Shooting in Harlan: Documentary Work and New Left Politics

In a scene in Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award-winning 1976 documentary Harlan County U.S.A., a miner describes the effect of the filmmaker’s work in eastern Kentucky: “They ain’t going to commit murder in Technicolor.”  Kopple had intended to make a film about the union reform movement Miners for Democracy (MFD).  Instead, she became enmeshed in the 1973-1974 strike at the Brookside Mine, where MFD activists worked with locals to plot strategy against armed strikebreakers.  When a strikebreaker shot a miner away from the line, Kopple recorded the gruesome evidence.  Her film played a critical role in the union victory at Brookside, spreading word of the miners’ democracy movement far beyond the coalfields.  Like much documentary expression in this period, Harlan County participated in the social movement it depicted.                                           

My project uses the making of this documentary to analyze the intersection of three postwar histories: the reform movements sweeping through organized labor’s big unions; the surge of young white middle-class activists into the union movement after calls for black separatism closed off much white civil rights activism; and the explosion of documentary filmmaking in the sixties and seventies that sent many would-be filmmakers into the rural U.S. South.  I use the successful alliance between local strikers, MFD, and Kopple to examine the relationship of documentary expression, conceived broadly as not just film but audio recordings, non-fiction prose, interest in “folk” life, and live musical performances—and social movement activism in the postwar United States.                                                              

In particular, Kopple’s film exemplifies a once vibrant but now almost forgotten attempt in the 1960s and 1970s to use documentary expression in imitation of Depression-era aesthetic and political practices.  My project resurrects this documentary movement—including direct cinema-influenced filmmaking, audio field recordings, and photography—and the history of young middle-class Americans’ broad interest in rural working-class life.