The Kopple Effect: Women Directing Documentaries

This chapter traces the reverberations of Barbara Kopple’s decision in 1973 to travel to Harlan County, Kentucky, where her tiny crew would plunge into filming what would become a new kind of classic labor documentary, in which the workers did not have to yield or even share screen time with talking heads or traditional leaders. The chapter illustrates how these decisions, which resulted in the creation of Harlan County USA, generated a wave of filmmakers, many of them women, who were either directly influenced by Kopple’s project or were in synch with the movement ideals she and her crew espoused. It argues that Kopple’s intensive focus on the workers’ lives and their struggles not only generated interest in filming workers deeply involved in labor strife, but also facilitated a cadre of other women filmmakers, most directly with Anne Lewis and Mimi Pickering from Appalshop, but also indirectly with other independent filmmakers such as Julia Reichert and Judith Helfand.