Sound interprets visual images, provides continuity and context, hides edits, eases scene changes, creates mood, and makes montage possible. Film sound affects what the viewer simultaneously sees, even as film images affect what the viewer simultaneously hears. In Harlan, sound anchors, explains, and makes “authentic” visual imagery compromised by the long history of documentary making in Appalachia.Īs Michel Chion, Rick Altman, Claudia Gorbman, and other scholars of film sound have argued, film works visually as well as aurally, even in the misnamed era of “silent” film. does some of its most compelling work, however, by engaging the sense of hearing. Kopple cannot directly engage all of the senses, but she certainly tries, visually evoking touch (the finger and the piece of brain) and smell (the bodies of people who do not have indoor plumbing) and taste (the endless white bread and baloney sandwiches of the picket line). In the film, bits of brain blasted into a dirt road, mucus coughed up by miners with black lung, chunks of coal hacked out of the earth, and cigarette smoke drifting from the noses of miners and their wives on the picket line struggle to counter romanticized images of poor Appalachians. Images of the raw materials of life in eastern Kentucky help convey the struggles of Brookside miners and their families during the 1973–1974 strike against mine owner Duke Power for the right to work under a United Mine Workers contract. In her 1976 Academy Award–winning documentary Harlan County, U.S.A., Barbara Kopple labors to wring a sense of visceral realism out of the overexposed visual landscape of Appalachian poverty. The camera then pans up from the finger to an arm, a man’s naked shoulder and chest, and then a face as the voice speaks again, coming out of the lips that at last appear: “Piss ants carrying off a man’s brains while they are in the hospital dying.” It is the sound-this first disembodied and then located voice-that tells viewers what they have seen in this scene. “That’s the brains of a goddamned fellow who tried to do something,” a male voice says. What makes the scene so difficult to watch and hear is not the visual image, however, but the words. The quick cut to the scene of the glistening glob leaves the viewer visually bewildered. Previous scenes have shown striking miner Lawrence Jones lying in a coma in the hospital, the sounds of the breathing machine keeping him alive and the clicks and beeps of hospital monitors clearly audible. Even after an enormous disembodied finger pokes into the frame, the visual alone remains indecipherable.
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An organic shape, small and shiny and pinkish white, sits on a dark, rough ground. (1976) looks at first like an abstract painting. The most shocking moment in Harlan County, U.S.A.