Harlan County, USA

Harlan County, USA I watched this on a new DVD last night, about 30 years after I first (& last) saw it in a cinema. Its excellent. From an essay accompanying its re-release on DVD:

Barbara Kopple’s detailed analysis of a Kentucky mine workers’ strike is unmistakably of this time—a virtual hub of urgent themes, formal tendencies, political debates, and material practices that define post-sixties documentary in America. But unlike other docs of the period, its theatrical distribution and relatively wide appeal generated considerable public support; it is still the only nonfiction film to have played the New York Film Festival, won an Academy Award, and been granted a listing on the National Film Registry. Moreover, its compelling dramatic structure, hybrid visual style, and rejection of fly-on-the-wall impartiality anticipate key developments in contemporary nonfiction. Despite its modest subject and visual resources, Harlan County USA encompasses an extraordinarily broad and complex aesthetic agenda whose influence can be felt in later fictional movies as well as political docs.