HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A.

US, 1976, 103 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Barbara Kopple.

Winner of the Oscar for the best documentary of 1976. Directed by Barbara Kopple, it has a large staff of women responsible for its making. Camera teams went out to Brookfield Kentucky and stayed with the striking coal miners and their families for over a year. The film shows the atmosphere and the rights and wrongs of this strike. It also goes back into the past and strikes and industrial unrest in Harlan County in the 30s as well as tracing the origins and the development of the U.M.W. It also shows the ugliness underlying some of the unions in the United States especially the Boyle murder of the Jablonski family. The film captured a lot of atmosphere and. has the audience very much involved in the issues of the strike and behind the strike. It seems to have a far more universal value than merely being a record of troubles in the seventies in Harlan County, U.S.A.

1. The quality of this documentary? Its appeal, impact? Produced and directed, mainly by women?

2. The purpose of the documentary: reporting, observation, recording history, recording social unrest. change?

3. The portrait of Harlan County? Bloody Harlan County in the thirties with the memories of strikes and confrontations? The similarity of Harlan County in the seventies? The recurrence of the song Which Side Are You On? Harlan County as representative of counties in the United States?

4. The film's portrait of Kentucky and the Kentucky way of life, the towns, industry? The beginning and ending with the details of coal production? The portrait of what happened in between with strikes and social unrest? The society of the Kentucky mining towns, social life, wealth and poverty. the strata of society, the detailed presentation of the towns? The people within their environment? Lack of education opportunities, their speech, their rights? Their banding together for a cause? The strong family heritage of the status of the mines and mining?

5. The documentary flavour of the filming of the places, the close-ups of the people, the groups meetings, the strikes and the pickets, the confrontations? Basil Collins and his violence, the final violence? How authentic the reporting? The editing for the purposes and outlook of the film?

6. The cause of the strike and its background? Duke and Eastover Companies? The contracts? The various representatives of the companies, the negotiators? Their speeches and intransigent attitudes? The impact of the strike over a long time, the people meeting, guns, the inevitable violence, the road blocks, the work of the Sheriff? The final killing and the achievement of the contract, the votes?

7. The background of the U.M.W. and its status as a Union? The presentation of its history, flashbacks, the officials. Boyle and his speeches and campaigns, the clash with Miller and Miller's election?

8. The candidature of Jablonski, the brutality of his murder with his wife and daughter. the funeral, his sons and their comments and their involvement in the Union, Boyle and the interviews, his arrest and trial and his being found guilty? The implications of this information for Unions and the way they are run in the United States?

9. The portrait of Miller as the candidate for the rank and file miners, his speeches, place in negotiations, his assistants?

10. The portrait of people in their place especially the women and their banding together, their meetings, clashes, help, confrontation with the Sheriff? Their pushing the men? The solidarity of the demonstration from other miners visiting the town? The sequence of the violent death and the funeral and its grief? The emotional background to strikes?

11. The importance of coal and the coal industry, the supply to the nation, American economy, government intervention?

12. The significance of the flashbacks and the inhuman treatment of the miners and the visualizing of this? The importance of the health questions and the destruction of lungs?

13. The use of songs and ballads throughout the film, songsand the people singing them, the folk-lore expressed in music? Florence Rose and her singing 'Which Side Are You On'?

14. This was the portrait of a particular strike. How did it illustrate unionism in the United States, the rights of workers, the rights of the underprivileged people? Their preoccupation with material gain? The contract with the attitudes of the corporations. government? The subsequent history detailed of the confrontations? A portrait of American political and industrial life in the seventies? Its universal application?