Kopple: Harlan County, USA (1976)

When Barbara Kopple started filming what would eventually become Harlan County, USA, the 1972 Brookside Miners’ Strike hadn’t even begun. Instead, she was intending to make a documentary about Tony Boyle, the corrupt leader of the United Mine Workers of America Union. Once the strike started, however, she shifted her focus, and lived among the strikers and their families for several years, painting their grievances with the Duke Power-owned Brookside Mine with an extraordinary, breathless sense of urgency and immediacy. Of course, it was artfully edited after the fact, structured for maximum impact and interpolated with interviews and found footage, but the main thrust is still that of someone participating in history as it happened. And as artful as Kopple’s organisation of her material might be, she is first and foremost a participant – like most strikers, her most radical gesture was simply remaining where she was, staying put, as the strike evolved into something more like a frontal class war. As a result, Kopple doesn’t insists on her presence – we only hear her voice a couple of times and hardly see her – but not does she deny it either. Instead, she uses her camera in the same way the other strikers use the tools and devices they have to hand – as a way of keeping the strike alive, and a way of anchoring herself to it. Not only were unused segments of the film distributed to educate and mobilise local workers, but it’s clear that the presence of Kopple’s camera was often the only thing preventing Duke Power and their hired mercenaries from devolving into full-scale military assault. Perhaps that’s why it often feels as if the strikers are addressing each other and the crowd through Kopple’s camera – they tend to look at it obliquely, as if it were a reflective surface, a convex mirror capable of shaping them into a single unity. At those moments, it feels every bit as momentous as Eisenstein’s Strike – there’s the same liquid sense of unified purpose, the same, sudden awareness of speaking in a common language, as Kopple overlays everything with a rich Appalachian strain of protest song. And, like the best protest songs, it’s too aware of history to feel historical, as Kopple works to keep history open, puts history back in the hands of the audience, electrifying and agitating at every turn.