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NOEL KING

RECENT'POLITICAL DOCUMENTARY

NOTES ON 'UNION MAIDS' AND'HARLAN COUNTY USA'

It is unfair in a sense to call a film intoquestion on terms which are not withinthe film-makers purpose. She [BarbaraKopple] intended to make a . . . 1 don'tknow if you .would call it a radical.. .but she intended to support the strikeand she did it. It's a marvellous film and1 support it.Christian Metz.1

As soon as you become caught up in thepositive aspect of American populism, assoon as you begin touching on thesubject matter, commercial and crass asyou are, you end up coming out withsomething fairly decent.Dan Georgakas.2

These two statements come from twoquite different film commentatorsdiscussing different kinds of film.Christian Metz is talking about HarlanCounty USA and Dan Georgakas isreferring to Hollywood's recent (re)'discovery' of the working class in filmssuch as F.I.S.T., Blue Collar and SaturdayNight Fever. But I think the statements,from their different perspectives, pointto a problem in current film criticism.The problem concerns that familiarformulation: the analysis of political

films versus the political analysis of films.Metz's statement is a reply to thefollowing question from Discoursemagazine:

Would you accept that a documentaryof a strike could be misleading insofaras it assumes that knoivledge isunproblematic and on the surface?3

In elaborating his reply Metz invokes thespecific instance of Harlan County USA,explaining that he and thousands of hisfellow Parisians loved the film. There aretwo points to notice in the positionrepresented by Metz's statement. The firstis that, to the strains of 'SolidarityForever', the ghost of authorial intentionrises and is readmitted to the vocabularyof film criticism. Any critical reading ofHarlan County USA falls silent in theface of an authorial good intention. The

1 'The cinematic apparatus as socialinstitution An interview with ChristianMetz', Discourse no 1, 1979, p 30.

2 "Hollywood and the working-class: Adiscussion'. Socialist Review, no 46 (vol9, no 4) July-August, 1979, p 121.

3 Discourse no 1, p 30.

at Universidade Estadual de Cam

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second thing to notice is the resurfacingof the notion that criticism should beadequate to its object in order to avoid asituation in which there could be a lackof fit between.a text and the way it wasread: it is the belief that in the case ofcertain kinds of films, criticism could be,literally, misplaced.

I'm wondering how it is that after adecade of film criticism which in part hasoffered critiques of authorial readings (thework of Barthes, Heath, Foucault,Willemen) how it is that if a film is saidto be political (as in 'a film about astrike') then it can once again become arepository of author-intended meanings.When this happens, criticism starts toslide away from any interrogation of theways in which films are appropriated andused, the conditions under which theyare distributed and discussed, the specificconjunctures in which they are inserted.For this is the ideological terrainoverlooked in Metz's statement. Anotherway of formulating the position of thatargument would be to say something like:if a film has its heart in the right place,if it alerts people to contexts of struggleof which they otherwise might never havebeen aware, then what right have I tosubject that film to the sort of criticismI normally perform? This notion of thefunction of film theory being compromisedby the evidence of the other uses to whicha particular film might be put in itscirculation, is evident in RuthMcCormick's Cineaste review of UnionMaids where she says she is 'not surehow much analysis or theorising shouldbe done on a film such as this.'4 This ideaof 'avoiding' analysis is an ideologyfamiliar from that form of literarycriticism in which the opposition of'feeling' and 'theorising' has such force.

4 Ruth McCormick, 'Union Maids', Cineastevol 8, no 1, Summer 1977, p 51.

In the case of this kind of literarycriticism 'theorising' is thought to impedea thoroughly subjective, affective surrenderto the experience of an 'encounter' withthe text. In the case of McCormick'sremarks however, avoidance of theorisingseems to be prompted by the belief thatthe use of Union Maids in areas outside aCineaste review could show analysis tobe impoverished or impertinent. Analysiswould be misplaced.

One way of beginning to reply to thisposition would be to insist that textstraverse various institutional locations.The fact that a Berkeley woman's groupmight use Union Maids as an organisingtool needn't affect other appropriationsof the film. This is to say simply that afilm such as Union Maids is read and re-written in specific, partisan conjunctures:a woman's group is one, an article inCineaste or Jump Cut is another, anarticle in part talking about the film'sintersection with those first two areas(film journals) constitutes a third. UnionMaids is based on Alice and StaughtonLynd's book: Rank and File: PersonalHistories of Working Class Organizers.(Beacon Press, Boston, 1973) LindaGordon's review of the film forJump Cut contains an accurate enoughdescription of Union Maids as:

a collective portrait of three womenlabour organisers active from the 1930sto the present. . . . The three womenwere part of a community of working classChicago socialists. They all came toChicago in their youth, wo from farmsand one from New Orleans; all enteredindustrial jobs in the 1930s and rapidlybecame rank and file activists, unionorganisers and socialist leaders.

In their respective analyses of UnionMaids Linda Gordon (Jump Cut) and Ruth




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l McCormick (Cineaste) saw the film'sprincipal potential as an organising tool

I for women's and workers' organisationsand each urged discussion sessions toaccompany screenings of the film. Gordonhoped 'that its showing will often becombined with discussions in which itspolitical implications can be evaluated'while McCormick thought that "discussionscan be built from the ideas presented,however summarily, in the film'. Both theCineaste and Jump Cut reviews identifiedthe same set of problems to be addressedin these post-screening discussions. First,Ruth McCormick:

Certainly this kind of discussion couldhelp to clarify the aforementioned lack ofemphasis on the role of the CP and theradical left in the struggles depicted. Inaddition the questions of sexism on thejob, and even, as the women mention,in the unions and among leftist men,which exists now as then, could bediscussed. Other good discussion pointsinclude the issue that Sylvia brings upabout working women having to work onthe job to return to more work at home,and Stella's statement about theinsensitivity she has sometimesencountered in the women's movementfrom better educated, more privilegedwotnen, to the double oppression of poorwomen.

Similarly Linda Gordon found the film'sdocumentary stance

perhaps most disturbing on the questionof leadership and socialist organisationwithin the CIO. 1 think that all threewomen were members of the Communistparty. However, the film masks their partymembership. The three women speak ofthemselves as 'radicals', not socialists orcommunists and say nothing about theirorganisational connections.

This resulted in a

failure to discuss the discipline, support,comradeship and strategic consultationthese women got from their Partycomrades [which] suggests that somehowthey became effective leaders magically,through their innate individual talents.

This article tries to identify some problemswhich go unmentioned in the Jump Cutand Cineaste reviews. In a sense mycomments take up a throw-away remarkmade by Ruth McCormick ('a film likeUnion Maids very likely owes itspopularity to the fact that it appeals tothe heart more than the head') andexamine the implications it has forreadings done of the film in journals suchas Cineaste and Jump Cut. To this extent,these notes could form the basis for aslightly different kind of post-screeningdiscussion from the ones envisaged byGordon and McCormick. The purpose ofsuch a project will be to try to break thecomplicity of certain kinds of readingswith certain forms of representationaltechniques so that rather than readingwith a film or reading off from it, readingmight go against the film. This is afamiliar project when applied toHollywood texts but is less familiar andfavoured when applied to leftist texts. Itconstitutes an attempt to 'interfere'with the circulation of, say, Union Maids,With Babies and Banners, Harlan CountyUSA (perhaps The Willmar 8) as leftcultural commodities, the start of somecounter-archive. It is an attempt to readthese documentaries against the grain, torefuse the reading it is the work of theirtextual systems to secure. In seeking torefuse these films in their current form astep is taken towards thinking what mightbe put in their place. In Macherey'sdescription:




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The type of analysis which I propose isprecisely to read the ideologicalcontradictions within the devicesproduced to conceal them, to reconstitutethe contradictions from their system ofconcealment*

(In the case of Union Maids these deviceswould be the interview format itself andthe intersection of discourses of biography,autobiography and popular narrativehistory.) It is a mode of analysis directed,as Balibar and Macherey have said, at

the textual devices which present thecontradictions of an ideological discourseat the same time as the fiction of its unityand its reconciliation.6

So in the case of these recentdocumentaries we might notice the waya discourse of morals or ethics suppressesone of politics and the way a discourseof a subject's individual responsibilitysuppresses any notion of a discourse onthe social and linguistic formation ofsubjects. So in Union Maids there is thestory of the group's obligation to Katiefor her exemplary behaviour ('Four yearslater Katie, we finally made it up to you').This is the familiar trope of subjectsbecoming 'worthy' and Union Maidspersistently mobilises the device of anindividual moral recognition of wrongness,an individual suddenly breaking throughblinkeredness and coming toconsciousness. In this sense the politicsin Union Maids might be termed a'redemptivist polities'; that is to say apolitics caught up in political,representations which contain moral-ethical elements; a system wherequestions of individual responsibility areparamount. It is a politics articulated bytextual mechanisms which fix theindividual subject as responsible, as either

fulfilling or not fulfilling a morally given 11imperative and this in turn results in anotion of triumph or guilt. It produces alogic for political action based on penanceand redemption. This moralistic mode ofrepresentation is not confined to thefunction-of the three narrators; the filmtalks about rent in the same way. Ratherthan be represented as a particular formof economic calculation, rent is given amoral status, is accorded an oppressive,evil intent within an organising pardigmof the individual versus the institutional.Hence the story of the young policemanseeing through his deforming, repressive,institutional location and going over tothe side of the people by passing aroundthe hat ('Here's your goddamn rent').The point to notice is that this is onlyone possible representation of rent (onefamiliar from the melodramas of thesilent era) but is the one which bestserves the film's humanist-historicist ends.The landlord is constructed (howeverbriefly) as a represser whose functionis to block the people's march forward.Rent is represented within a largersystem of guilt and redemption, goodand bad faith.

The narrative system of Union Maidsis comprised of a number of sub-formsof narrative, a series of mini-narratives:biography, autobiography and popularnarrative history: biography (insofar asthe film offers itself as a biographicalaccount of the lives of three radicals),autobiography (in that the interviewformat allegedly allows these women totell their own life histories) and popularnarrative history (in the form of a

5 Pierre Macherey, Interview with ColinMercer and Jean Radford, Red Lettersno 5, p 5.

6 Pierre Macherey, and Etienne Balibar,'Literature as an ideological form: Somemarxist propositions', Oxford LiteraryReview, vol 3, no 1, p 8.




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12

Union Maids

bridging voice-over commentary spokenby the interviewers at those momentswhere archival footage of 'America inthe 30Y is inserted into the narrative).Autobiography draws on practices ofreminiscence and anecdote, notions ofpersonal experience, while popularnarrative history constructs notions ofnational destiny. These two trajectories

then merge, the one of individualistlife-history, the other of collectivisednational movements and in each case themovement is tclelogical: from a past toa present, from a point of origin orgenesis along a casual chain until wereach the present. The present becomesthe point from which we can know thepast. The effect of employing such afamiliar narrative system is that theorigin always already contains the end.(In this sense originary narratives alwaysseem diachronic when, in fact, they arestatic).

This group of recent politicaldocumentaries all take the form of ahumanist-historicist mode with auniversalising populist tendency andsurprisingly, fit quite closely Brecht'sdescription of the operations ofbourgeois theatre and its habit ofemphasising

County USA




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the timelessness of its objects . . . All itsincidents are just one enormous cue andthis cue is followed by the 'eternal1response, the inevitable, usual, natural,purely human response.7

The narrative systems of these recentdocumentaries are calculated to make asimilarly unanlmist call to identification.A specific example of this would be thaimoment in Harlem County USA whereFlorence Reese's aged, cracked voice sings'Which Side Are You On'. Within thenarrative organisation of Harlan CountyUSA this becomes a strategy aimed atcreating a space of historical continuity,linking the 'bloody Harlan' of 1931 withthe situation of 1972. Reese thereby Isconstructed as a repository of all those

Bercolt Brecht, in John Willett (ed),Brecht on Theatre, London, Eyre-Methuen,

interim years of struggle and suffering. 13Harlan County USA is shot through withsimilar strategies, as when another oldwoman says

I've been through all this in the 30s. Theymay shoot me but they can't shoot theunion out of me.

Or when Lawrence Jones' mother 'rewrites'her son's death

That's what my son was shot over . . .he was shot for the union, and 1 don'twant my kids ever to he a yellow-backedscab. I want them to be a union man.

Or when a family recalls having watchedits father die of black-lung disease andthen having vowed to 'get the coalcompany'. These strategies are relatedto similar strategies evident in the

Harlan County USA




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14 of labour history and perhaps are thoughtto solve the problem of 'evidence'. Butany strategy which locates evidence/history unproblematically in the human,the natural, means that history is held toreside-in the subjectivities of itsparticipants, in their individuatedperception of events. Politics therebytends to be given at the level of the bodyand inevitably becomes heavily moralised.A series of witnesses are unanswerablein their existential authenticity; they areconstructed as incontrovertible within atextual system which effectively foreclosesany possibility of dialogue and analysis.

Stuart Hall remarked recently, 'weknow, for example, that in marxisttheory, the category of experience cannotbe an unproblematic one'.8 Yet theformats used for these recentdocumentaries would tend to suggestthat experience is unproblematic. Theinterview format of Union Maids providesa clear example of the sorts of practicesI'm citing in that it offers a highlyideological construction of history asdefined by the presence or absenceof individuals who become, thereby,archives. The interview format in UnionMaids constructs a notion of history asexperienced by subjects but the film hasnothing to say about the rules whichconstruct interviews and subjects in andfor interviews. The unasked questionresting behind all the1 questions asked ofthe three women in Union Maids issomething like: 'Would history have beendifferent without you?'

What occurs in these recent politicaldocumentaries is the intersection of aform of historicism with a documentarymode organised along the lines of classicalnarrative. Keith Tribe, writing on thisquestion which might be termed 'thecinema-history effect' commented:

The combination of historicism with film

results often in a humanism whichconstructs historical narrative as theactions of historical persons . . .History in the cinema thus too easilypresupposes that the historicity of eventsrests on the faithful representations oftKe agents of the history*

In a related context Michel Foucault hasobserved

The desire to make historical analysisthe discourse of continuity and thedesire to make human consciousness theoriginating subject of all learning and allpractice are the two traces of one andthe same system of thought. This systemconceives time in terms of totalizationand revolution never as anything but acoming to consciousness.10

Union Maids is a film in which the notionof individuals coming to consciousnessis very strong and it seems a pertinentexample of the way (again quoting Tribe):

In film, historicism and humanism becomecomplementary problems: the attemptto realise a history regresses rapidly toa humanism as its support in which theperson is the bearer of the history, thevisible agent of historicity, in whoseactions are inscribed the truth of thepast.11

Union Maids tells its story of past eventsthrough an uncontested representationof the memories of three women 'who

8 Stuart Hall, 'Marxism and culture',Radical History Review no 18, Fall 1978,p l l .

9 Keith Tribe, 'History and the productionof memories', Screen, vol 18, no 4,1977/78, p 22.

10 Michel Foucault, 'A reply to the Cercled'EpistemoIogie', Theoretical Practiceno 3/4, p 112.

11 Tribe, op cit, p 22




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rose to the demands of their time'. Thenarrativisation of the memories of thesethree women inevitably accords them anexemplary or exceptional status at thesame time as the film's populist thrustinsists on their ordinariness andreplaceability. This opposition ofordinary/extraordinary or typical/transcendent is a direct effect of the film'sordering as a textual system and isbound in with the problem the film hasin relating individual memory to classcollectivity. This is one among severalcontradictions which persistently threatenUnion Maids' coherent discourse. Giventhat it is the function of a classicalnarrative system to suppress and suturesuch potentially discontinuous orcontradictory features, any reading ofsuch texts should notice precisely howthat suturing occurs. This would be areading aimed at uncovering some of thetropes used by a film such as UnionMaids in order for it to tell the kind ofhistory it does.

Such a reading of Union Maids couldbegin by considering a simple but centralpoint alluded to earlier: the relationholding among the archival footage, theanecdotal reminiscences constructed inthe interviews and the bridging voice-overnarration (spoken by the three women)talking about 'America in the 1930s'.In her Cineaste review of the film RuthMcCormick stated that the 'rare photosand newsreel footage of the 1930s . . .[are] just right' and later added, 'Evenbeyond the accounts of the women, thenewsreels speak for themselves*. On thecontrary I would argue thatthese imagesfrom the archive are mute. They must beread but the possibility of a wrongreading, one which saw these images asno more than a series of representationssusceptible to re-interpretation, is insuredagainst by the familiar strategy of linkingthe images to the anecdotal narratives of

the three character icons. This linking 15and harmonising need not have occurred:it doesn't occur in Godard's work, forexample. In Union Maids it is a linkingaimed at securing a specific reading. It isone of a number of textual strategiesaimed at constructing, in Foucault'sphrase, a 'discourse of continuity' whichresults not in 'the past' but rather in theeffect of the past.

In making these sorts of comments I'murging a wariness in the face of anarrative system which tends touniversalise that which it represents. InUnion Maids militance is held to beuniversal, timeless, always waiting belowthe surface of a placid people (as opposedto being exemplarily present within thesethree women at a particular historicalconjuncture). Kate's final speech the'let the people decide' speech is nodifferent from Ma Joad's at the end ofJohn Ford's Grapes of Wrath. If one wereproducing a counter-text to Union Maidsit would be useful to insert Ma Joad'sspeech, the cab scene from On theWaterfront, dub over Frank Sinatrasinging 'My Way' as a means ofdemonstrating that similar tropes organiseother texts.

In the same way one should questionthe use made of songs in Harlan CountyUSA and Union Maids since their effect isalways to hold a reading at the level ofthe visceral, the affective, the nostalgic.Their use is celebrative and cathartic andit should be enough to note that recentpopular songs such as 'Shaddup you Face'or 'Come on Aussie, Come on' are quiteas catchy as 'Solidarity Forever' or 'Carryit On'.

In raising objections of this kind (allcentering on the questions of the 'cinema-history effect' in these documentaries)the question of the kind of access to thepresent offered by a film such as UnionMaids has to be confronted. The




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16 celebration of the film in Cineaste and]ump-Cut derives from the belief thatthe film does provide such access. It isseen as a film which reasserts

the potential of leadership by peoplewho are at once exceptional andordinary.12

This is an example of a reading that isthoroughly complicit with certain textualmechanisms which have worked to secureit. For the dialectic of exceptional/ordinary is no more than the effect of aparticular narrative ordering, adocumentary using a populist classicalnarrative mode. If this is the case thenone can't simply read the images ashaving an innate and timeless pertinence,as having immediate relevance tocontemporary contexts. A similarqualification would need to be made ofthe ]ump Cut/Cineaste judgment ofUnion Maids as being

about working class history made tobecome part of the working class future.13

I'll try to ground these general criticismsin a specific instance, one which concernsthe rather limited understanding ofunionism provided by the film.

In Union Maids the union is representedas a vehicle for the expression of pre-existing, almost genetic values. So muchis clear from the three narrators' accountsof their family origins and the way thisrelated to their subsequent immersion inradicalism. They were destined for it.This notion of the union as a vessel fortheir already-formed characters, this modeof constructing unionism, presentsa problem for the film. Forif the union movement is a vehiclefor the expression of essentialvalues then how does one account for thefact that shop-floor racism exists, the

fact that a fore-lady has to be black, thefact that a black man is not allowed inthe workshop? This problem is dealt with,in a very interesting way. Sylvia gives aboss's speech in the guise of unionism;that is, that in a time of highunemployment you either work with theblack guy or you go ('just go down thenearest street corner and find onehundred more'). But this is followed byanother, quite different, story around thequestion of racism in the union. In thissecond story (Stella's), colour is erasedby the communality of working together.The trope here is that of an homogenousessence in the working class, conditionedby their labour. But this second accountdenies those immediately preceding events(Sylvia's story) where integration wasachieved not by a quasi-religious view oflabour but by the threat of punitive actionfrom the union, punitive action ofprecisely the kind associated with bossesand management. The narrative hereeffects a rapid rewriting of history infavour of another, rosier version of theworking class; a narrative denial iseffected to produce an ideologicalrepresentation of the working class. Fora moment Union Maids posed the workingclass in terms other than that of anhomogenous entity conditioned by work,only to have this rapidly replaced by theview that unionism harmonises racism.14

12 Linda Gordon, 'Union maids: Workingclass heroines', ]ump Cut no 14, p 34.

13 ibid, p 34.14 For an account of a film practice (other

than Godard's) which does not use thissystem of representation, see ClaireJohnston and Paul Willemen, 'Brecht inBritain: The independent political film(on The Nightcleaners)', Screen, vol 16, no4, pp 101-118. The following statementseems appropriate in the context of myremarks on Union Maids 'It [The 'Nightcleaners] avoids the trap of present-ing the working class as an ideologicallyhomogenous bloc and focusses on internalcontradictions as well.' (p 108).




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In noticing such elisions of potentialcontradictions one also notices thatnarrative is a system with its own effects.Narrative produces a syntagmatic flowof events, an easy diachronic progressionwhich ensures a working out of allproblems, guarantees an increase inknowledge on the reader's part, promisescontainment and completion. And whenmoments arise which threaten incoherencein the ordering of the discourse, theseincoherencies are recast as momentarydeviations.

What point is there in telling storiesin which individuals either fulfil or fail tofulfil morally given imperatives, storieswhich deal in destiny or damnation?What does it mean after all to constructa narrative history of the kind given inUnion Maids, to seek to recover anhistorical origin, a past which is definedexistentially? Any sustained analysis ofHarlan County USA or Union Maidsinstead should notice the way the effectof 'experience' is constructed, notice thetextual mechanisms at work producingthese effects rather than goingimmediately, affectively to the producedeffects. To see history in terms of anorigin means that the present isunderstood in terms of fulfilling thatorigin: one is consigned to destiny orguilt. For an origin means that any actionis no more than a realising of that whichalready exists, contained in the origin.One way of noticing how limited is UnionMaids' understanding of the conditionsmaking possible the formation of unions and the place of women within them would be to ask how useful the film'srepresentational mode is to anunderstanding of working class andfeminist movements now. Given that thefilm attributes a common origin toworking class and feminist movements(it rewrites the history of unionism as if

it had been female) one might ask what 17use is this attribution of a commonorigin now? Origins clearly areunimportant in terms of current politicalconditions and calculations. Why shouldpolitical action now bother to recover acommon origin? Do working class andfeminist movements have an essence intheir origin or are they instead quitefragmented? The discontinuities withinfeminism would be evident from ascrutiny of its sites of reproduction(pedagogical institutions, governmentinstrumentalities, political parties,theoretical journals, conferences). Plainlyfeminism as a theoretical practice is notunified by an notion of a common originand to that extent shares no commonorigin with unionism.

What then might be put in place ofUnion Maids? Trying to provide an anti-historicist reading of a humanist-historicist text must be a prelude to amore direct form of textual intervention(which could take the form of theproduction of the counter-text alludedto earlier). We must refuse the film in itscurrent form (a form in which we'veencountered many others like it). Anti-historicism

abandons the past as a principle ofvalidation which dominates all otherconcerns; it instead argues that 'history'is something perpetually constructed ina specific conjuncture ... The conditionsof production of history are not the actsof revelation of a past but are determinaterelations in a given conjuncture.15

Another way of phrasing this is to saythat history surely has to be moreimmediate than any representation of anorigin. As Stephen Heath phrases it:

15 Tribe, op cit, p 12.




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18 effective memory for struggle . .. willnot be a function of the past but of thepresent, will be a production.

So the work of any reading of UnionMaids or any other of these recentpolitical documentaries must concentrateon the various moments of textualcompromise, those suturings which banishother modes of analysing these sameproblems. Such analyses would point tothe trained nature of the reading andwriting of texts, a f-aining of reading andwriting which, for example, producedUnion Maids in its current form (and itmust be stressed that this form ispowerfully actual). Such an analysis couldshow that the writing of a text such asUnion Maids occurs within the conditionsof its reading; that is to say within certaintraditions of populist cultural history andliterature (a fact evidenced in the veryfamiliarity of its tropes). It is thiscircularity of writing and reading whichclinches the text's effectivity, and thismeans that a reading of it cannot affordto let that circle close. In seeking to resistthose highly familiar and persuasive setsof rhetorical conventions, we need toimagine other modes of representation(for example, a text which depicted itsown strategies and practices and whichdid not provide a complete, unifiedrepresentation of class and collectivity).In Ranciere's words:

the problem is not to reconstitute but toproduce because the problem is not tounite but to divide.17

If it is the spontaneous function both ofcinema and of memory to unite then thisfunction must be resisted. We surely don'tneed to recover a unanimist way intoclass struggle nor do we need torediscover a suppressed tradition. Thedifficulty confronting any sustainedanalysis of these recent political

documentaries is that one would want tobe anti-historicist without at the sametime seeming to be destructively anti-historical. No one would want to denyor deride past struggles but nor wouldone necessarily want to acceptunequivocally the representations/reconstructions of these struggles whengiven, say, in the form of Harlan CountyUSA and Union Maids. A Brechtian maximmight be usefully borne in mind whentrying to think of practices of film-making and film criticism which coulddiffer from the ones mentionedthroughout this article:

Don't start from the good old things butthe bad new ones.18

In the case of Union Maids this mightmean starting from the fact of theinterview format itself, refusing the kindof function it performs in the film as itcurrently stands.19

16 Stephen Heath, 'Contexts', EdinburghMagazine 1977.

17 Jacques RanciSre, Interview, 'L'lmageFraternelle', Cahiers du Cinema nos 268/69, abridged translation in EdinburghMagazine 1977, pp 26-31.

18 Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht,London, New Left Books, 1976, p 121.

19 Had this been a longer article I mighthave spent more time on the 'line* ofjournals such as Jump Cut, Cineaste andSocialist Review. For the moment,Lesley Stern's comments in 'Feminism andCinema Exchanges', Screen, vol 20nos 3/4 (especially pp 94-96) seem tome very applicable to the reviews I amdiscussing.

I would also like to thank Ian Hunter,Dugald Williamson and Ric Phillips for theircontributions in the writing of this article.The responsibility for the final form of thearticle is, of course, my own.

Union Maids and Harlan County USAare available in the UK from The OtherCinema, 79 Wardour St, London Wl.Union Maids is also available from Con-temporary Films, 55 Greek St, London Wl.




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