Barbara Kopple: Acolyte to Leading Light

Barbara Kopple survived and thrived for five decades as a producer and director in the ever-insecure world of documentary filmmaking. This chapter explores how the arc of her career fits into a greater history of documentary production, and how her business and promotional methods became and continue to function as role models. The chapter considers Kopple’s career in relation to other female documentarians (e.g. Frances Flaherty, Esther Shub, Helen Van Dongen, and others), as well as considers the ‘family feeling’ organizational model used by Kopple and other American documentary filmmakers, particularly those based in New York. The chapter also examines Kopple’s legacy in terms of the many filmmakers who she has mentored, collaborated with, and inspired in their own documentary practices.

Fallen Champ: Poetics of the Documentary Film Interview

The chapter considers the cast of interview subjects in Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson (1993) and analyses the interviews themselves, first asking what the function is of each in terms of the unfolding plot and/or the argument underlying the film as a whole. It then considers the interview from five poetic categories: the presence of the filmmaker, the perspective established through setting and camera position, the pictorial context established by the preceding and the following sequences, the performance of those interviewed, and the polyvalence of the overall effect the interview contributes to the film. The chapter argues that Barbara Kopple maintains a delicate balance between portraying Tyson as a victimized ghetto refugee and a brutal fighter through her approach to the interviews in the film.

Afterword: Getting Inside

This Afterword provides an overview of Barbara Kopple’s career and documentary studies as a field. It considers Kopple’s working life as a filmmaker, specifically the tensions between independent and commercial production. It also considers the evolution of nonfiction filmmaking as a field, including Kopple’s role in the proliferation of documentaries in film, television, and digital platforms. Finally, it highlights Kopple’s key strategies as a filmmaker, specifically her uses of interviews.

Kopple’s Work within the Changing Documentary Business Ecology

Barbara Kopple has both worked within, and helped to shape, a changing documentary environment. This chapter discusses the changing options and creative solutions Kopple has faced in funding and distributing her work. The independent documentary scene Kopple first encountered involved being funded primarily through government agencies and private foundations and distributed in theatres and on public television. She went on to explore relationships with major network television networks (e.g. Homicide) and cable outlets. She has developed a substantial body of work in sponsored documentaries, profiling organizations and people with whom she politically or socially has some kind of affinity. Throughout, she has been able to maintain relationships and exploit existing markets while exploring new ones. The chapter examines how her career also tracks the changing conditions for independent documentary filmmakers.

The Peekskill Projects: Race, Riots, and Paul Robeson

Drawing on materials donated by Kopple to New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, this chapter traces the contexts and significance of several aborted efforts by Kopple to dramatize the Peekskill riots, a series of violent events in 1949 in response to a planned concert by Paul Robeson. The chapter reviews the impacts of these events on Kopple’s childhood and early filmmaking career, including her developing racial consciousness and investments in documenting incidents of social crisis. The chapter suggests that these materials highlight Kopple’s inclinations as a storyteller when engaging with issues of race: her tendency to gloss over the nuances of systemic racism in an effort to sustain the momentum and emotional tug of the crisis narrative.

Barbara Kopple: A Career of Personal Crises and Creative Tensions

This chapter underscores the longstanding tensions in Kopple’s career. It focuses her complex and often ambivalent relationships with collaboration, including her fluctuating status as an auteur, mentor, and crew member. It examines the tensions in her career between embracing her identity as an independent filmmaker and choosing to join with studios, television networks, and other media outlets in a complex system of commercial patronage. The chapter also considers Kopple’s shifting political stances as both activist and apolitical humanist. Finally, it provides overviews of each section and chapter.

Exposing the Lethal Gaze in Shut Up & Sing! and Running from Crazy

This chapter examines Shut Up and Sing! and Running from Crazy to consider the ways in which Kopple’s use of archival footage contributes to the construction of biography. It poses the question of what recordings of a person from different—but always selective—moments in their lives may tell us about what it means to represent an individual and a life through recorded traces. In these two films, Kopple trains her eye on women who have lived in the media spotlight and draws on existing recordings of them in order to try to understand how the cameras that previously recorded them have helped shape the course of their lives. In doing so, the chapter explores how she reveals something about the gaze of those cameras, the ways in which their act of recording has had lethal—or at least menacing—effects on their subjects.

American Dream in God’s Country: Odysseys in Documentary, Hospitality, Place

This chapter argues that Barbara Kopple’s American Dream (1990) and Louis Malle’s God’s Country (1985), although quite different in tone and subject matter, presciently trace the outlines of current political fragmentation and economic despair during the era of Donald Trump’s election and presidency. The chapter argues that if American Dream is a dystopian sequel to Harlan County USA, then God’s Country can be viewed as a portrait of a ragged social fabric barely covering the racism and anti-Semitism of the townspeople. Both films depend upon the kindness of strangers: the openness of citizens of “fly-over” America to outsiders—both Jews, a New Yorker and a Frenchman, with cameras, microphones and crew—who are at once keen observers of the subtle interactions among neighbors, friends, and adversaries and intimate participants in the day-to-day struggles that comprise a strike or a farm. Attentive to place, the chapter argues these films explore labor and affect through the presence of the camera.

Harlan County, USA and the Documentary Form: A Forty-year Retrospective

This chapter revisits E. Ann Kaplan’s “Harlan County USA: The Documentary Form,” which appeared in the journal Jump Cut in 1977 and remains one of the few in-depth articles devoted to Kopple’s early career. This chapter reassesses the film’s significance in terms of the documentary genre, labor films, and women in cinema. It considers Kaplan’s initial review of the film in light of vogue of semiology and psychoanalytic approaches to cinema in the 1970s, including issues of representation and notions of “the real” in documentary. Finally, it considers why Harlan County USA in particular and Kopple’s career in general remain so important to documentary cinema.

Blurring Lines and Intersecting Realities in Barbara Kopple’s Fictional Work

In addition to Barbara Kopple’s recognized contributions to documentary filmmaking, she directed several fictional works for both television broadcast and theatrical release. Although she often refers to herself as a director of both non-fiction and fiction, since both are important to her, very little critical attention has been paid to her fictional work such as the television episodes she directed for Homicide: Life on the Street, the PBS production Keeping On (1983), based on a screenplay by Horton Foote, and the independent feature Havoc (2005). This chapter examines the ways that she uses documentary techniques associated with cinema verite to establish a sense of place, character, realism, and social engagement within fictional stories. Rather than see her fictional work as an addendum to her acclaimed documentaries, the chapter argues that there is a continuum in which dramatic form and documentary practice inform one another as part of her style and approach to filmmaking.