Bluesky

This May Day weekend, possibly the one holiday movie release weekend that Disney does not yet own, Janus Films will bring back director Barbara Kopple’s two Oscar-winning documentaries on the American labor movement, Harlan County, USA (1975) and American Dream (1990). They appear as a double bill in 17 cities for the former’s 50th anniversary and a recently restored 4k print of the latter by Criterion. They tell the stories of two strikes, respectively: a 1973–74 miners strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, and a 1985–86 meatpackers strike at a Hormel factory in Austin, Minnesota. The miners won their strike. The meatpackers did not, and well over half the plant’s workers lost their jobs.

Kopple, now 80, has been documenting the United States left since 1972, when she took part in the collective doc Winter Soldier(1972), which featured Vietnam veterans (like John Kerry) recounting atrocities that they witnessed or in which they participated. Since then, her films have covered the military, labor, sports, entertainment, and this very magazine—in Hot Type!: 150 Years of The Nation. Her prescient Johnny Cash and Tricky Dick (2018) and Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing(2006), on how the far right attempts to censor and silence progressive artists, still ring true, as the Trumps target Jimmy Kimmel once again and Stephen Colbert enters his final month before cancellation on CBS.

Kopple shot her films in the cinema verité style, crossing the purely observational line of traditional documentary to get in close with hand-held cameras, using natural lighting, and finding herself part of the story when strikebreakers physically attacked and shot at her crew in Harlan County while she filmed on the line with workers. The style has been parodied in everything from This is Spinal Tap! to The Office, but in the hands of a master like Kopple, it still resonates powerfully.

I spoke with Kopple earlier this week about the rerelease of her first two films on American labor, and about a third now in post-production on gig workers.

—Ben Schwartz

Ben Schwartz: Harlan came out in 1975 and American Dream in 1990. What does the labor movement look like to you today?

Barbara Kopple: Similar. I’ve been doing my third union film now. We’re in editing, and it’s a film about UPS and the Teamsters. Amazon voted to bring in the Teamsters. It’s the deliveristas, the people who bring you your noodle soup when you’re sick, on bikes and motorcycles. UPS has had a union for 100 years, but they still don’t stay with the union. They still try to do things and fire people and hurt people. So you always have to engage. Also, Amazon—they’re all independent workers. There’s thousands and thousands of them. They wear the uniforms, they drive the trucks, they work in their warehouses, and yet they have nothing. They have no benefits. They get paid, you know, minimum, not even minimum wage. And if anything happens to them, they have to pay their own hospital bills. And they’re usually not from here. It was their dream to come here. They’re sort of on the lowest rung, because they have to buy their bikes, buy their clothing. And now they have to worry about deportation. We’re in editing, but we still go out and film if something’s happening.

BS: In Harlan County and American Dream, you open with sequences of workers going down into the mines where they can’t even stand up, and then the meatpackers slaughtering hogs. If you opened the new film like that, what would you show?

BK: The guys on the bikes? Its danger. They get an app. They’re monitored all the time on their phone. If they stop for a moment, they could get in trouble. They’re out on the streets, they’re in the snow, huge rainstorms, everything. It’s a very, very hard life, and the companies, DoorDash and others, just want them to go faster and faster.

BS: Why do you open the films that way?

BK: Because I want people to get a sense of who they are and what they have to go through and give them the kind of respect that they deserve. So when you hear them speak, you have understood a lot of what they’re going through.

BS: When you got to Harlan County, what were your preconceptions of what you were going into?

BK: I had no idea what I was going into.

BS: Harlan was violent.

BK: I had known a little of the history, that it was called Bloody Harlan County in the ’30s. The first day that I was there, the women on the picket lines didn’t really trust us. They didn’t know who we were, and they gave us phony names like Florence Nightingale, Martha Washington, right? Betsy Ross. Then the next day they said, “OK, you come to the picket line, be there at 4 am.” We were staying at that point at a little motel on Pine Mountain, which was this really steep mountain. It had no guardrails on it. It was raining fiercely the morning before, and another car just came right by us, and we tipped over. We got out of the car, everybody was fine, and we carried all our equipment in the rain and everything to the picket line. That’s when they opened up to us, and we lived with the miners and lived there for a long time.

BS: You yourself were shot at?

BK: We were beaten up the morning they shot at us with semiautomatic carbines. I went first, because the guy was coming towards the crew, and I wanted to protect them. And if you slow the film up, you can see me with my little headphones on and my hair back and whatever, walking towards them. And they were kicking me. And they got me, but it didn’t hurt because I had an Auger [hard plastic sound recording case] from here to here, and I had a long fish pole with a 415 mic on it, and I was swinging it. [Where we were staying,] they had no indoor plumbing, so you had to use outhouses. And I remember going with a .357 Magnum to go to the bathroom. The morning I was shot at I called my parents and just said, “Hi, you know, we were machine-gunned this morning by semiautomatic carbines.” And my mother said, “I forbid you to be there another minute. You come right home.” And I said, “Only kidding, Mom.” And she said, “Well, don’t kid me like that.” I said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” And I didn’t say anything about it until they saw the film at the New York Film Festival.

BS: When you cover an event like this, you have no way of knowing how it’ll end.

BK: Or begin. I mean, anything.

BS: You’re like a prospector mining for gold. In American Dream [in Austin, Minnesota], you had so many threads and so many people you’re learning about all at once. When does the story start to come together for you? While shooting? Editing?

BK: First you gather the material. American Dream was much different. We started in a place called Worthington, Minnesota, where an Armour plant was closing. And we were filming with a couple on their porch, a husband and wife, and the woman saying, “We’re not going to have any friends, and I’m going to miss everybody and going to church,” and all the things that they do. And the husband said, “But we have it in our contract that we can go be at another Armour plant.” And then the phone rang, and he went in and he got it, and then he came out again, and he burst into tears, and he said, “All the Armour plants are closing. There’s nowhere that we can go.” And other people came over and they would say things like, “We never did anything wrong. I even went to work when I was sick. We never missed anything. We hardly took any vacations. Why are they doing this to us?” And it was really a sense of hopelessness. People piled things in their trucks. They thought that there might be work in Texas. It was like The Grapes of Wrath, watching them leave.

I heard on the radio that in Austin, Minnesota, people were fighting and they said, “We’re not going to take it anymore.” We were very lucky because we had access to everything. I mean, there were four storylines. There was Jim Guyatt, president of the local. His wages, and the people he was caring for, were $10.69, and it was cut down to $8. He hired this amazing guy, Ray Rogers, who did corporate campaigns. His strategy was to bring in as much press and media as he possibly could and go where the money is and get unions to take their money out of, in this case, First Bank. Then there’s Lewie Anderson [a national vice president of United Food and Commercial Workers]. He had 25 different places that he was trying to help, and they were working for nothing, for $6.50 an hour, $7.50 an hour. He was trying to bring them up. And Anderson says, “You know, you’re not going to win this one, you’re just not going to win, you’re going to be out of a job.” And then there was the company, of course, who—if there’s a villain in the film, it was the company—because they had made about $30 million profit that year and just wanted to remain competitive. [Five hunded and fifty workers out of 700–800 did lose their jobs].

BS: In Harlan and Austin, what lessons did you learn about filmmaking?

BK: I understood what life and death was all about. These people were willing to give up everything for what they believed in.