Kopple, who has since worked in both fictional feature filmmaking and television directing, is an accomplished documentarian, but her greatest gift may be her sense of subject matter. She was originally drawn to the topic of coal mining and unions in 1972 when Jock Yablonski was challenging W.A. “Tony” Boyle, the corrupt president of the United Mine Workers (U.M.W.), for control of the union. Yablonski was subsequently murdered along with his wife and daughter, and Boyle was later convicted of ordering their deaths. This is a compelling story if ever there were one, replete with corruption, power struggles, and murder.

Yet, Kopple found her real subject when, in 1973, the coal miners in Brookside, Harlan County, located in the rural hills of eastern Kentucky, went on strike to protest the refusal of their employer, Eastover Mining, a subsidiary of the utilities giant Duke Power, to sign a U.M.W. contract. Harlan and a few camera and sound operators traveled to Harlan County and wound up spending 13 months there documenting the increasing fractious strike. In the process, they became part of the event as they gained the trust of the striking workers and their families, who gave them complete access to what was happening both on the picket lines and in the organizational meetings behind closed doors. What emerges from the hundreds of hours of footage shot (brilliantly edited together for maximum effect by Nancy Baker) is a compelling narrative about the age-old struggle between the powerful and the powerless.

Harlan Country, U.S.A. is not, in any sense of the term, a “fair and balanced” portrayal. Kopple openly dismisses cinema-vérité’s insistence on studied distance between the filmmaker and her subject and instead uses her intimacy with the people to generate sympathy and understanding, but never condescension. Hollywood filmmakers inherently tend to look down on the poor and disenfranchised, even when they’re ostensibly in their corner; the poor are made into mock caricatures or sad-sack empty vessels meant to be filled with the audience’s piety.

The primary strength of Harlan County, U.S.A. is that it never presents its subjects as anything other than what they are. Their poverty is a defining characteristic, and Kopple neither soft-shoes around it or exploits it. Rather, she allows the fabric of their lived existence, which includes ramshackle houses without running water and a lack of health care that results in everything from black-lung disease to rotted teeth, to stand as testament to the necessity of their rebellion. However, the film doesn’t paint an easy Norman Rockwell portrait of folksy togetherness, either. Rather, we see disintegration within the strike organizers, as some of the workers stop coming to the picket line and one meeting of the women’s club devolves from organizational discussion to accusations of husband stealing. The miners and their families are human beings, and as such they are flawed like the rest of us.

It’s not surprising that Kopple can’t help but take some potshots at the hypocrisy of those in power, both at the utilities corporation and the union itself. Kopple films the corporate executives in tight, uncomfortable close-ups that make their platitudes seem even more self-serving and hypocritical. They use editing to juxtapose what people say with the conflicting realities of the situation. Sometimes, however, they don’t even need to intercede with editing. For example, just listening to the president of Eastover Mining describe the miners as “our people” sends chills up your spine when you realize that his attempt to be inclusive and folksy is actually an inadvertent revelation of how the company views the workers: as its property to do with what it sees fit.

The film is filled with intriguing and memorable characters, most of whom we grow to admire as the film progresses. Chief among these is Lois Scott, a relentless organizer who refuses to be cowed or threatened. Within the film’s constructed narrative, she is the strike’s guiding force and primary source of energy; the worse things get, the more fierce becomes her conviction, even though she is not even from Harlan County (her husband is a coal miner in a neighboring county, thus she feels connected to the strikers). Lois Scott is a documentarian’s dream subject--a person of such force and vitality that little or no effort is required to make her memorable.

The same could be said for Basil Collins, Lois Scott’s nemesis. Collins is a hulking, scowling beast of a man whose primary occupation is breaking up picket lines to allow the “scabs” to get through so the mine can continue operating. Unlike the film’s other subject, Collins does not appear in any talking-head interviews, although there is one tense moment when he calls Kopple and her cameraman over to her truck and engages her briefly, asking where her press credentials are. He smiles and drives off, but underneath it all we can sense a coiled animal just waiting to strike, which we see briefly, but horrifyingly in a slow-motion shot early in the morning when he drives by the line, his face a mask of anger matched in threat only by the barrel of his drawn gun. Aesthetically, Kopple makes Collins seem even more monstrous by filming him in long shot, as if the cameraman is literally afraid to get near him (which he probably was, considering the fact that the camera crew is physically assaulted at one point during the film by Collins’s scabs).

As a whole, Harlan County, U.S.A. is a powerful indictment of the damage that can be caused by capitalism left it its own ruthless devices. Yet, while that may sound like leftist, liberal pap, the film never once feels in any way sentimental or soft. If anything, its gritty depiction of the realities of rural coal miners overshadows any preconceived political agenda. The bluegrass music that dominates the soundtrack, much of which was borne directly out of coal-mining culture, reminds us that the hardships, frustrations, and pride inherent to the culture depicted has long, deep roots. Black-and-white footage of violent strikes in the 1930s that earned Harlan County the name “Bloody Harlan” make it clear that what was happening in 1973 was just another reincarnation of a long struggle, one that the end of the film makes clear is still being waged.

Copyright ©2006 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © The Criterion Collection