Harlan County, USA
50 years later, a hot report from the American abyss
Oh, to recapture the power of those old documentaries, made with Nagra tape recorders and 16mm stock and filled with life-stuff
Barbara Kopple’s tough Kentuckians put us to shame
Golden anniversaries are often irresistible, if only because that big fat round 50, as a measure of years, represents a chunk of life we can’t easily dismiss as transient or trivial. Once you get to 50, you know things have changed. Documents that old, like films, can generate conflicted responses — usually a wrestling match between startlement (oh, the unalloyed righteousness of our old ideals) and shameful nostalgia. (Who among us of a certain age doesn’t blush when recalling the naïveté that in 1976 made us love Rocky or A Star Is Born?) Movies were already changing in 1976, edging away from New Wavism and toward Spielbergology and Reaganite solipsism, but it was still the ’70s, and of all the tissue samples we could take from that year, the most salient is Barbara Kopple’s landmark documentary, Harlan County, USA. We supposedly now live in a Golden Age of documentaries, and that’s true at least in terms of sheer numbers: Never before have so many nonfiction films been so easily …
