Native Land (1942, Leo Hurwitz & Paul Strand) (Patreon)

53/100

Still dismayingly relevant, though I suppose that'll likely always be true of a documentary about the struggle to unionize. (Title's oddly misleading.) Actually, Native Land must number among the earliest doc-fiction hybrids, split just about equally between candid photography accompanied by Paul Robeson's expository/declamatory voiceover narration and fully dramatized scenes of notable (mostly ugly) episodes in the labor movement's then-recent history. I tended to prefer the former, as there's a lot of creaky acting on display in the latter; Hurwitz and Strand tend to compose shots as if they were making a silent film, though, and strive to keep dialogue minimal, so there's still some zing to e.g. the lengthy tale of a spy, installed in Local 131 (and given cover when he pretends to root out another, more obvious spy), who finds out that he's gotten in way over his head. Narration initially sounds like what you'd hear in an educational filmstrip from the '70s (reminder: I am old) but gradually becomes surprisingly poetic, sometimes shifting into a particular character's POV without warning or modulation and trusting us to keep up. No surprise, either, that Robeson was the Morgan Freeman of his day, in terms of possessing a deep, rich, warm voice that you just instinctively trust. This gets very "let freedom ring!" in the home stretch, working to conflate unions with America itself, and I'll admit to having felt a little stirred despite my general discomfort with patriotism that flirts with chauvinism. There was a war on at the time, after all, which the U.S. must have only just recently entered when Native Land went into production. (Released in May '42; back then that would usually suggest a start date sometime around January.) And it's useful to be forcefully reminded that management will always seek to maximize profit at the expense of most laborers, and that sacrifice is sometimes necessary to achieve fairness.