Barbara Kopple stood on a Kentucky picket line for a year and came back with the documentary every strike film since is measured against. It picks a side in its first minutes and never asks a hard question of its friends.
Barbara Kopple went to Harlan County, Kentucky, with a small crew and stayed through the year the strike lasted. The miners at the Brookside mine had voted to join the United Mine Workers, and the mine’s owner, Eastover Mining, would not sign the union’s contract, so the men went out. Kopple filmed from the picket line, at dawn, in the rain, and she does not pretend to have been anywhere else. This is the strike film other strike films are measured against, and it has earned that. Its one real weakness is that it trusts its own side as completely as it distrusts the other.
Kevin Keating and Hart Perry shoot most of the film on a stretch of road. Every morning the company brings its replacement workers in by car, escorted by armed men, and every morning the strikers and their wives stand in the way. Basil Collins, the mine foreman, walks the line with a pistol on his hip and a look of mild irritation. Then there is the dawn when the shooting starts. The camera is jolted, the image swings to the ground and the voices rise, and we were frightened, properly, the way a real gun frightens and a film one does not, because whoever was holding the camera plainly had no idea what would happen next.
The women carry the film. Lois Scott, Sudie Crusenberry, Bessie Lou Cornett Parker and Mary Lou Fergerson take over the picket, lie down in the road in front of the cars and go to jail for it. Kopple sits in their kitchens and their meetings and lets them argue with each other about who has done enough, and the arguments are as sharp as anything on the road. Nobody in these scenes is performing for the camera; they have too much to do.
The music is the film’s other spine. Hazel Dickens sings unaccompanied over footage of men going down the shaft and old miners struggling to breathe, and her voice is high, hard and unlovely in exactly the right way. Merle Travis’s songs about the pits fill in around her. At a rally, Florence Reece, an old woman by now, stands up and sings Which Side Are You On?, and the hall sings it back to her. It moved us more than we expected a song to. Nothing about the moment is arranged; the hall knew the words before she stood up.
Mirra Bank, Nancy Baker, Mary Lampson and Lora Hays cut the material with a rising line, so that the year plays like a plotted feature: provocation, retreat, worse provocation. Title cards give the numbers on wages and profits, and they land where a fiction film would put its reversals. The company is not silenced. Norman Yarborough, president of Eastover, is interviewed at length and given every chance to make his case, and he makes it calmly. He comes off worse for the calm, which is what the film intends.
What it will not do is question its friends. Houston Elmore and Phil Sparks, the union’s men on the ground, are filmed with the same warmth as the strikers, and the union’s national politics, which the film leaves the county to follow for a stretch in the middle, are treated as a matter of good men against bad. That detour is where the 104 minutes sag; the film is weaker every minute it is away from Harlan. Near the end it also starts to explain what we have just watched, in speeches, when the pictures had already done the job. It has been accused of borrowing its shape from Hollywood. It has, a little. It also happened, and the camera was there.
Half a century on, the cars still come up that road every morning, and the film has not aged a day in what it shows. Watch it with the sound up. Dickens’s voice is half the case, and it does not survive being turned down.
