Word: miners
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...easy grace in front of a camera. But it's a painfully easy grace--born and nourished in suffering. Kopple takes us inside their lives and, in moving sequences at the funerals of Joseph P. Yablonski, murdered reformer within the United Mine Workers, and Lawrence Jones, a miner assassinated in Harlan during a 13-month strike, inside their deaths. Kopple's camera moves with that smae painfully easy grace, darting around a landscape that always seems dark green, gray-blue, or black...
...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...
...finally takes a killing to end it. Lawrence Jones, a striking miner, is shot in the back of the head one night, and, ironically, the outside pressure brought to bear from the incident forces Duke to negotiate. The scene causes anger to rise cold in your throat--it's strangely impersonal, yet moving. A flashlight shines on some muck on the ground, and a miner's dirty hand stirs through it. "Know what that is?" the voice asks. "Them;s brains. Shit. That's the way with a dirty scab. Shoot you when you're not even looking. Shit." Kopple...
...human expression." Not a word from Terkel, wondering whether those systems are not perhaps products of human expression. On the evidence of Talking to Myself, Terkel has rarely sought out people who actually run things. An indefatigable romantic, he prefers the "mute, inglorious Miltons" among the underdogs: the Welsh miner with a taste for the impressionists, the Cockney waitress with a Bruegel print on her wall, the Swedish miner who quotes Gibbon. Terkel is moved by what he takes to be the oppression of such people. As he presents them, though, they seem to be doing very nicely indeed...