1989 Labor Film Series
All films shown at the Eastman House Dryden Theater, 900 East Avenue
Nine films about labor will he screened at the Dryden Theatre this summer, in a series cosponsored by the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House and the Rochester and Vicinity Labor Council. AFL-CIO. Speakers will introduce and discuss each film.
This labor film series is part of the community’s celebration of the Labor Council’s centennial year. Today the council has more than 100 affiliated union locals representing over 50,000 area union members.
Thursday, July 20
NORMA RAE (Martin Ritt, US 1979, 120 min.) Sally Field is excellent in her Oscar-winning performance as a real-life poor Southern textile worker gradually won over to unionization by a New York labor organizer, played by Ron Liebman.
Thursday, July 27
HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple, US 1977, 103 min.) Gripping, human documentary whose Academy Award-winning achievement is so pure, its effect so galvanizing, that it mesmerized the 1976 New York Film Festival. Tells the story about the strike of Kentucky miners against the Eastover Mining Company.
Thursday, August 3
MATEWAN (John Sayles, US 1987, 130 min.) With Chris Cooper, James Earl Jones. Delving deeply into the moral and social issues that helped forge the American labor movement of the early 20th century, Matewan is based on the tragic showdown between miners and management which came to be known as the "Matewan Massacre."
Thursday, August 10
AMERICAN ROMANCE (King Vidor, US 1944, 151 min.) With Brian Donlevy, Ann Richards. Donlevy plays a poor Czech immigrant who rises to become a powerful industrialist. He reaches the top of the industry as an auto manufacturer, and then must face union opposition, forcing him to confront his own roots.
Thursday, August 17
THE ORGANIZER (Mario Monicelli, Italy 1964, 126 min. Italian with subtitles) Marcello Mastroianni plays a professor who has come to visit a friend in Turin. The local textile plant is in turmoil over inhuman labor conditions, and Mastroianni (who has made political noise in the past and is in semi-hiding) surfaces long enough to help the workers plan a strike.
Thursday, August 24
NATIVE LAND ( Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand, US 1942. 85 min.) Based on US. Senate Civil Liberties Commission and public documents, this is American propaganda at its finest. Designed to instill patriotism in the common man, the film encouraged American workers to perform at top efficiency producing munitions, while attacking all those entities considered a threat to the workingman. Narrated by Paul Robeson. Print from GEH Archives
Thursday, August 31
SACCO E VANZETTI (Giuliano Montaldo, Italy 1971, Italian and English with subtitles, 120 min.) With Gian Maria Volonte, Riccardo Cucciolla, Cyril Cusack; score by Ennio Morricone. Based on the true story of one of the most notorious trials in American judicial history, this film follows two Italian immigrants, admitted anarchists, through their trial, conviction and subsequent electrocution.
Thursday, September 7
MAN OF MARBLE (Andrej Wajda, Poland 1979, Polish with subtitles, 130 min.)
Wajda’s black satire follows a film student and her efforts to make a documentary about a former construction worker as her graduation requirement. Similar to Citizen Kane in its expositional style, Wajda has fashioned a sophisticated indictment of Stalinist rule. With Jerry Radziwilowicz. Michal Tarkowski
Thursday, September 21
THE KILLING FLOOR (Bill Duke, US 1984, 117 min.)
Impressive drama about interracial union organizing during World War I in the Chicago stockyards. The story, written by Tony award-winning playwright Leslie Lee, centers around
the plight of a black sharecropper who has just arrived from the rural South.
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