Word: harlan
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Coal mining is tough, dirty, two-fisted business--the most hazardous blue-collar job in the world. The heat that comes out of Boston's radiators and the light that comes from Boston's lamps is the direct product of the sweat of people in Harlan County, Kentucky, or somewhere else in the coalfields that stretch from south Pennsylvania and West Virginia to Alabama and west to Illinois. Once every three days, a man dies in the mines for someone else's heat and light, for someone else's steel...
...Harlan County, USA, Barbara Kopple has produced a brilliant documentary about the people of the coalfields. The USA in the title is significant--to citizens of the Northeast, these hill people are as alien as citizens of the moon. Yet Kopple, a native New Yorker, has captured them and the life they lead with touching accuracy. Perhaps her job was made easier by the fact that people who work hard and suffer long have a shy, easy grace in front of a camera. But it's a painfully easy grace--born and nourished in suffering. Kopple takes us inside their...
...film opens with miners hopping onto a conveyor belt and riding into Harlan's Brookside mine. In the background Merle Travis howls--"Come all you young fellers, so young and so fine, seek not your fortunes way down in the mines." Kopple cuts abruptly to Nimrod Workman, a retired miner. Workman sits on his porch and tells about going into the mines at ten, working 18 and 20 hours a day. Once a supervisor told him not to take his mule into a dangerous part of the mine. "But what about me?" Workman asked. "We can always a hire another...
...miners at Brookside and Eastover went on strike over Eastover Mining's refusal to accept their vote to join the UNWA. Eastover Mining is a subsidiary of Duke Power, one of the largest utilities in the country, and fewer than ten per cent of its workers are union members. Harlan mines are among the most unsafe in the world--in 1970, one day before the first anniversary of the passage of the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, 38 miners died in an explosion at a nonunion mine at Hurricane Creek, only a half-hour away. The miners were...
Kopple began to make her film about the Miners for Democracy, the UMWA reform factiion that sprang up after the murder of Jock Yablonski in 1969. Instead, she found herself focusing on Harlan County and the test fight the union was waging there against Duke Power. She moved among the miners, lived with them, eventually got herself beaten up with them. But all the time her camera was rolling, and Kopple has captured incredible scenes on film. Here is Basil...