Movie Review

Milan Kundera speaks the last words in the award-winning 1995 documentary The Uprising of '34. Throughout this stirring account of the general textile strike, perhaps the largest labor protest in United States history, the filmmakers George Stoney and Judith Helfand let working people speak. Unlike many documentarians, they never call on professional historians posed in front of bookshelves to authenticate ordinary people's recollections. The filmmakers, instead, dare to put the participants at the center of the story both as actors and as analysts. Yet Kundera delivers the final message: "The struggle of humanity against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

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From the start of their research, Stoney and Helfand recognized that the story of the strike was a story of history and memory. In one southern mill town after another—the strike's most dramatic moments unfolded in the South, and that is where the film is centered—they encountered a perplexing silence. When they asked people about the walkout, they often got blank stares. Many had never heard of this strike that rocked the region for the first three weeks of September 1934 and involved more than half a million workers nationwide at its peak; others just did not want to, or could not, talk about it. The memories of violence and community upheaval remained too raw and painful sixty years after the event. Still others were afraid to speak. They did not want their bosses to know that they knew about the strike.

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