The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

Harlan County U.S.A.
113
of them without running water. There’s a very interesting scene where
somebody’s getting a bath in a bowl.
James: And black lung—all the issues with black lung.
Yeah. It was very, very dire. The film won the 1976 Academy Award for
Best Documentary. Do you have another favorite moment?
James: What sticks in my head are moments right after this altercation
where this strike-buster guy talks about one of the strikers as being a “nigger.”
You hear this woman defend him with something like, “That nigger
is more of a man than you. Don’t you call him that.” Then there’s a scene
among the union organizers and the miners, which is attended by men and
women. They talk about the need to be better organized, and the woman
talks about that incident. The black miner who was the focus is in the room,
and so they talk about it.
Somebody says, “We need to get more of you guys out there, so you’re not
the only black out there.” You see people trying to grapple with their common
purpose across lines of race at a very interesting moment in the film. The
woman even uses the N-word in her description of it. That’s something that
today a white person would be very careful of. They’d say, “He called you the
N-word.” It’s a different time. You see people trying to grapple with class issues
that can get pushed into being race issues, and they’re trying to maintain this
solidarity and not let themselves be divided along race lines. It’s always been a
classic tactic to try and divide labor, and a very successful one in this country.
You chose this film as the one that changed your life, not Kubrick, not
Arthur Penn. So why? How did it change your life?
James: There’ve been many documentaries over the years that have powerfully
impacted me. I think this one came along at the time when I was more
interested in being a feature filmmaker than a documentary filmmaker. So it
came along at the beginning of a process of moving from an interest in feature
film to documentaries, and that’s where my career has taken me. It came along
at the right time for me. It helped me see, “Ah, this is more what I want to do.”
There’s something very alive about this film. What it’s about and the degree
to which the filmmaker courageously put herself into a situation that she was
not from. You don’t have to have known her history to know that she was