Whose side are you on? – Harlan County, USA at 50

Given enough time, even the most objective accounts of reality can mutate into myth. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this transformation has been particularly common in America, a country whose relentless spinning of straw into gold was a pre-condition for the modern world. During the early part of the 20^th century, as the nation dredged up its abundant natural resources and dressed up the resulting financial clout in Hollywood glamour, a group of documentary photographers – including Dorothea Lange and Lewis Hine – sought to reveal all that had been obscured by its tall tales of progress and prosperity: exploitative industrial work, squalid urban slums, destitute Dust Bowl farmers. And yet, for better or worse, this social realist cataloguing has itself become part of the great American narrative. Take Lange’s celebrated 1936 photo ​“Migrant Mother,” which is now often found on t‑shirts and postage stamps, more a poetic evocation of a shared past than an indictment of economic inequality. 

Celebrating its 50^th anniversary this year, Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA could be eligible for the same fate as that most recognisable image of the Great Depression, the Oscar-winning documentary now even less of a recent concern for us than that bygone period was for its original audience. So is it still possible to view this missive from the frontlines of a coalminer’s strike in rural Kentucky as anything other than a museum piece, a deteriorating document that might as well be a work of fiction?

In early 1974, employees at Harlan County’s Brookfield Mine decided to down tools, with the support of their national trade union the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). The action was instigated after a new contract was proposed by their bosses at the Duke Mining Company, which denied them the right to strike, raising concerns about their ability to influence working conditions in the future. News of this soon reached Kopple, who made it the subject of her first major project. 

This was the tail end of an era in which documentary approaches were continually adapting and evolving, in line with both technological possibilities and with the reality that was being documented. Kopple was participating in and furthering an ongoing tradition, which could be traced back through the non-interventionist direct cinema of the Maysles brothers (for whom she had been a camera operator and assistant, on their groundbreaking works Salesman and Gimme Shelter) to Jean Rouch, Lange, and Victorian-era photographers like Jacob Riis. This tradition also paralleled the somewhat longer American tradition of industrial activism, with which it shared an ideological basis.

As emphasised by Kopple’s stirring soundtrack of Appalachian protest songs sung a capella, Harlan County’s culture was permanently shaped by its own history of bitter struggles between mine workers and their employers. Indeed, the soundtrack includes a version of the iconic ​“Which Side Are You On?”, popularised by ​‘60s folk icon Pete Seeger but initially written during the so-called ​“Harlan County War” of the early 1930s, a brutal series of picket line clashes that resulted in over a dozen deaths. Elderly residents recount their experiences of that period throughout the film, while a shot of a sepia-toned photograph taken by the aforementioned Hine shows one of them as an eight year-old mine worker, before child labour was outlawed in 1938. 

Kopple’s film itself has an elegiac quality to it, the rugged beauty in her setting and in the weathered faces of its working-class inhabitants often reading as testimony from a vanished world. Yet part of the reason why the years have been kind is that the film is so steeped in nostalgia to begin with. It’s a portrait of a community seeking not just rights in the present day, but the preservation of its heritage, and within the life-or-death, us-vs-them clarity of the central labour dispute is a resistance to our modern-day mythologising of the era. For all our efforts to delineate clearly between then and now, there’s an urgency to Harlan County, USA that refuses the captivity of the canon. 

Having bedded in with the Harlan County community and built relationships over several months, Kopple lets the action play out organically, juxtaposing impassioned pro-union speeches with the intimate details of everyday domestic life, including a troubling scene where veteran miners are examined for black lung and other respiratory diseases. Her unassuming presence also lends extra power to those memorable moments in which she faces the same danger as her subjects, her involvement suddenly foregrounded clearly. A chaotic early-morning assault on the picket line sees her control over filming and her own safety pushed to the limit, as state troopers and the company’s hired ​“gun thugs” disperse club-wielding strikers with a hail of bullets and a cloud of smoke. Kopple has since stated in interviews that the presence of her camera tended to limit the frequency of such incidents, so she would sometimes pretend to keep shooting long after the film ran out.

Unprecedented technological advances since 1976 have made documentarians of us all, yet it would be difficult to suggest today that the camera still has the same power to prevent violence, or to bring about a fairer, more transparent society. Certainly, smartphone footage of civil unrest has served to raise awareness of previously under-exposed issues, while viral videos of police brutality and other abuses of power have often led to real retribution and accountability. But the type of trust that Kopple establishes is rare in our post-truth world. With the circulation of images now subject to the algorithmic whims of corporate-owned social feeds that thrive on isolation and division, shareability and immediate impact take precedence over context and detail, while facts can no longer be readily separated from ideology.

And the film might never run out anymore, but Harlan County coal did a long time ago. Eventually prevailing against their bosses in their struggle for a better contract, the Brookfield miners were nonetheless likely aware that their local industry was already on the way out. It has since frittered away to almost nothing, along with the community itself – unemployment in Harlan County is almost double the rate it was 50 years ago, while the population is less than half of what it was back then.

But who would want to live somewhere so remote and do such dirty, gruelling manual labour anyway? And now we’re all empowered – not to mention financially incentivised – to represent our own lives however we see fit, why do we need some humble documentarian to pay attention to us? 

We now rarely encounter ​“gun thugs” forcing us to comply with the demands of capital, mostly because they’re no longer needed. Tech giants have successfully convinced us to do our own exploitation for them, the carrot proving to be much more effective than the stick. An era that has seen ordinary people become creators, subjects and viewers at the same time is also one in which community has become indistinguishable from an audience or a marketplace. With heavy industries like coal moved to less developed parts of the world, our attention has become the new natural resource to be extracted, processed and monetised.

Undergoing a major resurgence in the era of Netflix and YouTube, long-form documentary cinema is just as afflicted by our new economy of attention scarcity. It’s easy to imagine UMWA boss Tony Boyle’s 1974 conviction for the assassination of his rival Joseph Yablonski, a scandalous development touched upon only briefly by Kopple, serving as the main focus of a contemporary Harlan County doc, its true crime angle an ideal hook for viewers idly scrolling for stories of scams, cults and killers.

Harlan County, USA​’s patient engagement with its subject jars with a contemporary media landscape that has become so fast-paced and fractured, one where politics is reduced to symbolism and performative gestures. Kopple, for her part, has retained her sense of commitment as a documentarian. Labour activism has remained a key interest in her work – she went on to cover a meatpacking strike in 1990’s celebrated American Dream, before returning again to the subject for this year’s Union Town, which premiered at Venice in September. 

Following the efforts of delivery drivers to improve their wages and working conditions, her latest feature finds labour as weak as it has ever been in recent American history. Though many of its issues are recognisable from Harlan County, USA, it’s also a vivid illustration of how much has changed since 1976, with the hyper-individualism that has been nurtured by tech increasingly impacting other, more traditional fields, precluding the possibility of a shared cause. 

Focusing on DoorDash, Uber and other platform-based services, Union Town explores the new gig economy, in which workers have little collective leverage over their employers and a notable reluctance to endanger their livelihoods by sharing their grievances on camera. The shadow of Amazon looms particularly large, not only due to its popularising this labour paradigm but also because of its cross-sector dominance – indeed, the retail giant’s influence in media means that it could limit the distribution of Union Town, or any other film whose politics it sees as a threat.

It’s this idea of observation as solidarity that endures in Harlan County, USA, a film that remains a provocation as much as it is a testimony. Of course, we can imagine something of our predicament refracted through its raw, unadorned images of a disappearing way of life, as our own changes beyond all recognition and we ourselves risk becoming historical footnotes. But, perhaps more importantly, the film shows attention to be a political end in itself – something that pushes us beyond our limited personal perspective, valuable regardless of the specific situation, and never to be taken for granted. As Kopple bears witness to a community bearing witness to itself, she aligns her struggles with theirs, struggles that those in power would seek to deny or to forget. In doing so, she leaves us with a pretty clear choice to make: which side are you on?