Dark, yet illuminating - “Harlan County, U.S.A. – The Criterion Collection” on 4K UHD
- Bill Kelley III
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
4K ULTRA HD REVIEW / SDR SCREENSHOTS
Striking Harlan County coal miners stand their ground during a conflict with armed Brookside line foreman Basil Collins. Sheriff Billy G. Williams serves Collins an arrest warrant for “Flashing a deadly weapon.”
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“HARLAN COUNTY, U.S.A. – THE CRITERION COLLECTION”
4K Ultra HD & Blu-ray; 1976; PG with violence, profanity and brief nudity
Best extra: Commentary with producer/director Barbara Kopple and editor Nancy Baker
I WAS born and raised in coal country.
Also, the grandson of a child coal miner who quit the mines at age 11 in eastern Kanawha County about 30 miles from the West Virginia state capitol. His reasoning: “too many of my buddies had died,” at the beginning of the 20th century in the shallow, darkened shafts.
Life in the mines has always been one of the most dangerous jobs on planet Earth. Plus, the cumulative effects of inhaling coal dust caused scarring in the lungs, impairing the ability to breathe and being diagnosed with “Black lung disease.”
First-time producer/director Barbara Kopple (“American Dream”) and cinematographers Kevin Keating and Hart Perry took their shoulder-mounted 16mm film camera, and Kopple ran the Nagra tape recorder, capturing the heart-rending violent, 13-month strike of 1973-74, between the union miners and the Brookside mine in Harlan County, Kentucky. The miners of eastern Kentucky had been “paid sub-living wages in impoverished living conditions (no electricity or running water), at a time when coal-company profits were climbing,” writer Michael Atkinson reports in the enclosed Criterion booklet. “The miners and their families were hickory-tough and immune to both placation and bullying.”
(1-4) The opening sequence of “Harlan County U.S.A.” as a group of miners illegally ride the conveyor belt into the mine, while two eat a snack during a break.
The film went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature on March 28, 1977. After accepting the golden statue from 1950s blacklisted screenwriter Lillian Hellman (The Little Foxes,” “Watch on the Rhine”), Kopple said, “I accept this award on behalf of the miners of Harlan County, who took us into their homes, trusted us and shared their love with us, and it is their commitment and loyalty, which is honored here tonight.”
Nearly 30 years later, the late film critic Roger Ebert chaired a discussion at the Sundance Filmmakers’ Lodge with Kopple. She remembered a notorious scene in the documentary, “Where guns are fired at the strikers in the darkness before dawn,” Ebert writes. The director and the cameraman were knocked down and beaten. “I found out later that they planned to kill us that day,” Kopple says. “They wanted to knock us out because they didn’t want a record of what was happening.”
EXTRAS
All of the bonus features are carried over from the previous 2006 Criterion DVD edition.
“The Making of ‘Harlan County U.S.A.” (22 mins.) – includes interviews with Kopple, Keating, Perry, associate director Anne Lewis, and United Mine Workers organizer Houston Elmore, miner Jerry Johnson, and strike activist Bessie Parker. Kopple considers the film the most important she’s ever made. “It molded friendships with me and the coal miners, and the women (the wives of the miners), that I think will last as long as we do.”
Keating says Kopple first approached him about documenting Arnold Miller’s “insurgent campaign” to become the UMW president. Eight months later, they pivoted their film toward the strike in Harlan Co. “We were really banged down there pretty bad by the state police, and the company, and the courts and the union told us that a camera crew was coming in, and would probably be on our side,” Johnson said.
Violence was everywhere since, “everybody had guns,” Kopple says. “The first morning we were there, a guy had a shootout with another guy…I knew I was in for a rough time.”
(1) Miners on the picket line. (2) Many of the Brookside company homes were without running water, as a mother bathes her young child on the front porch. (3) The Kentucky State Police try to keep the peace on Black Mountain. At the same time, one miner says, “They’re only here to break the strike.” (4) The documentary highlights several historical photographs, including this one titled: “No Time for School in 1911,” which portrays a group of young boys, aged nine to fourteen, at the end of their ten-hour shift in a West Virginia coal mine.
“Hazel Dickens” (12 min.) – a West Virginia bluegrass singer/songwriter, who provided a number of tunes for the down-to-earth soundtrack. “For some reason or other, music always did pull people together,” Dickens says.
“John Sayles” (6 mins.) – the indie filmmaker said he steered the cast and crew of his masterful “Matewan” (1987), the dramatizing of the West Virginia coal union struggle of the 1920s, to watch “Harlan County U.S.A.” “It was such a well-made movie,” Sayles says. He admits he opened “Matewan” just like “Harlan,” underground in a four-foot coal seam, and you see “just how hard this job is. It’s wet, and it’s dusty, and it’s dark, and it’s cold.”
“Commentary with the producer/director and editor Nancy Baker” – which was recorded in 2005. “Going into the coal mines was unbelievable,” says Kopple. The opening sequence shows miners riding the conveyor belt down into the mine. “It's low coal. And what they did on the belt, going in, is totally illegal. “It’s very dangerous.”
Their conversation, nearly 30 years later, is full of emotion and compassion for the miners. “They spend eight, ten hours a day down in the coal mine was absolutely amazing. Eating down there, working down there, socializing down there. Always crawling, always kneeling.”
“Sundance Film Festival” (14 mins.) – the film was inducted into the Sundance Collection for its 30th anniversary. The panel discussion was moderated by Ebert, with Kopple, Perry, Baker and Dickens. “Your film is one of the first films we really got behind on our TV show, when Gene Siskel and I were first starting,” Ebert says. “On his behalf, I know that he felt this was a great film. We both did.”
(1&2) Non-union miners drive through the picket lines, while the State Police arrest several striking miners. (3) Center, Norman Yarborough, president of the Eastover Mine Co. (owned by Duke Power). (4&5) Coal miners visit Dr. Donald Rasmussen’s Black Lung Clinic in W.Va. A miner gets an oxygen treatment at home.
VIDEO
The original 16mm A/B/C rolls stored at the Academy Film Archive were scanned (1.33:1 aspect) and restored in TRUE 4K. No HDR grading was applied, but the gritty documentary footage has plenty of film grain dancing across the screen, and as expected, the imagery is softer than traditional Hollywood 35mm film stock of the 1970s. The colors and facial toning are natural, and the blacks inside the coal mine are deep, deep black – controlled by colorist Anthony Raffaele.
AUDIO
The Criterion crew handled the 24-bit audio restoration sourced from the original Mono soundtrack. All excess pops and hiss were removed, while the voices are clear, and delivered front and center. Rich bluegrass/folk tunes, including “Dark as a Dungeon” and Coal Tattoo” sung by David Morris, “Come All You Coal Miners” sung by Sara Ogan Gunning, “Black Lung,” “Cold Blooded Murder,” and “They’ll Never Keep Us Down” sung by Hazel Dickens.
In the enclosed essay, musician/journalist Jon Weisberger says, “The musicians of eastern Kentucky and Appalachia have maintained their belief that music can be more than simple entertainment – that it can console and inspire, and by doing both, serve as a rally cry and as spiritual sustenance.”
— Bill Kelley III, High-Def Watch producer
(1) Sheriff Williams talks to Lois Scott, the wife of a coal miner and a key supporter of the strike. (2) Nearby Virginia miners join the fight during a march in downtown Harlan. (3) Samuel B. Hager sings “Shuttle Car Driving Man” during a UMW rally. (4) The killing of miner Lawrence Jones became the turning point in the strike. He left behind a 16-year-old wife and a five-month-old baby daughter. (5&6) The contract was finally accepted, and the strikers returned to work.
SPECS:
100 GB disc
TRUE 4K mastering
Captured on 16mm film stock (1.33:1 aspect ratio), with spherical lens.
Video bitrates: Varies from 33 Megabits per second to 98 Mbps, with a running time of 103 minutes.
Box office: Premiered at the New York Film Festival on October 15, 1976.
Awards: Academy Award winner for Best Documentary, Features
Los Angeles Film Critics Awards: Special Award Barbara Kopple
National Board of Review: Top Ten Films
National Film Preservation Board: 1990 winner
The Hollywood Reporter – The 25 Best Documentaries of All Time: “Harlan County U.S.A. No. 12. “Grey Gardens’ (1975) was No. 1
British Film Institute – Critics’ 50 Greatest Documentaries of All Time: “Harlan County U.S.A. No. 24. “Man with a Movie Camera” (1929) was No. 1
Rotten Tomatoes: Top Critics’ 100 percent, Audiences 92 percent.
“There is something that a good documentary does… is open you up into a window, into other people’s lives you may never meet. And if they do it well, you feel like you’ve met some people and you’ve shared something of their lives and who they are that just would never happen any other way.” – Filmmaker John Sayles
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