The Miners' Hymns

Media artist Bill Morrison's documentary short is a non-narrative symphony of images from U.K. film/news archives related to the English coal industry. Yorkshire pits and collieries such as Hylton and Monkwearmouth endured from the Victorian era, nurturing surrounding towns while sustaining the British Empire—at least until the tapped-out mines closed in the 1970s and 1980s, with the Thatcher years awash in bitter strikes by the National Union of Mine Workers in a futile attempt to hold back inevitable demise. With a slightly Philip Glass-like score/sound design by Johann Johannsson, The Miners' Hymns is not so much an A-to-B chronology as a back-and-forth dip into a lost world—highlighting the monumental coal-burrowing machines; carts on their rails like a subterranean roller-coaster; and the working-class pride of the miners, as well as their brass bands and families on parade in the streets. Billowing trade-union banners—glorious even in black-and-white—end the film on a triumphant but also elegiac note (since we have already beheld the labor riots and armies of British policemen who accompanied the end of this industry and its culture). DVD extras include three bonus short films by Morrison. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (C. Cassady)