American Class Struggle on the Big Screen
Barbara Kopple won Oscars for her gripping documentaries, like Harlan County, USA, on the struggles of the labor movement. She sat down with Jacobin to discuss that and her more recent work, as well.
Film director Barbara Kopple at the Metrograph theater on January 26, 2018 in New York City. (Mark Sagliocco / Getty Images)
Few filmmakers are as associated with chronicling the plight of the American working class like Barbara Kopple.
In 1977, Kopple won the Best Documentary Oscar for her classic Harlan County, USA about striking Kentucky coal miners. In 1990, she followed it up with American Dream about another strike — this one by Minnesota meatpackers knee-deep in the Reagan-Bush era. These two films are arguably to nonfiction cinema what John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath is to Hollywood depictions of class struggle. Even today, they’re incredible, wrenching documents of solidarity, violence, and the ambiguities of labor politics in the most unequal country in the developed world.
In 2020’s Screening Reality: How Documentary Filmmakers Reimagined America, author Jon Wilkman describes the seventy-four-year-old Kopple as an “indomitable . . . brave, empathetic, and relentless” director. Kopple’s latest documentary, Desert One, sheds new light on the little-known 1980 clandestine mission to rescue American hostages seized in 1979 and held by Iranian students at the US embassy in Tehran. Desert One details the debacle of a botched covert operation by the Western imperialists who couldn’t shoot straight.
Sorry, but this article is available to active subscribers only. Please log in or become a subscriber.