Coalmining Women

While examining a range of early examples of filmic history, we made a discovery: A ten minute film entitled “A Day in the Life of a Coalminer” (1910, produced by the Kineto Company for the L.N.W. Railway) presents surprising details of the multiple tasks of heavy labor performed by women at the Wigan Coal and Iron Works. In fact, at least half of the scenes of this ten minute documentary foreground women and their labors. According to this film, in 1910, women pushed full carts of coal, piled support beams, sorted through coal pieces on a conveyor belt, and worked on the top of coal cars, all while dressed in head scarves, loose-fitting skirts and dresses covered with leather aprons. These images of women coal workers served to highlight the documentary’s goal—coal coheres the family and builds the nation—but they also served as images of resistance—resistance by women against stereotypical gender roles.

Images of women coal workers in “A Day in the Life of a Coalminer” highlight women’s most powerful resistance, working in and around coal mines in stereotypically male roles. Women have worked in coalmines since mining began. In fact, women worked in coalmine shafts in England, Scotland and Wales until an 1842 law restricted their labor underground, but women continued to work at the mine works until the onset of World War I. In the United States, images of women coal miners, even in Harlan County, Kentucky, come up on Websites that tell us women returned to the mines as workers in the late 1970s, when Harlan County USA came out. Although North Country tackles a sexual harassment case connected with a woman’s move into an iron ore strip mine, we believe the 1981 documentary, Coalmining Women, best illustrates this return to the mines. We assert that this image of the woman coal miner has been neglected and should be viewed as an image of resistance more powerful than protest.

“A Day in the Life of a Coalminer” provides a picture of coalmining from the perspective of the L.N.W. Railroad and the Wigan Coal and Iron Company, Limited. Images of a coalminer leaving a wife and two children for work and returning home after a day underground, then, serve as advertisements for the value of coal: it pays men (and women) wages, builds strong families and a strong nation, and warms homes of rich and poor. Colin Harding and Simon Popple argue that the film “drew clear parallels between the hard physical nature of the coalminers’ work and the luxury of those who relied on their toil” (44-5). But the film reveals more about mining works in 1910 than a “reality creatively shaped” (Kino) to serve the company’s purposes. The film does foreground a sole male miner at its beginning and end, but much of the ten-minute film highlights work done above ground—mostly by women.

Once the miner leaves his warm family, the film cuts to “The Pit Head” and pans the coal works, showing two women pushing a coal cart in the distance. Men are fore-grounded in the next three scenes: “Locking the Lamps,” “Miners Descending” and “Working the Coal Face.” But once the coal comes up from the mines (in “The Coal Shaft 4 and 9 Tub Cages”) women (with the occasional boy) serve as the film’s focus. After an introduction to the multitude of women workers in a posed photograph—“Belles of the (Black) Diamond Field”—the rest of the film’s center shows us “Female Industry.” Women push carts in pairs dressed in a uniform of skirts, leather aprons, blouses, and head-scarves. They load and push carts filled with support timbers, and they work the coal in a segment entitled “Sorting, Screening, and Loading.” From the works to the coal cars on long trains, women work with coal. The frame scenes of the sole miner returning to his family (as clean as when he left, we might add) and a rich man’s family warming themselves beside a coal fire may reinforce the company’s message—coal makes families strong. But from a twenty-first-century perspective, images of women (in 1910) working at the mine subvert the visions of a patriarchal family the film’s frame shots illustrate.

Women in “A Day in the Life of a Coalminer” seem to play the traditional roles of wife and mother (in either a working-class or rich family). But the majority of women highlighted in the film work outside of the home in back-breaking jobs (although, ironically, only men line up for pay during the “Pay Time” scene). With faces blackened by coal dust and arms muscled by labor, the women of “A Day in the Life of a Coalminer” resist the roles the film’s message would provide them—building a life around a nuclear family where women stay home to care for husband, children, and their household. These images of resistance comprise at least fifty percent of the film and the majority of scenes of work around the mine, leading us to question the power of the film’s frame message centering on a nuclear family.

             “A Day in the Life of a Coalminer” advertises mining and its benefits to society, but it also shows us images of labor at a mine works on all levels and, perhaps naively, reveals the extent of that work that is accomplished by women. This film stands out as a film where women and their work takes the center: working-class women work at the mine; at least one miner’s wife works in the home rearing children; and another works as a servant for a middle- or upper-class family in the film’s last scene. Only one woman escapes labor, the upper-class wife and mother served by the working-class domestic. Women working at the colliery may be represented as unmarried or widowed because they—unlike the clean wives and mothers wearing starched white in both the working-class and middle-class homes—are “veiled” in head scarves and covered in coal. Yet Victorian values that stimulate positive depictions of the traditional family still seem subverted by so many images of women hard at work. What is missing from the short film are some of the consequences of women’s labor. The work these women performed was dangerous and possibly fatal. Also missing are methods of payment for these women. In fact, during the pay-time sequence, only men line up for their pay. Women presumably “donated” their earnings to a male patriarch—a father, a husband, or even a brother. Women worked, but they had fewer rights than their male counterparts. Women were treated like children, so in 1842, when children under ten were prohibited from working in the pits, so were women.

Coalmining Women (1982), on the other hand, shows women working in the mines—but in 1980s America in a powerful act of resistance to stereotypical gender roles and expectations. Women returned to the pits in the 1970s (at least in the United States) when laws changed, mechanized tools took the place of pick-axes, and economic conditions led them to seek employment in the mines. Coalmining Women illustrates some of the problems women face in the mines—and from their male co-workers. The forty-minute documentary also includes footage of interviews with the first women miners to take their protest power to Washington, D.C., especially in a fight for black-lung benefits. From 1978, when women gained (legal) equity in the workplace, women from Colorado to Tennessee, West Virginia, and Kentucky entered the mines to earn better pay for equal work alongside men in spite of their need to resist gender roles and stereotypes.

Although Coalmining Women demonstrates the extent of women’s resistance both in the mine and on the picket line in the late twentieth century. “A Day in the Life of a Coalminer” reminds us that women working in “nontraditional” jobs and donning “nontraditional” roles are nothing new. Women worked in mines beside men as soon as mining became a profession. They continued to work at collieries after their work in the pits was outlawed. And their return to the mines in the last few decades rests on a foundation of women, who continually revise images of “women’s work.” Such a revision serves as one of the most powerful forms of resistance there is.

Las Acacias (2011): Merging Human and Nonhuman Nature

A quiet, minimalist Argentinian road movie, Pablo Giorgelli’s Las Acacias (2011) explores loneliness and relationships during a timber truck drive from Paraguay to Buenos Aires. The film centers on Rubén (Germán de Silva), a dour, middle-aged truck driver, who is transporting timber from Paraguay to Buenos Aires, and Jacinta (Hebe Duarte), a passenger forced upon him by his unseen boss and her unwelcome 5-month-old daughter Anahi. As Jeannette Catsoulis of The New York Times declares, “as the journey progresses, this improbable romantic movie reels you in.”

During this journey Rubén and Jacinta develop a bond built on a hope nurtured by the joy Anahi and her mother bring to the lonely road. In this beautifully photographed film, however, rather than intimate dialogue, it is the change in the landscape and the subtle softening of facial expressions that reveal this growing connection. The journey from the nearly clear-cut forests of Paraguay to the more fertile yards and roadsides of Argentina, Rubén and Jacinta’s connection grows stronger as Rubén bonds with Jacinta’s daughter Anahi, perhaps transforming the thorny shrub of the film's title, as well. 

Jacinta discovers pictures of Rubén giving a bicycle to what could be a son, but it is Rubén’s willingness to talk about his child and their distant relationship that begins to cement the trust building between them. Rubén’s desire for connection even prompts him to take a detour and deliver a months-late birthday present to a sister. Although Catsoulis asserts, “What we don’t know is legion — the origin of the scar beneath Rubén’s left arm, or why Jacinta declares that her child has no father — and will remain unrevealed,” small gestures like these speak volumes about Rubén’s transformation from an isolated and alienated misanthrope to a compassionate man.

Only the hum of the truck engine and swoosh of passing traffic accompany sparse dialogue, providing opportunities to examine the faces of the three traveling figures more carefully. As Catsoulis explains, “when there’s not much to listen to, we watch more intently, noticing Rubén’s weathered face soften when he interacts with the ridiculously cute child, and Jacinta’s eyes warm in response. Trust grows in that silence, chipping away at barricaded emotions with palpable patience.”

The quiet also emphasizes the landscapes outside the truck cab windows. As Jacinta and Rubén watch the scenery, so do we. The film begins in the desolate clear-cut wood where Rubén picks up his enormous load of timber. The view out of the truck cab looks like a war zone, with dark sharp stumps breaking through gray hard soil. Sage-colored scrub grass and desert bushes line the motorway through Paraguay and much of Argentina, but when they come close to Buenos Aires, the landscape brightens.

At a rest stop, shade trees hover over a picnic table. Green trees line roadways in the city, as well. And when they reach Jacinta’s cousin’s home, the fertility of nonhuman and human nature seem to merge, with a front yard garden and loving family members greeting Jacinta and Rubén. This fecund setting parallels the relationship between Rubén, Jacinta, and her child, highlighting the ever more interconnected relationship we share with the natural world.

A New Dust Bowl Coming?

A New Dust Bowl Coming?

As we have commented on earlier in our examination of Pare Lorentz’s The Plow that Broke the Plains (1937), the idea of “eco-memories” are complicated and prone to be shunted aside for ideas of endless progress and boundless wealth extracted from “nature.” As the film asserts:

High winds and sun

A Country without rivers

And with little rain

Settler: Plow at your peril

Two hundred miles from water

Two hundred miles from town

But the land is new

Many were disappointed

The rains failed

And the sun baked the light soil.

The drought that is now plaguing a significant portion of the U.S., however, may soon lead to conditions favorable to a repeat of the parched 1930s. Everything is in place. A complacent set of state governments that refuse to acknowledge scientific facts, coupled with the over-farming in the Plain States, have created conditions that will, many people warn, lead to a recurrence of the catastrophe of the 1930s. Looking at Lorentz’s short documentary that carefully details the causes of the disaster also aligns with recent historical texts by Donald Worster, such as Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (1979) and Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (1985), as well as The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (2006) by Timothy Egan.

Endless stories about shrinking water supplies, depletion of aquifers, sale of cattle due to grass die off are also coupled with farmers exploiting marginal land for profit, stripping protective crop covers to feed stock, and opening up land that was set aside in the 1930s to prevent the very disasters that had just visited the water of the U.S.

Texas now is suing other states for access to river water. Oklahoma and Kansas are disaster areas due to a blasted out wheat crop. Farmers are selling their water allotments to energy companies to use for “fracking.” One more season of hard drought, paired with high winds, may produce the very conditions documented by Lorentz and novelists like John Steinbeck in Grapes of Wrath.

The fragility of the landscape is duplicated by the fragility of memory. Eco-disasters are quickly forgotten, and if they are repeated, it will not be because warnings were not present, but that people refuse to remember or believe that documentary images of whole cities being buried in “dust storms” are nothing more than the overheated imagination of liberal filmmakers in the faraway Neverland of Hollywood.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi: Preserving A Way of Life

Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) chronicles the day-to-day work life of 85-year-old Jiro Ono, a world-renowned sushi chef and owner of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a prestigious ten-seat sushi restaurant in Tokyo, the only restaurant of its kind with a three star Michelin rating. Although this prestige attracts sushi lovers from around the world to make reservations months in advance for one of the few seats at Jiro’s sushi bar, it is Jiro and his sons, rather than the restaurant, that provide focus for this revealing documentary.

Although the film’s production notes suggest the film “is a thoughtful and elegant meditation on work, family, and the art of perfection,” however, the relationship between Jiro and his eldest son moves beyond revealing the complexity of Jiro’s multiple roles as culinary success and loving but demanding father. The relationship also reveals the changing attitudes toward the environment that must be embraced for the dream of sushi to continue. In order to continue the traditions Jiro establishes as a sushi master, his eldest son Yoshikazu must encourage an aquatic conservation missing from Jiro’s experience. The drive to maintain his father’s reputation as a sushi master, then, parallels the desire to preserve the sea life that sustains it.

Despite any weaknesses they note, reviewers laud the film’s presentation of Jiro and his goals to create the perfect sushi. Noel Murray of the A.V. Club notes that the film “argues persuasively that it’s that constant pursuit of improvement—even to the best sushi in the world—that gives us all a reason to wake up and punch in.” Nicolas Rapold of The New York Times declares Jiro is “a god among men.” Roger Ebert calls the film “a documentary about a man whose relationship with sushi wavers between love and madness. He is a perfectionist, never satisfied, and if you go to work for him as an apprentice, you will have to spend weeks learning how to squeeze out a towel properly before moving on to learn how to slice a hard-boiled eggs.”

What they don’t note is the different focus Jiro’s son Yoshikazu brings to the film during his trip to the fish market. The scene is the market is reminiscent of segments in anti-fishing documentaries such as The End of the Line (2009) and We Feed the World (2005). Huge tuna and other ocean fish lie in rows on a massive concrete floor ready for bidding. After Yoshikazu purchases tuna, shrimp, and other seafood for the day at the restaurant, he speaks reflectively into the camera, mourning the loss of rare ocean life and promoting the need to conserve the fish that remain for future generations. The film shows us plates of sushi items no longer available because of the overfishing Yoshikazu laments.

Although the film leaves this scene quickly to return to Jiro and his amazing restaurant, it portends a possible change when the now 85 year-old Jiro passes the restaurant onto his son. This brief scene offers hope that preserving the excellence of Jiro’s restaurant may also help save the sea.