Lewis had been shown for what in fact he was: a great union leader and a vicious enemy of union democracy...

...She will not minimize the dangers of the strike...

...But there is no doubt that Kopple short-circuits this subject...

...We know that the mine can never be a "good" place to work, that to descend day after day into this nether world cannot fail to take its toll, and that the sight of men riding (belly down) on the same belt that brings the coal out of the ground is but final proof of how they and their labor have become objectified...

...At the end of the film no such interpretation is possible, however, even though we know that the publicity from Lawrence Jones's death is what finally moved Eastover to sign a contract...

...We never see this scene come to its final end—with the Brookside workers driving off...

...When, immediately following this opening sequence, Nimrod Workman, a retired miner, tells the story of how in the old days his foreman worried more about the company's animals than its workers — "You can always hire another man...

...Work The screen is dark...

...They are too pale, too soft...

...In her film she is not oblivious to the details of the local or national agreements the Eastover workers sign...

...The gun might just as easily be a precious broach, shown to special friends from time to time but in general kept out of sight...

...More darkness...

...Now the men are concerned with the ratification of a national UMW contract, and we hear them talking tough, voicing their dissatisfaction over the no-strike agreement Arnold Miller wants them to make...

...The defiance of the men would have appeared incongruous, too much at odds with their bodies...

...This time of a machine grinding into a coal seam...

...and I suspect that viewers without much labor experience might never guess it...

...This time the Brookside workers are determined not to be dispersed, except on their own terms...

...Are we to suppose the miners themselves are indifferent to the terms of the contract for which they're fighting...

...At this juncture we are not fooled by the sign someone has pasted next to a mine elevator, "BE CAREFUL, BUDDY...

...But complexity is something Kopple isn't always at ease with...

...Kopple has deprived us of essential information—that the strike never managed to gain the support of all the workers involved...

...Now she reaches into the bosom of her dress and pulls out a pistol...

...Harlan County's reportorial roots lie in the new journalism, which deals with fact but uses the tools of fiction (the language and point of view of the participants in an event, for example) to get at a felt truth...

...It pans the countryside for an instant, and we see the men come out of the mine—some on hauling machines, others on the conveyor belt for bringing up coal...

...We learn later that nothing happens to Collins (whom Kopple has photographed drawing his gun and driving through a picket line), but as this scene makes clear, Collins, as terrible as he is, is not the real issue...

...Given her pro-striker perspective, she could never have adequately shown the other side, and what she did in the end was stick to the medium she started out with, telling one story well rather than two stories inadequately...

...There is no room for them to stand, and as the camera closes in, we see that, in addition to all else, it is hot...

...In the process she has, to be sure, evaded certain problems (we never, for example, learn much about those who go to work for Eastover, although their roots are the same as those of the people on strike), but her evasions are minimal...

...Were we to read of such a gesture, it would seem ridiculous or else filled with such excruciating selfmockery that we could only take it as a sign of despair...

...Union Meeting • At the meeting all the talk centers on one fact— the men working for the company have guns and every time there is a confrontation, the guns come out...

...Then men working on their hands and knees...

...An enormous woman in size and spirit, she has a tendency to dominate any scene in which she appears...

...But it is not reportage in the traditional journalistic sense of giving both sides of a story in terms of an objective perspective...

...Finally the camera pulls away...

...What is at stake in these early-morning confrontations is the capacity of the Brookside workers to stand together...

...In Harlan County the story Barbara Kopple wants to tell is principally that of those who went out on strike against the Eastover Mining Company, and when we see her film in these terms, the omissions Howe speaks of are far less damaging than he contends...

...Harlan County, U. S. A, though a moving and at some points very impressive film, doesn't yield enough...

...It is a Brookside picket line...

...And one by one the men step on a conveyor belt and are carried into the mine...

...And it disappears from sight with no bulge, no apparent discomfort to her...

...A reaction to weeks of being shot at and beaten up...

...He tells of a strike in which the issue was a 61/2 cent wage and how the company gave in when everyone out on strike stayed together...

...We know that behind it there lies a tested and comprehending fury...

...Howe's final point—that Kopple presents an inadequate picture of those who break the strike— is, as I indicated in my review, telling...

...Kopple seems so enraptured by the vision of working-class action, she lets herself be oddly indifferent to the realities of working-class need...

...Picket Line • It begins with a long profile shot of men standing behind a car, pistols drawn...

...But at no point, as I recall, does anyone tell us, what do they want in the contract...

...That a portion of the workers refused to join the strike doesn't make it any the less valid—only more complex...

...Toward the end the film offers sympathy to those people in the UMW who want to reject a new national contract negotiated by the Miller leadership...

...Kopple has, to use James Agee's words, caught the cruel radiance of what is, without dissection into science or digestion into art...

...It is both the most graphic and the most abstract scene in Harlan County...

...You got to buy the mule...

...He's a great speaker, his words about the need for labor organization are moving, he comes out a hero...

...Another cry, "All clear...

...She shows it around, then daintily puts it back...

...It is three months after Lawrence Jones's death and the signing of a contract with Eastover...

...And here is the source of our disagreement...

...He is hesitant to do what she asks, but slowly, reluctantly he yields...

...But the more a work of art (and especially a documentary laying claim to the disciplines of reportage) yields to the pressures of historical complexity, the better it is likely to be as a work of art...

...Their heaviness—the looseness of men whose work makes other exercise impossible, whose diet relies principally on starches—seems overwhelming...

...Later in the film Tony Boyle, Lewis's successor as head of the United Mine Workers, is shown to be the autocrat and crook everyone by now knows him to have been...

...the strikers find it hard to develop a strategy for coping with the scabs...

...They don't have to win each confrontation...

...There is no irony in his voice when he talks about the paltriness of the wage in dispute...

...The camera pans up the road, and, as far as the eye can see, cars are lined up bumper to bumper...

...It is loaded, she says, and for use against anyone who threatens her...

...Sweat is pouring down the cheeks of a young miner...

...It is not the Maysles brothers, who gave her her start, to whom she must be compared, but Robert Flaherty...

...Better working conditions...

...if so, it suggests they still have a lot to learn about the workers they admire...

...His story doesn't sound like ancient history...

...She is buoyed by her size, and she starts to laugh even before she reaches for her pistol...

...Indeed, had we been shown this scene at the start of Harlan County, it would have seemed undermining...

...All art, I'll be told, is selective, limited in viewpoint, and other such profundities...

...The same logic holds for the details of the contracts the Eastover miners sign...

...In the case of John L. Lewis it would, for example, be good if he were put in proper perspective...

...We hear the click of their guns as they simultaneously pull back the hammers on them...

...Lois Scott confronts the sheriff with more defiance than ever...

...There is nothing self-hating about her gesture...

...Why this reticence...

...Their job is to make sure only the right size coal (no slag or rocks) comes out of the mine, and they look as though they have been burrowing into the coal itself...

...q I rving Howe's comments go to the central issue that Harlan County, U.S.A...

...We are told more about them than Howe indicates (in a scene that occurs on Wall Street and in a discussion the workers have among themselves while voting on the national UMW contract...

...All they need to prove is that they won't yield to the pressure that's being put on them...

...But not a single phrase in the film makes clear that Boyle was Lewis's creature or that Boyle's dictatorship in the union merely continued Lewis's dictatorship...

...It is impossible for those in the room not to laugh with her, not to join her on the picket line...

...Because Barbara Kopple doesn't know this or because she's committed to a simple good guys/bad guys approach...

...Another close up...

...There is a new vitality in their voices, and it contrasts sharply with the naked bodies we see...

...We never get a clear statement about this, we have to guess it ourselves...

...Only the boys' darkened faces (like minstrels who ran out of makeup) and their too-white eyes make clear what their real job is...

...Her point is simply that the fear of being shot can be dealt with if the Brookside miners will rely on their capacity to improvise...

...History • The camera closes in on a group of boys, lined up like school children posing for their class picture...

...What we see on the ground has no recognizable form or shape, and yet this piece of flesh is more haunting than the picture we get of Lawrence Jones in his coffin, more haunting even than the scenes from the murdered Jock Yablonski's funeral...

...She stayed and recorded the 13-month-long struggle (from July 1973 to August 1974) of the Brookside mine workers to win a contract from the Eastover Mining Company, a subsidiary of Duke Power...

...No doubt...

...q 310...

...Such "details" may seem uninteresting or undramatic to young people who emerged out of the radical student milieu of the late '60s...

...A "documentary" claims to be presenting historical reality, but out of a desire to make a dramatically neat film or to fulfill, a romanticized vision of proletarian heroism, Kopple twists and suppresses portions of reality...

...We see a man talking on the phone...

...Murder • It is night, and the camera zooms in on a shapeless white object that glistens in the dark...

...309 (3) Perhaps the most serious flaw in the film is mentioned by Mills...

...But these boys are not school children They are the "Breaker Boys" from a 1911 Lewis Hine photograph...

...Fortunately, Kopple didn't remain true to her original purpose...

...It is the ability of the men to organize that he feels was—is—important, and as Kopple's narrative moves back into the past again and again (we see newsreels of John L. Lewis, of federal troops routing strikers), it becomes clear that what makes "Bloody Harlan" such a code word for everyone in the film is that the past has not really gone away...

...If any comment is appropriate, it is the closing lines from Zola's Germinal, where he writes of the Montsou miners on their way to work after a strike, "Men were springing up, a black avenging host was slowly germinating in the furrows, thrusting upward for the harvests of future ages...

...It is their sense of history, the willed encouragement they give one another that accounts for their capacity to fight back...

...It is the line of stalled cars that tells the real story, that and the sound of the women singing, "We Shall Not Be Moved...

...When a miner later says, "A contract is what we're fighting for," we now know enough to hear him the way his fellow workers do—as a man 308 saying much more, talking in fact about freedom from terror and brutalization...

...Nor, for that matter, is the film as a medium...

...Nor is it logical that we should...

...Kopple has brought us to the point where we realize the strength of the Brookside workers does not depend on the tangible...

...The strike is long and the company stubborn...

...Here, I again believe that she does better than Howe indicates, showing at a relatively early point in the film those who broke the strike sitting around a local gas station discussing the "Communists" in the UMW...

...It goes to the essence of what we have just seen...