Word: miners
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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...
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...