Documentary | THE LABOR FILM DATABASE

Michael Honey’s film with Errol Webber

In 1960, Reverend James Lawson helped to launch the Nashville sit-in campaign which successfully desegregated the Woolworth’s lunch counter, and inspired a new generation of student civil rights activities throughout the South. After Nashville he pastored the largest African American Methodist Church in Memphis and continued to work closely with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Birmingham and on other civil rights campaigns, teaching workshops in nonviolence. At each stage of his life, Lawson has supported campaigns for labor rights as a dimension of human rights.

Next to King himself, Reverend Lawson remains one of the most important social justice leaders of our time. This project set out to examine the legacy of Reverend Lawson, particularly his nonviolent approach to labor and civil rights, and to help share his story. The Love & Solidarity project did just that when it premiered a film by the same name that chronicles Lawson’s life and work as a force for positive change. In addition the Love & Solidarity project, led by Dr. Michael Honey, has launched the Love & Solidarity website to help share this story of how ordinary people can use nonviolence to make a more peaceful and just world.

This is a project of the Fetzer Advisory Council on Labor, Trades, and Crafts.

Michael Honey, Fred and Dorothy Haley Professor of Humanities
1900 Commerce St. Tacoma, WA 98402
253-692-4454
michaelkhoney@gmail.com
mhoney@uw.edu
University of Washington, Tacoma
http://faculty.washington.edu/mhoney/

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Posted by Labor Film Database on November 11, 2015 in Blacks, Discrimination: Racism, Sexism, etc, Documentary, Organizing

Labour in a Single Shot

11 Nov

http://www.labour-in-a-single-shot.net

Starting in 2011 artist, curator, and author Antje Ehmann and filmmaker, video artist and author Harun Farocki initiated video production workshops in 15 cities around the world in which participants were to engage with the subject of ‘labour’: paid and unpaid, material and immaterial, traditional or new. The videos could not be longer than two minutes and they had to be taken in a single shot. The camera could be static, panning or travelling but cuts were not allowed. This concept references the Brother Lumière’s famous film Workers Leaving the Factory which was filmed in one continuous take from a fixed camera position.

The result of these workshops, which were organised together with local branches of the Goethe-Institut, are 400 films which show people engaged in all kinds of work, each film taking a different stance, literally and figuratively, towards its subject while also recording the diverse mental attitudes and bodily relation people have to their work.

Facing the challenge of filming something that might be essentially repetitive, continuous and boring, the films also foreground the work of the camera operator and his or her aesthetic decisions. In the multitude and diversity the films form a visual compendium and an archive of labour and cinema in the 21st century that is never boring or repetitive but enhances and simultaneously questions our perception and understanding of work.

All the films can be watched on a dedicated website, at random, or sorted by city, colour or type of work. A selection of 90 films was shown as an installation at the House of World Culture in Berlin from 27 February to 6 April 2015 with an accompanying conference. This exhibition also presented the project ‘Workers Leaving the Factory in 15 Cities’ (2011 – 2014), consisting of contemporary remakes of the famous film by the Lumière Brothers which were shot in 15 cities all over the world. Also included in the exhibition was the installation ‘Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades’ (2006), which showed scenes of workers leaving the factory throughout the history of cinema, from the Lumière Brothers (1895) to Lars van Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000).

‘Labour in a Single Shot’ is a co-production of the Harun Farocki Filmproduktion with the Goethe-Institut.

www.harunfarocki.de

Deadline for Action (A 1946 Call To Action Pt 1)

05 Feb

21 minutes
This film produced by The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) gives a taste of the post WWII politics that led to the Taft-Hartley Act that restricts the ability of workers to join unions.

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Posted by Labor Film Database on February 5, 2015 in Documentary, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Labor History, Streaming Online (Youtube, Vimeo), Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts

We Have a Plan: PBS Great Depression Series (1993)

05 Feb

Episode 4 (60 min.)

By 1934 challenges to the New Deal came from both sides of the political spectrum. In California Socialist Upton Sinclair ran for Governor promising to turn idle land and factories into self-governing cooperatives. Sinclair’s campaign ended in defeat, but one year later President Roosevelt’s signing of the Social Security Act signaled America’s emergence as a modern welfare state.

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Posted by Labor Film Database on February 5, 2015 in Documentary, Labor History, Streaming Online (Youtube, Vimeo), Unemployment-Wages

New Deal, New York: PBS Great Depression Series (1993)

05 Feb

Episode 3 (60 min.)

In his first one hundred days in office, in a effort to stem the effects of the Great Depression, President Roosevelt created many new federal agencies giving jobs and relief to people and transforming the American landscape with public works projects. Nowhere was this transformation more apparent than in Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s New York City. Together Roosevelt and La Guardia expanded and redefined the role of government in the lives of the American people.

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Posted by Labor Film Database on February 5, 2015 in Documentary, Labor History, Streaming Online (Youtube, Vimeo), Unemployment-Wages

A Job at Ford’s: PBS Great Depression Series (1993

02 Feb

episode 1 (60 min.)
Just before the advent of the Great Depression, Henry Ford controlled the most important company in the most important industry in the booming American economy. His offer of high wages in exchange for hard work attracted workers to Detroit, but it began to come apart when Ford hired a private police force to speed up production and spy on employees. After the depression hit in 1929, these workers faced a new, grim reality as unemployment skyrocketed.

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Posted by Labor Film Database on February 2, 2015 in Documentary, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Labor History, Streaming Online (Youtube, Vimeo)

Flint Sitdown Strike — Part 1

01 Feb

1937, Flint, PBS, Walter Reuther and the Rise of the UAW, 15 minutes

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Posted by Labor Film Database on February 1, 2015 in Documentary, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Labor History, Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts

IBEW: Lighting the Path

01 Feb

Published on Oct 24, 2014
“Our smiles can light up a room. Our work can light up an entire city. We’re the men and women of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.”
Outreach video for women carpenters; 3 minute video designed for use on social media.