HARLAN COUNTY USA

(1976) Director: Barbara Kopple

NETFLIX
DVD

SUMMARY:

This film documents the coal miners' strike against the Brookside Mine of the Eastover Mining Company in Harlan County, Kentucky in June, 1973. Eastovers refusal to sign a contract (when the miners joined with the United Mine Workers of America) led to the strike, which lasted more than a year and included violent battles between gun-toting company thugs/scabs and the picketing miners and their supportive women-folk. Director Barbara Kopple puts the strike into perspective by giving us some background on the historical plight of the miners and some history of the UMWA.

VIDEO: TRAILER



REVIEWS, INTERVIEWS, CREDITS:

Roger Ebert review
AV Club review
Video interview with director Barbara Kopple

NOTES:

• Other Barbara Kopple credits: American Dream (Director), Shut Up & Sing (Director), Winter Soldier (Producer), Gimme Shelter (Production Assistant)
• When filming began, the film was intended to be about the 1972 campaign by Arnold Miller and Miners For Democracy to unseat UMWA president Tony Boyle, in the aftermath of Joseph Yablonski's murder; but the Harlan County strike began and caused the filmmakers to change their principal subject, with the campaign and murder becoming secondary subjects. (From Rogerebert.com)
• 1977 winner Best Documentary Academy Award
• 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. "I found out later that they planned to kill us that day," Kopple said later, in a discussion I chaired at the Filmmakers' Lodge. "They wanted to knock us out because they didn't want a record of what was happening." But her cinematographer, Hart Perry, got an unforgettable shot of an armed company employee driving past in his pickup, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. (From Rogerebert.com)
  
• "I accept any and all kinds of documentaries," she said. " 'Harlan County' came out of the tradition of Albert Maysles and Leacock and Pennebaker, documentarians who went somewhere and stayed there and watched and listened and made a record of what happened. That is one approach. There are others, just as valid. All that matters is making a good film." (From Rogerebert.com)