Word: coal
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BECAUSE I insist on being one thing, it doesn't mean I've to deny being another," declares one of the characters in Saville. But straddling two worlds is not so easy. Between the dark drudgery of the coal pits and the cold, clean life of the middle classes, there can be little dialogue. Colin Saville, bred from the mines to escape their pull, stands between the two worlds mute and placeless; all that remains for him is to rage wordlessly at the circumstances which have set him free...
Such freedom as Colin possesses is merely the badge of his isolation. Coached by his coal-miner father, he has made it past the crucial examinations into grammar school, the English ticket out of the working classes. But the long bus rides, the harsh school regimen, the summers spent working as a farm laborer are only the downpayment on his escape; the price for fulfilling his parents' dream is one that Colin, severed from a past which lingers to haunt him, must keep right on paying...
...acknowledgement of his roots. Colin too suspects that his identity derives from the world he has left behind, and he is constantly looking back, hoping it will overtake him. But when he turns toward Saxton, his home, he finds it empty of meaning, as insensible as the coal to which his father has mortgaged his existence. "It's no good hanging on," Colin finally tells the older woman he deserts, with sudden insight. The alternative, beautifully inevitable in Saville, is to walk fearlessly ahead into a vacant future, armed only with the prayer that life, freed from its bondage...
...expressed an interest in taking a side trip outside London when he came to England for the economic summit. Carter mentioned Wales, the birthplace of his favorite poet Dylan Thomas. But Callaghan, concerned about possible problems with Welsh nationalists, suggested Newcastle-upon-Tyne (pop. 295,700), a grimy coal town that is rife with unemployment as it attempts to shift to cleaner industries. Besides being the home of Washington's ancestors, Newcastle is a stronghold of the Labor Party (although the Conservatives did surprisingly well there in last week's elections...
Harlan County, USA. Barbara Kopple's Oscar-winning documentary of miners and a coal strike in Harlan Country, Kentucky is very worth seeing. Kopple skillfully weaves a pastiche of film clips from the 1930s, when the county was known as "Bloody Harlan," footage of UMWA leaders from John L. Lewis to Tony Boyle, Jock Yablonski, and Arnold Miller, and always the 13-month strike that didn't end until miner Lawrence Jones was murdered by scabs. The music is first-rate--all old union songs, some by local hero David Morris of Ivydale, West Virginia, Kopple's camera is discreet...