Labour Films

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Comment by Alexandria Davis on March 4, 2012 at 18:06

I'm glad I haven't seen that scab film yet union brother.]

I'd have to say my favorite is Norma Ray. I could watch that over and over.

Comment by Peter Ølgaard on March 4, 2012 at 17:37

Here is a great paper on Hollywood anti-union bias: Silver Screen Tarnishes Unions

Comment by Peter Ølgaard on March 4, 2012 at 17:35

Just watched a horrible film :Sometimes a Great Notion with Paul Newman and Henry Fonda as timber logger scab heroes.

Comment by Viola Wilkins on February 23, 2012 at 0:27

Salt of the Earth film review http://ning.it/yembHV

Comment by Doug Taylor on August 22, 2011 at 8:05

“The Wobblies” (1979 documentary)

From Where the blog has no name

The 1979 documentary, The Wobblies, directed by Deborah Shaffer and Stewart Bird, is now available on line at google video (1:28:39). Highly recommended.

This 1979 documentary established a new, primary-research modus for historical nonfiction—no narrator, no authorial perspective, just original documents and witnesses—but its subject matter was, and still is, its most radical characteristic. By the ’70s American culture had been made to forget that the Industrial Workers of the World had ever existed, just as in the century’s first decades the segregated union utopia was condemned, brutalized, legislated against, campaigned against, and demonized.

Today, things haven’t changed much—Deborah Shaffer and Stewart Bird’s film stands among a scant handful of books detailing the labor movement’s astonishing power and growth, its newspapers and songs and sheer membership, as well as the sickening history of suppression, murder, and criminal injustice that was brought to bear upon it. (Don’t forget Warren Beatty’s Reds, shot around the same time and with several of the same elderly survivors.) American high schoolers should have to see it to graduate, but then so much of what they’re taught would evaporate as a consequence. Released with new interviews and old anthems, and alongside nine other classic docs in the “Docurama Film Festival I.”

By Michael Aktinson (Village Voice) June 20, 2006

 

Comment by John Pietaro on July 31, 2011 at 3:43

This year's DISSIDENT ARTS FESTIVAL occurs on Sat 8/13, 4PM-11PM at the Brecht Forum, NYC. The Fest opens with a screening and discussion of the long-blacklisted film "Salt of the Earth". Concert follows: Upsurge!, Radio Noir, Judy Gorman, Secret Architecture, radical poets Steve Bloom, Angelo Verga, Jackie Sheeler, many more! http://theculturalworker.blogspot.com/2011/07/who-what-and-where-of...

Comment by Doug Taylor on July 20, 2011 at 22:28

"Potiche": entertaining film features stars, strikes, class struggle

By Ed Rampell
Peoples World, March 30 2011

Review HERE

 

Comment by Doug Taylor on July 18, 2011 at 1:49

Movie Review:

'Made in Dagenham' a fun history lesson

Link HERE 

 

Comment by Doug Taylor on July 3, 2011 at 3:15

Short Takes: The Canadian Worker on Film

By David Frank
Labour/Le Travail
Fall 2000

Is there a Canadian labour film? After a century of film production in Canada, the answer is uncertain. Canadian workers do appear in a variety of documentary and feature film productions, but their presence often arises from the incidental processes of documentation and fictionalization.

There is also a more purposeful body of work focused on the concerns of labour history, but its promise remains relatively underdeveloped. Although film has become one of the dominant languages of communications at the end of the 20th century, the practice of visual history stands to benefit from closer collaboration between historians and film-makers.

Read more HERE. (pdf)

Comment by Doug Taylor on June 28, 2011 at 6:34

Gold Diggers of 1933

 

"We're in the money!"

 

Gold Diggers of 1933 has the reputation of being fluff - but what beautiful fluff - because it employed the greatest mass-dance choreographer of all time, Busby Berkeley. But if you have never seen it or remember only the fluff, it deserves another look, for it captures the economic contradictions of the Great Depression in a way only rivaled by Preston Sturge;s comedies.

The "gold diggers" are of course the chorus girls who want to make it - not by successufully hoofing it in a big Broadway show - but by marrying rich guys.

Stanley Solomon characterizes this film as one in which "money looms as an obsession, poverty as an ever-present threat", but Arthur Hove emphasizes that the moral of the story is that "chorus girls really do have a heart of gold". And while we remember the gals costumed as gold coins and dancing a capitalist jig, we forget that the film ends with images of unemployed veterans who have been forced to walk the breadlines. Sound familiar? Styles of filmmaking change, of course, but some problems never go away.

- From Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds and Riffraff: An expanded guide t... by Tom Zaniello.

Clips HERE.

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