We relaunched and are currently running. The previous day's stream is available on demand. Jump and I will share pictures of our control room and some stats on how we are doing along with information about our Special Presentation of Salt of the Earth
We are very excited by our stats so far with no marketing we continue to grow. We had 23 viewers when we re-launched. We are finding viewers all over the world.
Our USA numbers are good too, lots in Nebraska which I would expect am concerned there are none so far in Iowa.
We have a very small studio, really just big enough for one or two people and a virtual background. Our control room is really tiny, big enough for two people and sometimes a floor manager hanging out the door.
Now for our Special Presentation, Salt of the Earth.
Salt of the Earth is a 1954 American drama film written by Michael Wilson, directed by Herbert J. Biberman, and produced by Paul Jarrico. All had been blacklisted by the Hollywood establishment due to their alleged involvement in communist politics.[1]
This drama film is one of the first pictures to advance the feminist social and political point of view. Its plot centers on a long and difficult strike, based on the 1951 strike against the Empire Zinc Company in Grant County, New Mexico. In the film, the company is identified as "Delaware Zinc," and the setting is "Zinctown, New Mexico." The film shows how the miners, the company, and the police react during the strike. In neorealist style, the producers and director used actual miners and their families as actors in the film.
The film opens with a narration from Esperanza Quintero (Rosaura Revueltas):
"how shall I begin my story that has no beginning? My name is Esperanza, Esperanza Quintero. I am a miner's wife. This is our home. The house is not ours. But the flowers... the flowers are ours. This is my village. When I was a child, it was called San Marcos. The Anglos changed the name to Zinc Town. Zinc Town, New Mexico, U.S.A. Our roots go deep in this place, deeper than the pines, deeper than the mine shaft...."
The issues the miners strike for include equity in wages with Anglo workers and health and safety issues. Ramon Quintero (Juan Chacon) helps organize the strike, but at home he treats his wife as a second-class citizen. His wife, Esperanza Quintero, pregnant with their third child, is passive at first and reluctant either to take part in the strike or to assert her rights for equality at home. She changes her attitude when the men are forced to end their picketing by a Taft-Hartley Act injunction. At the union hall, the women convince the men, after a long debate, that they should be allowed to participate and they join the picket line.
The film was called subversive and blacklisted because the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers sponsored it and many blacklisted Hollywood professionals helped produce it. The union had been expelled from the CIO in 1950 for its alleged communist-dominated leadership.[2]
Director Herbert Biberman was one of the Hollywood screenwriters and directors who refused to answer the House Committee on Un-American Activities on questions of CPUSA affiliation in 1947. The Hollywood Ten were cited and convicted for contempt of Congress and jailed. Biberman was imprisoned in the Federal Correctional Institution at Texarkana for six months. After his release he directed this film.[3] Other participants who made the film and were blacklisted by the Hollywood studios include: Paul Jarrico, Will Geer, Rosaura Revueltas, and Michael Wilson.
The producers cast only five professional actors. The rest were locals from Grant County, New Mexico, or members of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, Local 890, many of whom were part of the strike that inspired the plot. Juan Chacón, for example, was a real-life Union Local president. In the film he plays the protagonist, who has trouble dealing with women as equals.[4] The director was reluctant to cast him at first, thinking he was too "gentle," but both Revueltas and his sister-in-law, Sonja Dahl Biberman, wife of Biberman's brother Edward, urged him to cast Chacón as Ramon.[5]
The film was denounced by the United States House of Representatives for its communist sympathies, and the FBI investigated the film's financing. The American Legion called for a nation-wide boycott of the film. Film-processing labs were told not to work on Salt of the Earth and unionized projectionists were instructed not to show it.[citation needed] After its opening night in New York City, the film languished for 10 years because all but 12 theaters in the country refused to screen it.[6]
By one journalist's account: "During the course of production in New Mexico in 1953, the trade press denounced it as a subversive plot, anti-Communist vigilantes fired rifle shots at the set, the film's leading lady Rosaura Revueltas was deported to Mexico, and from time to time a small airplane buzzed noisily overhead ... The film, edited in secret, was stored for safekeeping in an anonymous wooden shack in Los Angeles."[7]
The Hollywood establishment did not embrace the film at the time of its release, when McCarthyism was in full force. The Hollywood Reporter charged at the time that it was made "under direct orders of the Kremlin."[8]
Pauline Kael, who reviewed the film for Sight and Sound in 1954, panned it as a simplistic left-wing "morality play" and said it was "as clear a piece of Communist propaganda as we have had in many years."[9]
New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther reviewed the picture favorably, both the screenplay and the direction, writing: "In the light of this agitated history, it is somewhat surprising to find that Salt of the Earth is, in substance, simply a strong pro-labor film with a particularly sympathetic interest in the Mexican-Americans with whom it deals...But the real dramatic crux of the picture is the stern and bitter conflict within the membership of the union. It is the issue of whether the women shall have equality of expression and of strike participation with the men. And it is along this line of contention that Michael Wilson's tautly muscled script develops considerable personal drama, raw emotion and power." Crowther called the film "a calculated social document."[10]
The film found a wide audience in both Western and Eastern Europe in the 1950s.[11]
The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 100% of critics gave the film a positive review, based on eleven reviews.[12]
Accolades[edit]
Karlovy Vary International Film Festival: Best Actress: Rosaura Revueltas; Crystal Globe Award for Best Picture, Herbert J. Biberman, received Ex aequo also by True Friends. Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad), Czechoslovakia; 1954.[13]
Academie du Cinema de Paris: International Grand Prize; 1955.[14]
In 1992 the Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."[citation needed]
The film is preserved by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The story of the film's suppression, as well as the events it depicted, inspired an underground audience of unionists, leftists, feminists, Mexican-Americans, and film historians. The film found a new life in the 1960s and gradually reached wider audiences through union halls, women's centers, and film schools. The 50th anniversary of the film saw a number of commemorative conferences held across the United States.[15]
The "Salt of the Earth Labor College" located in Tucson, Arizona is named after the film. The pro-labor institution (not a college, per se) holds various lectures and forums related to unionism and economic justice. The film is screened on a frequent basis.[16]
This is an opportunity to see a film not in wide release for more than 50 years.