A unique, hybrid doc on the identity of Central Appalachia being inexorably connected to coal mining. It’s a poetic exploration around the tensions between pride and remorse as it reckons the past, present, and future of this region. We break down KING COAL by Elaine McMillion Sheldon in this episode.
Sundance 2023 Section: NEXT
Distribution: Theatrical release on August 11, 2023, American Documentary reports on December 4, 2023 that “King Coal will make its national broadcast premiere as part of POV’s upcoming 37th season launching summer 2024”
From the Sundance website: Central Appalachia is a place of mountains and myth. Director Elaine McMillion Sheldon knows this well, calling those mountains home. Coal has had a profound influence on this community’s identity, but Sheldon dares to consider what future stories might look like out of the shadow of coal, now that relationships to coal are changing. She takes us on an alluring cinematic journey through the past, present, and future of Appalachia.
Sheldon’s distinct vision remixes present-day moments of life in a coal-mining town with archival footage and atmospheric invocations of the land to alchemize something new — a rare, nuanced depiction of this community. A young girl learning the story of coal anchors the journey while Sheldon’s poetic voiceover guides us through the experience and an expressive score differentiates the reality of coal from a more imaginative world. The hybrid approach allows Sheldon to explore the act of storytelling itself and is a magical reclamation of the power of stories to shape how a region sees itself. The end of one story welcomes the beginning of another.
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.501] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. And I'm Wonder Bright. And welcome to Story All the Way Down, where we're covering the Sundance 2023 documentaries. And today's episode is called King Cole by Elaine McMillan Sheldon. It's part of the next documentaries, which is taking a little bit more of an experimental approach, and this film in particular is mixing some archival footage and documentary aspects, but also some actors that are doing this poetic reimagination, and it's taking us into central Appalachia. So that's southwestern Pennsylvania, western Kentucky, the western part of Virginia, eastern North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and all of West Virginia. So we're taken through all of these towns that have the culture of coal mining and seeing the ways that it ripples out through their community. And it's weaving together this poetic narrative along with the observation of these areas. I'm going to read a little bit from the synopsis just to get a bit of a flavor of what this film is doing. So Sheldon's distinct vision remixes present day moments of life in coal mining town with archival footage and atmospheric invocations of a land to alchemize something new, a rare nuanced depiction of this community. And it's differentiating the reality of coal from a more imaginative world. Then it says, the hybrid approach allows Sheldon to explore the act of storytelling itself and is a magical reclamation of the power of stories to shape how a region sees itself. The end of one story welcomes the beginning of another. In some ways, this description is describing this idea of story all the way down, but they're really exploring the identity of these coal mining towns throughout the history. And yeah, we'll get into the different beats that they get into, but that's a good place to kind of set the context. And I'd love to get some of your initial thoughts of King Coal.
[00:01:59.142] Wonder Bright: Yeah, this film has a narrative structure that is similar to The Dreaming State, the way that we saw in Melissa Tondo. So that there is this weaving together of different stories across, you know, using archival footage, newsreel footage to explain the past, even before the filmmakers were born. And then also to talk about what it was like growing up in these spaces as a child. in the actual narrative, the way that it's crafted and the structures of the pieces have that same sort of like surfacing, going below, re-emerging, coming in and out. And so that the experience that's evoked in the audience is an experience of going along for the ride and having my own experience of surfacing and then plunging back in and not always tracking it in the way that you might with like a linear narrative construct. And so it has this evocative, poignant quality to it, which is hard to pin down and come away with like really concrete experience. In some ways it's more provocative as like thinking of it as an open question. I think we have this idea of narration or of someone telling their story as if they're telling you the facts of something. And what I appreciate about both these films is that we're getting an interpretation and it's very clear that it's an interpretation. And the confidence of the filmmaker in her vision is really resolute. And in the instance of King Cole, it's also beautiful because these mountains are beautiful. The landscapes have such grandeur to them. And also the forests are so woolly and wild and the mist and the steam that rises from the Appalachian Mountains. I mean, I've never actually seen it. And it was really wonderful to go there through this film and have that experience of seeing it through the filmmaker's eyes. She was really able to evoke this real feeling of longing in me for place and for a place that has such profound natural beauty. I spent three years of my childhood living in the mountains in eastern Washington, and my parents built a log cabin and, you know, we didn't have running water for the first year. And so I have this experience of living in nature, in the woods, in a way that it just always calls to me and has me longing for that. And this film brought up that experience of being a part of nature. And then even the way that she talks about coal and the coal industry, somehow she manages to take it away from the industry and into this experience of being in the earth. The coal miners are going into the earth. We're going down there with them. This is what we find.
[00:05:19.009] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's a couple of things that I really took away in terms of what it's like to be a part of these communities and cultures. First of all, for the coal miners themselves, the degree to which that they're putting their lives in danger every time they go down into the coal mines, and they actually lists the earth, air, fire, and water, where each of these different elements are a threat for how they could kill them. The earth could crush them, you could have a methane gas explosion, which is a fire, they could suffocate, or they could drown from water. So each of these paths of how they could be killed means that they're putting their lives in danger, which also connects to another part of the film where they start to talk about the United Mine Workers of America, where they were walking some of the same pathways where these historic fights for workers' rights They were talking about from like 1921 and 1935. And then the United Nine workers moved on to the auto workers and steel workers and rubber and textiles. They're kind of asking like, do you like weekends? Do you like vacations and healthcare and pensions and benefits? Well, it all started with fight that these mine workers were trying to advocate for a better life. Because you have these coal mining companies, they're coming in there, they're basically creating these coal mining towns where they own all the businesses. And so they're able to get this really cheap labor, but to what degree are they really reinvesting into these local communities and allowing people to really make a comfortable living for themselves and start their own lives. And so there's a bit of extractive mindset that the coal mining companies had, but that at least with the unions were able to fight back a little bit to not just have all that wealth extracted out of that area, but to be also reinvested in that area as well. but also all the little cultural touch points that we touch onto, whether it's the football field and the players touching the coal, or marathon runners getting coals thrown in their face, or the dropping of coal during New Year's Eve, shoveling coal, all these rituals that are orienting around this mythological character of King Cole, who is either going to provide it for some, and from others, it's stolen. It's brought pride to some, and for others, it's brought shame. So, for me, there's also this underlying dialectic of the pride that has come from the King Cole and also the remorse of all the other unintended consequences. Yeah, I think that was kind of an underlying tension between the underlying pride of it, but also this sort of underlying remorse that they're trying to also reckon with.
[00:07:50.766] Wonder Bright: Yeah, it's really interesting because as you're saying these things to me, what shows up is that when I've initially read King Cole, I added on the word industry to the end of it. And I'm only seeing that now as we're talking through it, because of course, in the film, it isn't King Cole industry. It may evoke that, but The film is quite literal. This is a substance of the earth. This is a place on earth that we call home. This is the substance that is inextricable from our experience, despite the fact that we're extracting it from the earth. And King Coal is only king because the coal industry made it king. I got really interested when the film started talking about union workers because my grandfather worked for Ford Motor Company in Detroit, Michigan, and he was a card carrying member of United Auto Workers Union. And that was a really important piece of the puzzle for my family growing up in Detroit in the suburbs. And so much so that in 1987, when the John Sayles film Matewan came out, my mom made a point of taking me to see it in the movie theaters. And she really wanted us to understand where unions came from. So that whole story is really personal to me because Matewan is a film that really explores the history of how unions in this country came to be. And it is riveting, it is harrowing, and it is probably essential watching for any American. And because unions are sort of in the news now, because they're really under attack, and it's something that has been under attack ever since they started forming, like Meituan is literally about these workers who got killed and the coal industry tried to break them. And because of my own personal connection to this history of unionizing, to me, I was raised to believe that workers, laborers and unions to support them is a part of the American dream. Like that is how the American dream is realized. If you don't have a union, than the people who own those industries are going to do what the coal mining industry did to their workers. It wasn't just that they created these villages where all of the coal miners lived and worked, but the way that the coal miners were paid was they were paid in currency that could only be accepted at the shops that were also owned by the coal mining industry. And so it's this circuitous thing that just caused real damage to people. And when those coal miners started to unionize, they were initially segregated into white coal miners and black coal miners. But one of the things that's so fascinating about early unionizing is, and it starts in Matewan, it starts with this event that gets touched on in the film King Cole, where these workers had to create a union in order to get paid what was fair. But in their efforts to do that, they were sort of kicked out of their homes and they all had to live in what they called a tent city and it became non-segregated. So black families and white families were living together and they formed these unions together. And that carried on in Detroit when the United Auto Workers Union formed as well. So there's this backbone of unionizing that is actually a very diverse effort that is a part of our American history that's really hidden. And if I had a complaint about King Cole, it would come from just that space. I know, you know, one film can't tell all the stories, but to me, that's actually an essential part of the story about the coal industry and story about Appalachian Mountains. One of my favorite sequences in King Cole was with this black family who goes to visit the house that the grandmother had been raised in and she's telling the stories that she learned growing up. And she's telling them to her daughter and her granddaughter. And the granddaughter is friends with this little white girl that we see throughout the film. I think she's sort of like, It's not entirely clear what the white girl represents, you know, because it was shot in that dreamlike fashion. But we see her over and over again. It's sort of like to me, it was evocative of the childhood experience of being a child in this landscape and growing up, learning about coal. And so we see this little white girl and her friend, this little black girl, like studying the history of coal together and like playing together on the train tracks against the backdrop of these incredible mountains. And I just feel like there was maybe some missed opportunities there to talk a little bit more about the history of how black and white coal miners worked together in their unionizing efforts. But it also just was like this place where I was like, oh, now I want to go back and rewatch Matewan. I want to learn more about unions. And this film really, they talk to this wonderful, there's a whole scene where they do talk about the unions and they talk to this man who's speaking first person about like how important it is and what the history is. And that was another point in the film that I just, I really loved.
[00:13:33.519] Kent Bye: Yeah. I mean, this film feels like it's taken an impressionistic, dreamlike quality of dipping in and out, and it's got some poetic narration, but they do cover it in the sense that they're covering this march that's commemorating this turning point of getting workers' rights. So we hear him talking about it, but we also earlier, they talk about in the late 1930s, how there's 140,000 people that were white, black, Native American immigrants who were all working together in the coal mines. And so there is a sense that there was this really pluralistic diversity of workers that were there. So in that sense, it is a little bit implied. And when they do follow up with this black woman who's talking to her, two young black kids that she's basically sharing a really tragic story that it took 20 years to retire. And at 19 and a half years, he basically got hurt and the union wasn't fighting for black miners in the same way they were for white miners. And so there was a little bit of racial discrimination that was happening. So that does cover the sense that even though the unions were being founded by both white and black members, the black members still weren't always being treated the same. So those points I think were made clear in the piece. And I think generally the vibe that I got was that it is this poetic imagination that does have this fusion of what's fiction, what's nonfiction. You don't know what is architected or constructed or directed versus what's Clearly, there's a lot of cinema verite footage of different events like the King Cole pageant and other moments where it's clear that it's a documentary, but then there's other parts that have this construction of the reality that's being presented. So I think the filmmaker's way of trying to blend together all these different modalities It is in the next section that is this section that's really encouraging this fusion of different modalities and genres. And so, this is a film that I think is really weaving together a lot of those. But my experience of it was that it was like a poetic meditation that I'm kind of dipping in and out of these different parts of Central Appalachia. And through that experience, I'm getting the story of the culture, but also really appreciating I guess more of the nuanced complexity where as an outsider, I see coal as like, okay, this is a polluting type of energy source. We should just cut it off, like give it up. But at the same time, it's a part of the history and the cultural heritage and the evolution of these communities. And it's still a part of what has really made a lot of these different towns in that region. And so there's this reverence, but also this mixed feeling that's also the more contemporary consciousness about the implications of how this may not be in right relationship to the rest of the world. So there's this mixed pride that you're able to provide for your family, but also like, how are we going to provide for our family in the future? So it's this fusion of looking into the past, looking at the present, and how do we tell the new stories of the future? I think this film is trying to reckon with those intersections.
[00:16:37.748] Wonder Bright: Yeah. And how do we tell the story of the future if we want to include our history with coal and our histories with unionizing and the communities that came together and maybe, you know, weren't always protected inside of that? And also just the bottom line, how are people going to make a living if this is something they no longer can do? You know, like these are all These are all open questions that nobody's been able to answer successfully. And, you know, that just sort of brings me back to where I started with this film is that, you know, as you're reiterating here, it has this dreamlike quality. I feel like it just pulled at a bunch of threads for me and I kind of want to follow them now. And we're actually going to be going there this fall and get a chance to go to Dollywood. live out a lifelong dream. We won't be in Virginia, just in Tennessee, but I'm really looking forward to laying eyes on these mountains myself for the first time.
[00:17:49.575] Kent Bye: Yeah, I spent some time in Baltimore and then would go into West Virginia and North Carolina and I've spent some time in the mountains and yeah, it is really quite beautiful. And I have a new appreciation for what has been the economic roots of some of that area and that region. So I'll be curious as we go, what kind of traces of King Cole that we'll be able to discern as we're there. So yeah, I guess as we start to wrap up, some of the things that I'm bearing witness to is I really enjoyed the poetic narration that was in this film. If I haven't said this before, as I was watching a lot of these films, I was taking as best as I could like a real time transcript of what was happening just so that I would, as we go back and after watching, I watched 43 films to go back and kind of recall my memory. I'm sorry.
[00:18:42.561] Wonder Bright: I just have to. I just have to have some real time like reflection back to you that you watched 43. I was telling some friends earlier today that I watched 29 films and they're like, Oh my gosh, how did you do it? And I'm like, that's nothing.
[00:19:03.489] Kent Bye: So we watched about 30 films together. And so I watched as many of the documentaries that were available on top of like the 15 hours of shorts, but yeah, that's kind of like another separate part. I'm not really digging into the shorts, but after watching all of those, I was wanting to just bear witness the best I could to the content of what was being said, so that when I go back, I can try to understand how they're telling each of the stories. And this was a lot of long takes, a lot of poetic narration that was speaking to this dialectic between the pride and the remorse, and what is the implications of having this king call that's been such a key part of their culture. And it's provided for them, but how do they start to reckon that as they look into the future? So, Yeah, a real nice fusion of the different techniques. And I just really wanted to give a shout out to all the people that were credited as additional writers, including Shane Boris, Logan Hill, Eva Radijovic, and Heather Hanna. That was the additional writing. I think Elaine McMillan, Sheldon also was likely involved in both directing and the writing as well. But I felt like the writing in this piece particularly stood out for me just because some of the different scenes just will really stick with me. I'll leave it for the viewer to discover these different moments that they take you through, but I really quite enjoyed where they took me on this journey.
[00:20:30.362] Wonder Bright: Yeah, it is a really beautiful textual literary narration, really rich. And and I am not going to spoil like the way in which they did it, but there is a ritual that they invoke throughout the course of the film that really culminates in the closing of it. And the writing in that portion was extremely moving. and will stay with me. And I think the other thing that I just want to bear witness to is, of course, the unions and the efforts involved from all of these laborers who were already, as we've talked about, risking their lives and getting paid so little and not being able to really support their families in a meaningful way. and how they risked their lives to unionize too and to come together as a group of people to do that and to bear witness to all of the people that are going to have to keep doing that because this is a fight that's brewing again in this country. So it felt really good to be able to engage with that story again in this particular time in our nation's history.
[00:21:50.284] Kent Bye: We'll have to watch that film, Matwan by John Sayles, and really dig into more of that particular aspect of the story that was really just alluded to in this film, but contextualize it for how it's connected to this region. That was King Cole by Elaine McMillan Sheldon. It was part of the next doc at Sundance 2023. It was in the next section of Sundance 2023. At this point, there's no distribution that's been announced. Yeah, thanks again for joining us here on Story All the Way Down. To learn more about this film or this podcast, feel free to visit storyallthewaydown.com. There you'll find some show notes, more information about the podcast, and opportunities to support what we're doing. Thanks for joining us.
