For her Oscar-winning, directorial debut, Barbara Kopple embedded herself with striking Kentucky coal miners in 1973 and 1974 and came away with one of the landmarks of advocacy filmmaking. She also managed to make a heck of a music documentary.
Coursing throughout Harlan County U.S.A. are both traditional folk songs and newly written ballads directly addressing the situation at hand. Many of these are sung by the doc’s subjects for Kopple’s camera. At one point Florence Reece, who wrote “Which Side Are You On?” in 1931 during a previous labor dispute in Harlan County, appears at a union meeting to sing it once more, despite the fact that, as she says, “I’m old . . . and I can’t sing very well.” But sing she does, with a warbly conviction that can’t be denied. (Throughout the doc, I kept thinking about the way John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley also incorporated the folk music of a 19th-century Welsh mining village.)
Women are often at the forefront of Harlan County U.S.A., despite the fact that none of them work in the mine. The wives of the workers are seen organizing their own meetings and protests, which have their own strife and complications. (When accusations of husband-stealing are thrown about at one point, one of the women says, “I’m not after a man, I’m after a contract—I’m raising two sons!”) Indeed, when hired “gun thugs” start intimidating the picket line, it’s one of the women who brandishes a piece of her own and declares that it’s time to “fight fire with fire.”
Kopple’s camera is drawn to faces, and she finds a treasure trove of them here. From the drawn, coal-blackened visages of the men emerging from the mine to the hardened tobacco lines around the eyes of their wives to the smug mugs of the suits—whether that’s company president Norman Yarborough or union boss W.A. Boyle—this is a portrait of America at its greediest and most haggard.
The time spent on Boyle, who was convicted in 1974 in the murder of his union rival, could have been a documentary of its own; the same could be said of the brief time we spend on an earlier explosion at a different mine. At nearly two hours, Harlan County drifts a bit here or there. But its looseness is also one of its virtues. Immersive rather than explanatory, the doc employs occasional informational subtitles but mostly moves along like a collage. Kopple knows that a brief story from an old-timer—in which he recalls a foreman telling him to be careful with the mules in the mine, because the animal’s life was more valuable to the company than the man’s—gives us all the objective information we really need to understand what the miners are up against. Everything else in Harlan County—the faces, the voices, the music—makes us feel it.
