Barbara Kopple, the filmmaker who keeps going back to the picket line

Barbara Kopple

Photo: Montclair Film Festival / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 30, 1946 New York City, United States
Occupation	Documentary filmmaker
Known for	Harlan County U.S.A., Havoc
Awards	2 Academy Award · Sundance Grand Jury Prize: Documentary, American Dream · Directors Guild of America Award, Fallen Champ · AFI Life Achievement · Award, National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (lifetime achievement)

Slow the footage down and you can see her: a young woman with headphones on and her hair pulled back, walking toward the men sent to break a strike, a long boom pole in her hands. Barbara Kopple went first that morning because one of them was heading for her crew. She has spent the half-century since asking, film after film, whose side the camera is on and whether it may say so. Her answer has shifted more often than her admirers like to admit.

Her childhood was spent on a farm in Scarsdale, outside New York City, the city of her birth. Her father was a textile executive, and her uncle, Murray Burnett, co-wrote Everybody Comes to Rick’s, the unproduced play that became Casablanca. At Northeastern University she studied political science and clinical psychology, marched against the Vietnam War and decided she would rather make films than write papers that, as she put it, nobody would probably ever read.

A cinéma vérité class at the School of Visual Arts settled it. A classmate who worked for Albert and David Maysles brought her in and she never returned to the class. Born on July 30, 1946, she was still in her early twenties when she worked on their films Salesman and Gimme Shelter, then joined the collective behind Winter Soldier, in which Vietnam veterans described atrocities they had witnessed or committed.

In 1972 she founded Cabin Creek Films and began filming the reform movement inside the United Mine Workers. When miners at the Brookside mine in Harlan County, Kentucky, walked out in 1973 to win a union contract, she moved there with a small crew and a $12,000 loan. The women on the picket line gave her false names at first, Martha Washington and Betsy Ross among them, and trusted her only after the crew rolled their car on a mountain road and still turned up at four in the morning. She recorded her own sound, kept a .357 Magnum within reach and phoned her parents on the morning strikebreakers fired on the line with semiautomatic carbines. Harlan County, USA took four years and a pile of debt on her own credit card. It premiered at the New York Film Festival in October 1976 and won the Academy Award for documentary feature, which she accepted on behalf of the miners “who took us into their homes”.

Her next feature documentary took fourteen years. In between came Keeping On, a television drama about unionizing a mill. Then a radio bulletin about meatpackers in Austin, Minnesota, sent her driving toward the Hormel plant, where Local P-9 was fighting a cut to its $10.69 hourly wage. “That was the beginning,” she said later, “and I never left.” American Dream took five years to finance, and Kopple believes the first Oscar made that harder. It follows the local, its hired campaigner Ray Rogers and Lewie Anderson, the national union negotiator who warned the strikers they could not win. Hormel replaced most of them. In January 1991 the film won the documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, shared with Paris Is Burning, along with the audience award and the filmmakers trophy, and that spring it brought Kopple her second Oscar.

This is where the tidy version of Kopple, the union filmmaker, stops being accurate. In Harlan she stood openly with the miners. In Austin she chose not to. “I cared about the people in Austin, Minn., very much,” she has said, “but if we were ever to look back at [the film], we had to have the full story.” The result, a union tearing itself apart, is bleaker for its fairness. Money complicated things further, pushing her toward commissioned work for networks, studios and later YouTube, and toward portraits of famous, contested men. Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson, made for NBC while the boxer was in prison for rape, earned her a Directors Guild of America award. Wild Man Blues followed Woody Allen’s jazz band around Europe and became the first major public showcase of his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn. Critics have questioned how authentic such commissioned films can be. Kopple answers with the rules of vérité: she watches, she lets people speak. That defense holds up better on a picket line than with a star who chose to let the camera in.

She also directed episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street and Oz, revisited the three Woodstock festivals in My Generation, followed women reporting from the Iraq War in Bearing Witness and made Havoc, a fiction feature written by Stephen Gaghan and starring Anne Hathaway that went straight to DVD in the United States. With Cecilia Peck she directed Shut Up & Sing, about the Dixie Chicks after Natalie Maines criticized the president from a London stage days before the Iraq War. Later came portraits of Mariel Hemingway in Running from Crazy and of the soul singer Sharon Jones in Miss Sharon Jones!. Desert One, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019, reconstructed the failed 1980 mission to rescue the American hostages in Tehran.

The labor films came back this year. Janus Films returned Harlan County, USA and American Dream to American screens in 4K restorations over May Day weekend, a 17-city double bill for the first film’s 50th anniversary. By then she was editing a third. Union Town, shot over three years beginning in 2023, follows UPS drivers in the Teamsters, Amazon workers trying to organize and the mostly immigrant couriers who deliver New York’s food by bike and answer to an app. It premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival on September 9, then played Toronto and the Camden International Film Festival in Maine. Autlook Filmsales took world rights to it along with the two earlier films. Companies still fire organizers, she told The Nation in May: “So you always have to engage.”

Reviewers have called Union Town the close of a labor trilogy, though Screen Daily suggested it is a trilogy she may never have planned, and noted that the film strives against the odds to find the hopeful side. If Harlan County, USA recorded a victory and American Dream a defeat, the new film lands somewhere less settled: modest contract gains, couriers cut off by an app without explanation, and a final shot of a parcel-sorting robot at a UPS hub. Kopple, now 80, calls it “an act of solidarity with workers across the US – and the world.” Next she takes all three films to the Festival dei Popoli in Florence on November 3 and 4: half a century of strikes on one program.

Tags: American cinema, documentary filmmakers, woody allen, Barbara Kopple, Union Town, American Dream