Union Maids
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Union Maids |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1976 |
| length | 55 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director |
Jim Klein Julia Reichert Miles Mogulescu |
| production | Jim Klein Julia Reichert Miles Mogulescu |
| camera |
Tony Heriza Sherry Novick |
| cut | Jim Klein Julia Reichert |
| occupation | |
|
Kate Hyndman | |
Union Maids (translated “ union women”) is an American documentary film directed by Jim Klein , Julia Reichert and Miles Mogulescu . The black and white film portrays three women unionists who were active in Chicago in the 1930s .
content
The film shows excerpts from individual interviews with the three women Kate Hyndman, Stella Nowicki and Sylvia Woods. The interviewers are audible and sometimes visible. Excerpts from the three interviews alternate and are interrupted by historical film material from the period described.
The women talk about their lives and especially their experiences with the industrial action in the 1930s. Woods describes a sit-in strike in a laundry and Nowicki describes the regular standstill of conveyor belts in the Chicago Stock Yards . Hyndman, who also worked in the stock yards, was fired after she wrote an article for Daily Worker .
Finally, the women state that in retrospect they were satisfied with their lives. The film looks at the development of the trade unions in the 1950s and their current situation, as well as the status of the women's movement.
Musically, the film is accompanied by union songs such as Solidarity Forever and Union Maid .
background
Union Maids is one of a series of films that have been made since the late 1960s in the wake of the strengthening US women's movement and made women and their living conditions more visible. The technique of using interviews and historical film material was also quite common at the time and was often modeled on In the Year of the Pig (1968).
Jim Klein and Julia Reichert worked together regularly in the 1970s and were also a couple privately. They defined themselves as radical filmmakers who want to contribute to the progress of society with their work. In 1971 they supported the founding of the film distributor New Day Films, which is still active to this day and which primarily supplies universities, public libraries, etc. and also distributes Union Maids . Union Maids was Klein and Reichert's third major joint film after the feminist documentary Growing Up Female (1971) and Methadone: An American Way of Dealing (1975).
The film is based on the oral history publication Rank and File published in 1973 by Alice and Staughton Lynd . Personal Histories of Working-Class Organizers , which deals with the American trade union movement in the 1930s and 1940s. Thereby concentrating Union Maids to a selection of the interviewees, three active in Chicago trade unionists of the CIO .
The idea to make three women from Rank and File the subject of a film came from Miles Mogulescu . Since the authors of the book knew the address of the trade unionists, contacting them was straightforward. The women volunteered to be questioned without restrictions, except that two of them refused to be called communists, partly because they feared they would be fired. The clips for the film were ultimately selected from three hours of interview recordings. The interviews were followed by a review of archive material and a nine-month research phase in which the filmmakers grappled with the history of the unions, about which they knew little before.
Production costs were approximately $ 13,000, of which 2,500 came from the Rabinowitz Foundation and 1,000 from the Film Fund. Klein and Reichert paid the majority of the costs with their income from Growing Up Female .
reception
Mogulescu, Klein and Reichert were nominated as directors and producers of the film at the 1978 Academy Awards in the category of Best Documentary . In 1977 they won the Critics' Prize of the Syndicat Français de la Critique de Cinéma et des Films de Télévision for Best Short Film.
The women surveyed left a positive impression on film critics. Was the verdict Vincent Canby , "Sylvia, Stella and Kate are three naturals, characters Whose hearts and minds leap off the screen with a kind of grace and nobility I have not seen in a documentary since Jerry Bruck's" IF Stone's Weekly "(dt. .: "Sylvia, Stella and Kate are three natural talents, characters whose hearts and minds jump over from the screen with a grace and refinement that I have not seen in a documentary since Jerry Bruck's IF Stone's Weekly .")
Marina Burke, in Ian Aitken's Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film , criticizes that while the film works best as a story of three working-class heroines, by focusing on three extraordinary women it denies the reality in which women especially in non-union offices and service sector worked. In addition, Union Maids avoided the question of whether the interviewees had ties to the Communist Party. In doing so, he weakens both his documentary and his radical standpoint.
literature
- Marina Burke: Union Maids In: Ian Aitken (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film. Routledge, New York 2006, ISBN 1-57958-445-4 , pp. 1364-1366.
- M. Keith Booker : Film and the American Left: A Research Guide. Greenwood Press, Westport 1999, ISBN 0-313-30980-9 , p. 281.
- Alan Rosenthal: The Documentary Conscience: A Casebook in Film Making. University of California Press, Berkeley 1980, ISBN 0-520-03932-7 , pp. 317-329.
Web links
- Union Maids in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Union Maids at the distributor New Day Films
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Marina Burke: Union Maids In: Ian Aitken (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film. Routledge, New York 2006, p. 1364.
- ^ Alan Rosenthal: The Documentary Conscience: A Casebook in Film Making. University of California Press, Berkeley 1980, p. 317.
- ^ Robert Niemi: History in the Media: Film and Television. ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara 2006, ISBN 1-57607-953-8 , p. 330.
- ^ Alan Rosenthal: The Documentary Conscience: A Casebook in Film Making. University of California Press, Berkeley 1980, pp. 319-320.
- ^ Alan Rosenthal: The Documentary Conscience: A Casebook in Film Making. University of California Press, Berkeley 1980, p. 324.
- ↑ The 50th Academy Awards | 1978 oscars.org. Accessed January 1, 2020.
- ^ Prix SFCC de la Critique 1977 syndicatdelacritique.com. Accessed January 1, 2020.
- ↑ Vincent Canby : Film: 3 Women Who Didn't Wait for Lefty. In: The New York Times . February 4, 1977. Retrieved January 5, 2020.