Coal miners are a permanent underground in more than the literal sense. They trouble any society they support: like feet, the more they are weighed down by their owners the more pain they give.
In East Germany and Poland the authorities treat them with a special deference. Even in its harsher times the Franco regime was never able to stop them from striking. Laws against assembly were useless. A hammer would stop a mile below ground; the man in the next chamber would go to see what the matter was; the silence would spread and a line of stubborn, blackened men came to the surface and stayed until the Government could figure out some way of getting them back down.
Miners' strength, their assertiveness and solidarity are based largely on their economic power; and where coal-mining becomes marginal to the economy of a region, they lose much of their ability to fight. There is another factor, though. Miners in their tunnels, vulnerable to explosions, cave-ins and destroyed lungs, weigh on a society's conscience as well as its economy. Their grievances command an instinctive respect.
One of the reasons for the defeat of Prime Minister Edward Heath in Britain two years ago was a widespread feeling that in choosing the miners as the target for his austerity fight he had picked just the wrong target.
"Harlan County, U.S.A.," to be shown tonight and tomorrow at the New York Film Festival in Alice Tully Hall, is a full-length documentary of the year-long strike carried on by the miners at the Brookside works in eastern Kentucky. It has flaws, some of them considerable, but it is a fascinating and moving work. Its strength lies chiefly in its ability to illuminate the peculiar frightfulness and valor of coal-mining, and made it clear just why coal-miners can never be rightly treated as a less than a very special case.
Barbara Kopple and her photographers have got right inside the life of the miners and their families in their long struggle against the operators of the Brookside mine and its parent company, the Duke Power Company. It is a brilliantly detailed report from one side of a battle that caused one death, several shootings and a flood of violent bitterness; and that brought back to Harlan County memories of the much-bloodier coal strikes of the early 1930's.
The strike began after the miners voted to join the United Mine Workers of America—which had lost its hold in eastern Kentucky—and the owners refused to sign a standard U.M.W. contract. It was not until more than a yaer later—after the violence had claimed the life of one striker — that Duke Power, under strong pressure from Federal mediators, agreed to sign.
The film shows the picketing, the use of state troopers to keep the road open for nonstrikers, the confrontations, a shooting, the efforts of the strikers and their families to remain organized and united through the long year. It intercuts old footage from the 1931 strike, where five miners were killed. It also details the successful battle of reformers to oust the old national leadership of the U.M.W.; and the support given to the Harlen County strike by the new leadership under Arnold R. Miller.
Some of the thematic interweaving is awkward, but this is more than made up for by the extraordinary intimacy Miss Kopple has achieved with the strikers and with the bitter life of the strike. There is an old miner, lungs torn by coal dust, who makes our chests hurt as he talks. There are frightening scenes of tight-lipped strike-breakers, guns openly displayed rushing through the pickets. There is a terrifying night scene where shots are fired and we see the leader of the strike-breakers brandishing a pistol in the cab of his pick-up truck. There is a heartbreaking scene where the mother of the slain miner collapses at his wake. There is much more, equally good.
The film is entirely partisan. Considering that the company's refusal to sign a contract was condemned by the National Labor Relations Board as a pretext not to recognize the union and considering that the film itself is forthrightly an effort to see the struggle through the miners' own eyes, this is no real drawback. Perhaps there is some skimping: it is something of a cinematic trick to film the President of Duke Power in such tight closeup that his face completely fills the screen.
More serious are the sometimes questionable ways in which the film advances its message: that the Harlan strike is only part of a struggle, and that the miners must go on struggling and striking. The instance I am thinking of comes in its suggestion that the reformist leadership of the U.M.W. may ave sold out in 1974—after the Harlan County strike was over—by recommending acceptance of a national mine contract that curtails local strikes.
The film does not call this a sell-out—it uses no narration at all and conveys its message by its editing—but all reactions of individual miners that it shows before the vote are negative. Yet the membership ratified the contract by 44,000 to 34,000. The film states this, to be sure; yet somehow all the faces we have learned to admire during the long Harlan County struggle seem to push us to feel toward Mr. Miller the same way we felt toward the recalcitrant mine owners.
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