Barbara Kopple

Barbara Kopple (born July 30, 1946, New York City, New York, U.S.) is an American director and producer who is best known for her riveting documentaries that chronicle battles in the American labor movement in the 1970s and ’80s. She was the first woman to win two Academy Awards in the documentary feature category, for Harlan County U.S.A. (1976) and American Dream (1990). Harlan County U.S.A., which captures a coal miners’ strike in Kentucky and the violent attempts to suppress it, is widely regarded as one of the greatest documentaries of all time.

Family background

Kopple grew up in Scarsdale, New York, the daughter of a textiles executive and a homemaker. She has described her upbringing as being solidly middle-class and supportive, telling Bomb magazine in 1992, “My parents gave me a sense of security, a sense that I could do things—that let me be brave enough to go outside of where I’m from.” She has also cited her uncle, Murray Burnett, as being an important influence on her. Burnett was a schoolteacher and a writer whose unproduced play Everybody Comes to Rick’s (which he wrote with Joan Alison) was sold to Hollywood and adapted into the classic film Casablanca (1942).

Education, Gimme Shelter, and other early work

Kopple attended Northeastern University in Boston, where she studied political science and psychology. After graduating in 1968, she enrolled in a course in cinéma vérité at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. When an opportunity arose to intern for Albert and David Maysles, two brothers and filmmakers who were innovators in cinéma vérité, Kopple jumped at the chance to work with them. She interned on the films Salesman (1969), which follows four Bible salesmen, and Gimme Shelter (1970), a chilling documentary of the Rolling Stones’ disastrous tour of America in 1969. (The tour culminated in a free concert with other musical acts at the Altamont Speedway in California, where a young Black concertgoer was killed during the Stones’ set by a member of the Hells Angels, who had been hired as the festival’s security.) In interviews, Kopple has described the Maysles brothers as filmmakers who treated women film workers as equals and fostered a nurturing, creative atmosphere on set.

At this early stage in her career, she took on roles as sound recordist and mixer, camera operator, and assistant editor. Other documentaries she worked on for other directors or as part of a film collective include two films about the Vietnam War and its veterans, Winter Soldier (1972) and Hearts and Minds (1974), and the film Year of the Woman (1973), about the women’s movement’s convergence on the 1972 Democratic National Convention.

Harlan County U.S.A.

In the early 1970s Kopple went to Harlan county in southeastern Kentucky to film a documentary about the Brookside coal miners’ strike. The strike began in 1973 after the miners voted to join the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) in a bid for higher wages and other improvements. The mine owners—the Eastover Mining Company, a subsidiary of the Duke Power Company—refused to sign the miners’ contract, leading to a bloody 13-month struggle by the miners and their families before the contract was signed. Kopple spent four years living in the coalfields of Kentucky for the film that would become her directorial debut. With a small crew that often consisted of just two people, she immersed herself in the Harlan community, gaining the trust of the miners and their families while joining them on the picket lines. In the process, she captured some astonishing moments on film, including a shooting that occurred before dawn one day when a gunman hired by Duke drove past the picket line and began firing on the strikers. At one point, the gunman aims his weapon directly at Kopple and her cameras, and she can be heard off-camera screaming, “Don’t shoot!”

The completed film, Harlan County U.S.A., mixes archival footage of coal mining and previous labor struggles, stirring renditions of bluegrass-style protest songs, and scenes shot inside the Brookside mine, at the funeral of a young coal miner who was shot on the picket line, and during the organizing meetings of the miners’ formidable wives, widows, mothers, and daughters. The documentary also covers the poverty in Harlan county, power struggles in the UMWA, and black lung disease. Kopple’s film takes an unabashedly partisan stance—unsurprisingly perhaps, as she once described herself in an interview as “a political person first and a filmmaker second.” In 1990 Harlan County U.S.A. was added to the National Film Registry, a film preservation program established by the U.S. Library of Congress that selects films of cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance.

(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)

American Dream

After Harlan County U.S.A., Kopple’s next major project was American Dream, another documentary of a labor struggle—this time at the Hormel Foods Corporation’s meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota. The film follows a strike launched by 1,500 Hormel workers in 1985 after their wages and benefits were significantly cut, even after the company announced a profit in the previous year of $29 million. Kopple’s film captures the workers’ high hopes as the strike begins and the movement’s collapse into despair and violence as the union local loses the support of the United Food and Commercial Workers International, strikebreakers cross the picket line, and the National Guard is called in by the governor. Other scenes show union members and families torn apart over the decision on whether to return to work or stay on strike. In 2018 Point of View Magazine wrote of the film, “If the in-fighting of Harlan County was dramatic, the fissures between union members of American Dream proved explosive while capturing the devastating impact of Reagan-era economics on the working class.” American Dream won Kopple a second Oscar for best documentary feature.

Other films

In the 1990s Kopple directed several television documentaries as well as feature-length films, often on celebrity subjects. Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson (1993) looks at the life and career of the champion boxer, leading up to his conviction in 1992 for rape. Wild Man Blues (1997) follows filmmaker Woody Allen as he goes on tour in Europe with his jazz band. Notably, it was the first time a film captured scenes of Allen’s controversial relationship with his third wife, Soon-Yi Previn, who was the adopted daughter of Allen’s former partner Mia Farrow. Kopple also directed documentaries about the Woodstock concert of 1969 and the ’90s versions of that music festival, as well as episodes of the TV shows Homicide: Life on the Street and Oz.

In 2006 Kopple released Shut Up & Sing, a behind-the-scenes look at the country music band the Dixie Chicks (now known as the Chicks) as they write and record their album Taking the Long Way (2006). The film’s portrait came at a key point in the band’s career, three years after lead singer Natalie Maines’s statements disparaging then president George W. Bush for the Iraq War ignited a campaign of heavy criticism and even death threats against the band. In 2015 Kopple offered another intimate portrait of a music artist at a crisis moment when she released Miss Sharon Jones!. The film documents the inspiring career of the Grammy-nominated soul and R&B singer Sharon Jones, who was being treated for pancreatic cancer by day even as she was performing onstage at night. (Jones died from the disease in 2016.) Other, later documentaries include Desert One (2019), about the Iran hostage crisis, and Gumbo Coalition (2022), about the civil rights leaders Marc Morial and Janet Murguía and their advocacy work for voting rights and immigration reform in the wake of anti-immigration policies during the Donald Trump administration.

Kopple has also served as an executive producer of projects directed by other filmmakers. Notable among these projects is The Super Models (2023), a four-part series that examines the careers of ’90s supermodels Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, and Christy Turlington. Kopple’s touch is evident in the series’ enlightening perspective on the four models not only as glamorous celebrities who helped define a decade but also as pioneering women workers in the fashion industry.