Salt of the Earth

First of all, may I present this awesome and fantastically literal picture that I found via Google Images? Salt of the earth...get it?

Anyway.

Salt of the Earth is a fictional film based on the true story of a zinc miner strike in New Mexico. The miners are fighting for better working conditions and racial equality, and when their wives join in the strike they add better living conditions to their list of demands. Ultimately the film becomes a story of the struggle for gender equality as well; the women want to join the in strike, but the men are adamant that the wives stay out of it. According to Rob Waring’s article, the conflict is able to come to a satisfactory conclusion when the two groups fighting for social justice decide to work together instead of competing.

The articles talk about the difficulties that occurred in the making of this film, including threats of violence, the deportation of the main actress, and the fact that several of the filmmakers had been blacklisted by the industry; in fact, Herbert Biberman was one of the infamous “Hollywood Ten” and spent six months in prison prior to making this film. The film was edited in secret in various “safe houses” because a) people in the business were instructed to have nothing to do with the film, and b) the filmmakers were afraid that someone would try and destroy their footage. The entire filmmaking process was basically every filmmaker’s worst nightmares all rolled into one horrific experience; in addition to the previously mentioned difficulties, only a handful of theaters in the country would show the film, and from the time they made the film in 1954 to the time Aljean Harmetz wrote his article for The New York Times in 1986 the filmmakers only made back $100,000 of the $250,000 they spent on production.

One aspect of the reading that caught my attention was when Harmetz stated that the fact that the film was blacklisted was what turned it into a cult film and ultimately caused the increase in popularity in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. This struck me as funny because a few days ago I saw the movie Howl directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman and starring James Franco, and I noticed huge similarities in the two situations. Howl is about the famous poem of the same name written by Allen Ginsberg. When the poem was published, it was viewed as obscene, and the publisher was brought to trial for publishing it. The trial was basically to determine whether or not the poem had literary value. Ironically, it was the trial that caused the poem’s popularity; people would have probably read it anyway, but the publicity caused by the trial brought the poem into the spotlight and made it available to more readers. The same sort of thing happened with Salt of the Earth; the blacklist label was what made it popular. This sort of occurrence seems to be a pattern among the arts; persecution of a work of art usually tends to be the key to its success.