King Coal

A collection of sixteen documentaries, stretching from 1901 to 1984, this is a moving, powerful, and personal documentary collection that we would heartily endorse every citizen of Britain to see as soon as possible.
From the Mitchell and Kenyon films, beautiful and at times heart-rending memories of the human-ness of people we usually only read about objectively, or as numbers in the newspaper. We see happy people, sad people, ghard working people, but above all real people. People we are connected to by ancestry and geography who are just as we are, but living in such a time that seems almost unimaginable to us now. We see the incredible conditions, which seem inhuman to us now, and remind us how close we are to that very reality. We want to speak to these people, like we can talk to our next door neighbour, and ask them what they really FEEL about their work.
Documentaries add some artistic majesty, from the hympnotic and surreal cartoon of 'King Coal' to start to the Britten-scored and Auden themed celebration/condemnation of industry, an incomplarably powerful piece.
There are moments of great humour, the mix is well balanaced and does not overemohasise any one aspect of the picture. The training documentaries are pure dead-eyes comedy. Then we have the newreel holiday footage, at once hillarious and at once an evocation which, in its very unthinking ordinariness, tells us more than a hundred graphs and figures could.
And then we have footage of the 60's and 80's, so near and yet so distant, people with such different concerns who walk through the very same streets we do. The past is, truly, a foreign country. This collection of documentary lets us visit, through a dark glass, for its 80 minutes.
This is a masterpiece of documentary cutting, presenting a view of life that makes you leave the screen and see the country, and the people, differently. One of the most important documents we kno to exist, regarding this country.