The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

Harlan County U.S.A.
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How would you describe Harlan County U.S.A. to someone who has
never seen it?
James: It’s a film about labor unrest in the ’70s, a very pivotal time for labor’s
history. It focuses specifically on the mining community in Harlan County,
Kentucky. In that particular mine, the workers were trying to unionize and
met great resistance. Barbara Kopple went in there as a very young filmmaker;
she followed this strike and got tremendous access to it. I guess I’m
getting past the descriptive phase. I think what makes the film so memorable
in so many ways is, number one, the access. It falls into that classic
verité tradition.
Albert and David Maysles were at the center of the documentary world
of the ’60s and ’70s, where filmmakers were able to get terrific access to
people’s lives and be there and really capture it as it unfolded. Harlan County
certainly has a tremendous amount of that. It’s not a piece of journalism. It’s
not a film that went in and said, “OK, let’s look at what these striking miners
are saying, and what management is saying, and really try to delve into
presenting each side’s positions and leave it up to the viewer to make judgments.”
The film is a piece of political activism.
Tell me about when you first saw the film.
James: I first saw the film in graduate school at Southern Illinois University.
The film came out in ’76. I didn’t see it when it came out, although I was
just getting interested in film around that time. It was around ’76 or ’77 that
I really was starting to get interested in film. But at that time, I was more
focused on feature filmmaking, like a lot of filmmakers, including a lot of
documentary filmmakers. Stanley Kubrick was a hero. Arthur Penn’s Bonnie
and Clyde and Little Big Man were films that I greatly admired. So I had
it in mind that I was going to be a feature filmmaker. It wasn’t until I got to
graduate school at SIU and studied film that I became interested in Harlan
County. The film was shown as part of the series there.
So I saw it a few years later; it was making the college circuit at that point.
I just remember being really struck by it—being really struck by this gritty
quality that it had. The raw honesty of it and the access that Barbara was
able to achieve. You hear occasionally in the movie, her asking questions
and prodding people. I’ve come to know Barbara since then, many years