Limits of the straight documentary

Scan page 9

with such a challenge.

The strikers were then confronted with the usual panoply of courts, police and scabs and won particularly tenacious support from an auxiliary organisation of women relations.

who maintained and developed the picket line.

• As the struggle: dragged on, there was the same battle that there always is to maintain the continuity of the picket line to push aside and deal with the divisions and differences that inevitably intrude. and to ensure that solidarity was maintained until the end.

Reform candidate

The Harlan County strike also saw the inevitable union bureaucrat (in this case. fresh from his victory as the "reform" candidate in the UMW presidential election) lead hundreds of supporting miners in a demonstration around the town.

"Left" bureaucrat Arnold Miller, with all the tactical panache of the Grand Old Duke of York, was elected as the "rank and file" opponent of the corrupt and murderous Tony Boyle but was determined to isolate the strikers behind pious words and militant phrases.

Besides so many details whose form will be familiar to any participant in such a struggle the Harlan County strike had some special features of its own.

One of these was the very active participation and sacrifice of the women, which is more than adequately portrayed in the film.

The women are shown not only arguing for proper picket duty and carrying it out themselves against in timidation and violence.

Armed

They are also to be seen arguing out and rejecting the view that they must worry first about their personal lives. "holding on 1o their husbands" and so forth.

The film shows palpably how it is the struggle itself that seizes hold of these women, and shows the physical revulsion of one of them when she is arrested. po: wit wif and realises that she stand the scabs at all".

The women find it necessary to be armed. not just with the clubs shown in the picture but also taking steps to protect themselves with guns.

Those familiar with the history of class struggle in the United States will not be surprised by this.

No employer in the world uses organised violence more viciously and blatantly than an American boss. he he Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford or the faceless men behind the Duke Power Company owners of the Brookside mine.

Scabs

In this particular strike. the employers first of all used court injunctions and state troopers, whose confrontations with the strikers are vividly portrayed.

They then brought in as vicious and anti-communist a bunch of scabs as you could hope to see.

Some bourgeois reviewers have said that it is one of the strengths of the film to show how human" these people are.

This very fair and "liberal" view of the matter is a little in conflict with the pictures shown of bullet holes in strikers homes. shooting on the picket line itself. and finally the murder of a young miner called Lawrence Jones.

Movingly portrayed This death is movingly trayed in the film, along h the anguish of his e, mother and brother miners.

Although the event provided the pretext for the settlement of the strike. the film is less certain about the precise terms of this settlement, and to what extent it represented a realisation of the original aims of the strikers.

Dynamic

The many subsequent struggles in the American coalmining industry which are depicted in the film and which later culminated in the national strike this year. indicated clearly that the battle of Harlan County was by no means the end of the war.

The film shows suceessfully the feel the image of the struggle of this group of workers.

It goes beyond this to show how the dynamic of this strike fitted into the context of a bitter battle for leadership within the miners' union with the murder of Yablonski in 1973 during his efforts secure election as Preside nt.

Disillusionment

Barbara Kopple and her collaborators even go so far as to portray the inade quacy of the "left" Miller leadership which emerged in the union in the next period. and the disillusionment of some younger workers with this leadershipss role in the Harlan C'ounty strike.

Yet it must be said that the film suffers from great political inadequacies. The fact that • has been taken up by the radical chic sections of the establishment and even awarded an Oscar. shows this clearly.

it has even received the ultimate accolade of being praised in the Socialist Worker for its portrayal of militancy.

However the form of the film and the political views of its creators make it impossible for it to show workers a way to go beyond their own spontaneous militancy.

The documentary form certainly makes it possible to portray realistically, and movingly the bitter struggle of the miners and of the women.

But although the makers of the film do not choose at Review of Harlan County USA directed by Barbara Kopple in 1976, distributed by The Other Cinema and now showing at the Scala Cinema, 25, Tottenham St. London W1.

random what to po tray in the end they show only images of the struggle itself at its own level.

Harlan Countr has been praised hy the middle class and the syndicalists who see no alternatire to this bureaucracy in its lett' or ' right" form except sponta neous, non-political militan cy and heroism.

Spontaneous The film maker intervenes as an outsider goes deeper and deeper into the consciousness of the workers. but never transcends this trade union. bourgeois consciousness, or the spontaneous level of struggle.

The intervention of a One reviewer said that it is notable that the film does not mention socialism.

To us it does not seem surprising, because such a concept is outside its terms of reference.

Could a film raise such questions about the course of such . struggle. about the need for a revolutionary alternative and how it could be built?

New methods Within its pure documentary form probably not. Such issues were more effectively raised in Roy Batterby s Leeds United and Jim Allens Days of Hope though often simply in the form of discussion away from the real action.

It is only as revolutionaries i themselves begin to intervene workers' struggles to fight for them to transcend the trade union level that artists will be able to conceive new methods of portraying that on film. In the meantime see Harlan Count! for its por. trayal, of this heroic struggle, and think of what it has missed in terms of the next questions to be raised. Miners wires confront the scabs

Scan page 10

ADUSTRIAL

AVAI

"TROTSKYISM TODAY." Quarterly theoretical journal of the Workers Socialist League.

Issue No. 2 includes TROTSKYISM TODAY NEWS at the Garners restaurants?