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Harlan County, USA
June 1, 2006
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, touching off<br />
even more jaw-tightening tension. The picket line confrontations,<br />
complete with brickbats and brandished weapons, are amazingly tense,<br />
and death is a sad inevitability in this struggle. <b>Kopple at times<br />
engages in blatant rhetorical point-scoring with her editing work, and<br />
you know this, yet her subjects are in the end so heartrending and<br />
sympathetic — undereducated but busted-ass, hard-working decent folk —<br />
that you feel yourself swept up in the tide of their quandary</b>. The film<br />
is especially moving in its portrayal of the steadfast women of the<br />
community, and authentic native bluegrass protest music inarguably<br />
makes up its spine, even if it is a bit overindulged in performance.<br />
Housed in a regular Amray case, <i>Harlan County, USA</i> is presented<br />
in a new, high-definition, 1.78:1 digital transfer, letterboxed on<br />
standard 4:3 televisions, and created from the Academy-restored 35mm<br />
blow-up of the film struck from the duplicate negative. It looks great,<br />
both in its gritty black-and-white and color segments, though optional<br />
subtitles may aide viewers at a few difficult points during the Dolby<br />
digital 1.0 mix.</p>
<p>Criterion’s treatment of <i>Harlan County, USA</i> is superb, but <b>of<br />
the disc’s many fine supplemental features certainly among the best is<br />
a smoothly engaging audio-commentary track from Kopple and editor Nancy<br />
Baker.</b> Their recollections of the film start off as mundane and<br />
anecdotal (Kopple recollecting waking up every morning with splicing<br />
tape in her hair, Baker recounting the claustrophobia of first seeing<br />
the underground mine footage), move through clarifying background<br />
information (the initial distrust of their subjects, rooted in the<br />
legend of women around the mine being bad luck) and into the truly<br />
harrowing, as when detailing some of the charged physical<br />
confrontations and assaults the film captures. Kopple also cops to the<br />
fact, both amusing and smart, that even though they sometimes ran out<br />
of film due to temporary financing shortfalls, she would feign a<br />
rolling camera, in order to maintain solidarity with the striking<br />
miners and try to help preserve at least some small feeling of a safety<br />
mechanism in the face of threats and aggression. </p>
<p><b>Ever-articulate director John Sayles sits for an interview on the<br />
film’s influence upon him, and a panel discussion from the 2005<br />
Sundance Film Festival with Kopple and film critic Roger Ebert is also<br />
included</b>, which reveals that the film’s bland working title, <i>The Miners Film</i>, was swapped out for <i>Light at the End of the Tunnel</i> before eventually settling on the more iconic <i>Harlan County, USA</i>.<br />
Never-before-seen outtakes from the movie, a video interview with<br />
legendary bluegrass singer-songwriter Hazel Dickens and the original<br />
theatrical trailer are also included. <b>Rounding things out is a nice,<br />
sepia-toned, 24-page insert booklet</b> that includes photos and an essay<br />
on the movie by critic Paul Arthur and an essay on the rich history of<br />
its music by bluegrass journalist Jon Weisberger. <b>A- (Movie) A (Disc)</b></p>
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