Harlan County, USA is a 1976 American documentary film covering the "Brookside Strike" a 1973 effort of 180 coal miners and their wives against the Duke Power Company-owned Eastover Coal Company's Brookside Mine and Prep Plant in Harlan County, southeast Kentucky. It won the Oscar for Best Documentary at the 49th Academy Awards.
It was directed and produced by filmmaker Barbara Kopple, then early in her filmmaking career. A former VISTA volunteer, she had worked on other documentaries, especially as an advocate of workers' rights.
Why It Rocks
By the early 1970s it became difficult to ignore the drawbacks to cinema verité, such as its illusion of objectivity and how the lack of voice-over narratives, give-and-take of interviews, and attempts to explain content had direct cinema practitioners limited to covering celebrities, institutions, or civic disasters. Harlan County USA shows how the style had to evolve in the coming years.
The content for the documentary is how Joe Yablonski had challenged Tony Boyle -- who was president of the United Mine Workers of America at the time -- only for Boyle to take a contract out on his rival’s life and kill Yablonski along with his wife and daughter. But while the murders sparked what would eventually become the film, a strike at the Brookside mine in Kentucky provided the angle the director needed to tell the story.
The film starts with a straightforward account of mining conditions in 1973, gradually widening the focus to provide a context for the strike. Kopple filmed many of the survivors of that era, but was far from an objective reporter. When the workers at the Brookside mine go on strike against Duke Power and its subsidiary, the Eastover Mining Co., she's clear about who's meant to be in the right and wrong.
It's partisan filmmaking at a vivid, close-up level. Kopple’s defiance becomes one the film’s endearing traits. The scenes where she is fired upon, where her cameraman is knocked to the ground, where she helps women on the picket line stand down “gun thugs” are moving and inspiring in ways that mainstream documentaries couldn't equal.
The director relied heavily on music to provide a sort of narrative for the film. In a way, the film is structured like a protest song, which in the Appalachian tradition used individual incidents to comment on larger problems.
A clear direct account of the strike is presented, which lasted 13 months. The film shows the arrival of strikebreakers, the increasing tension between the strikers and their bosses, the arrest of many of the miners' wives, the disillusionment as the months dragged on, and escalating violence that leads to the murder of one of the strikers, Lawrence Jones.
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