Strikebound

Richard Lowenstein's rather dour first film, shot on 16mm and blown up to 35mm is based on a book 'Dead Men Don't Dig Coal' by his mother, Wendy. It is a dramatization of the coal miner's strike at Korumburra in Victoria's South Gippsland region during the late 1930's. The story centres on the characters of Wattie and Agnes Doig, who appear as themselves at the outset and closure of the film, still feisty in their seventies, and are played by Chris Haywood and Carol Burns in its main dramatized body.

Lowenstein is, however, more concerned with recreating the general political history of the event than turning his story into a more conventional narrative drama, such as, for example, Warren Beatty's Reds (1981) or Claude Berri's Germinal (1993) which dealt with similar subject matter. Whilst this makes the film unusually serious-minded, without even the tendency to sentimentality typical of Italian neo-realist socially-conscience films, and this has its merits, it does tend to result in didacticism and this, in turn, has its own rather disengaging conventionality.

Thus we have the diligent workers and their loyal wives, the evil bosses, the weazly scabs, the thick-as-a-brick coppers and so on in what ends up being a straight-as-a-die story of worker solidarity overcoming capitalist exploitation. Whilst it is easy to sympathize with the plight of the miners, the film offers little in the way of emotional identification and not surprisingly was not well-received at the box-office despite its  evident strength of commitment.

 

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