ABSTRACT
With more than 30 films—two Academy Award winners and one listed on the National Film Registry—Barbara Kopple is one of the most accomplished documentary filmmakers in the history of American cinema. Emerging out of the American cinéma vérité movement, or Direct Cinema, under the tutelage of Albert Maysles and D. A. Pennebaker, Kopple embraced an approach to documentary filmmaking that prioritized intimacy, observation, and advocacy. Harlan County, USA (1976) catapulted Kopple to international recognition, receiving festival and theatrical play, an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and earning inclusion on the National Film Registry—only the second documentary to do so. Her work—Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson (1993), Wild Man Blues (1997), Woodstock ’94 (1998), Shut Up & Sing (2006), Miss Sharon Jones! (2015) to name a few—is a roadmap of many of the political and social issues that have defined American life over the last 50 years, including labor battles, civil rights, gender issues, free speech, gun laws, mental health, homelessness, AIDS, and environmental crises. This chapter includes a biography of Kopple, a 1998 interview with Kopple originally published in The Independent Film & Video Monthly, and an original interview with Kopple in 2018.
