WORLD RENOWNED FILM DIRECTOR TO ATTEND
SPECIAL SCREENING OF ‘MATEWAN’ IN WATERFORD
Imagine Arts Festival in partnership with the Waterford Council of Trade Unions and Waterford Film For All are pleased to announce that the world renowned and twice Academy Award nominated writer/director John Sayles is to travel to Waterford from his home in New Jersey, USA to help the WCTU celebrate its centenary.
John Sayles will introduce his film ‘Matewan’ at a special screening on Thursday 15th October at in Waterford. He will be joined by his partner and producer of ‘Matewan’ Maggie Renzi for the screening.
John Sayles is one of the most admired filmmakers in the US. He has been making intelligent, literary, independent films with a strong social conscience and political awareness for almost thirthy years. He has become known as the Godfather of Independent films for his refusal to succumb to the Hollywood studio system. His films examine the moral and physical corruption of a society that worships naked greed over equality, fraternity and liberty.
The film is based on the true story of the Battle of Matewan where workers from the Stone Mountain Coal Company fought with hired mercenaries from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. The attempts to prevent the workers from unionising resulted in a pitched battle on the streets of Matewan, West Virginia on May 19th 1920, which resulted in ten deaths including the mayor of the town.
Inspired by the Battle of Matewan, coal miners from across West Virginia gathered in Charelstown, West Virginia. Determined to organise the southern coalfields, they began a march to Logan County. Thousands of miners joined them along the way in what became the largest armed insurrection in the United States since the Civil War – the Battle of Blair Mountain. The Battle of Blair Mountain was the largest organised armed uprising in American labour history and led almost directly to the labour laws currently in effect in the United States of America.
About John Sayles:
Before there was an Independent Film Channel or a Sundance festival, and long before independent film became a ‘marketing niche’ there was John Sayles, making it happen with a combination of talent, shrewdness, and determination.
And he's kept on making it happen for three decades, coming to personify the movement that he jump-started in 1979 with his $40,000 feature The Return of the Secaucus 7. He has become the definitive independent, the Godfather of Bootstrap Cinema.
John Sayles was the original do-it-yourselfer. Even though his budgets have increased over the years — from $40,000 for Secaucus 7 to $4.5 million for Limbo (1999) — his basic MO hasn't really changed. His methodical, buccaneering approach to film has become something of a legend in the Hollywood system.
Like Martin Scorsese and James Cameron, among others, Sayles got his start in film working with Roger Corman. Sayles went on to fund his first film, Return of the Secaucus 7, with $30,000 he had in the bank from writing scripts for Corman. He set the film in a large house so that he did not have to travel to or get permits for different locations, set it over a three-day weekend to limit costume changes, and wrote it about people his age so that he could have his friends act in it.
In 1983, after the films Baby It's You (starring Rosanna Arquette) and Lianna (a sympathetic story in which a married woman becomes discontented with her marriage and falls in love with another woman), Sayles received a MacArthur Fellowship for $40,000 a year for a five-year term. Sayles used the money to fund The Brother from Another Planet, a film about a black, three-toed slave who escapes from another planet and finds himself at home among the people of Harlem in New York City, largely because he is incapable of speaking.
Sayles has funded most of his films by writing genre scripts such as Piranha, Alligator, The Howling and The Challenge. One such script, for an unproduced film called Night Skies, inspired the project that would eventually become the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. That film's director, Steven Spielberg, later commissioned Sayles to write the script for the forthcoming Jurassic Park IV.
Sayles also works as a script doctor; he has done rewrites for Apollo 13, The Fugitive, and Mimic, among others, and finds the job rewarding since he gets to help other writers tell their stories and also meet other directors and watch how they work.
Some of his own better-known films include Lone Star, Passion Fish, Eight Men Out, The Secret of Roan Inish, Limbo, Sunshine State, and Matewan. His films tend to be politically aware; social concerns are a theme running through most of his work. He has twice been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Passion Fish and Lone Star.
He has also directed several music videos for Bruce Springsteen including Born in the USA and I’m on Fire.
In early 2003, Sayles signed the Not In Our Name ‘Statement of Conscience’ (along with individuals such as Noam Chomsky, Steve Earle, Brian Eno, Jesse Jackson, Viggo Mortensen, Bonnie Raitt, Oliver Stone, Marisa Tomei and Susan Sarandon) which opposed the invasion of Iraq.
Filmography
• Piranha (1978) (screenwriter)
• Alligator (1980) (screenwriter)
• Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980) (writer/director)
• The Howling (1981) (screenwriter)
• Lianna (1983) (writer/director)
• Baby It's You (1983) (writer/director)
• The Brother from Another Planet (1984) (writer/director)
• Wild Thing (1987) (screenwriter/story)
• Matewan (1987) (writer/director)
• Eight Men Out (1988) (writer/director/actor)
• City of Hope (1991) (writer/director)
• Passion Fish (1992) (writer/director)
• The Secret of Roan Inish (1994) (writer/director)
• Men of War (1994) (writer)
• Lone Star (1996) (writer/director)
• Men with Guns (1997) (writer/director)
• Limbo (1999) (writer/director)
• Sunshine State (2002) (writer/director)
• Casa de los Babys (2003) (writer/director)
• Silver City (2004) (writer/director)
• Honeydripper (2007) (writer/director)
• The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008) (co-writer)
• Jurassic Park IV (TBA) (screenwriter)
About Matewan
Matewan (1987) is an American drama by John Sayles, illustrating the events of a coal mine-workers' strike and attempt to unionise in 1920 in Matewan, a small town in the hills of West Virginia.
A true story based on the historical events Battle of Matewan, the film features Chris Cooper, James Earl Jones, Mary McDonnell, David Strathairn, Kevin Tighe, Will Oldham, and Jace Alexander.
Matewan is a coal town where the local miners' lives are controlled by the powerful Stone Mountain Coal Company. The company practically owns the town, reducing workers' wages while raising prices at the company-owned supply and grocery.
The citizens' land and homes are not their own, and the future seems dim.
When the coal company brings immigrants and minorities to Matewan as cheaper labour, an IWW union organiser, Joe Kenehan arrives in Matewan by train.
Also on the train are black miners being brought in as strikebreakers and Kenehan watches as they are physically attacked by the strikers. Kenehan's first successful intervention in the conflict is to persuade the strikers that the way to defeat the company is to ally with the black and Italian miners rather than trying to drive them out. Kenehan challenges the racism of the white miners and succeeds in persuading them to accept the appeal for working class solidarity made by the black miners who were unaware that a strike was in progress and make it clear that they are not scabs. His strategy works, and in a dramatic scene both the Italian and the black miners join the strike under the guns of the company guards.
Kenehan preaches a doctrine of working class solidarity and consistently argues against recourse to force. The strikers, he insists, must not allow themselves to be goaded into violence, no matter what the provocation. Instead they have to rely on their unity to bring them victory.
As the crisis grows, strikers and their families are removed from their homes by two coal company mercenaries and the situation heads inexorably toward a final shootout on Matewan's main street.
Sayles' simple but telling screenplay brings to light the treatment of immigrants and minorities in the early 20th century South, and it draws sharp parallels between the Matewan labour battle and the Civil War some 50 years earlier.
The visual feel of the film is real West Virginia backwoods, with much of the credit going to legendary cinematographer Haskell Wexler, whose warm, rustic lighting belies the anxiety and terror felt by the oppressed townspeople.
Matewan is a marvellous celebration of working class solidarity and courage in the face of the most brutal employers. It focuses on the rank and file experience of the 1920 strike with the intention of inspiring similar solidarity and courage among the working class today.
Variety Magazine: ‘Matewan is a heartfelt, straight-ahead tale of labour organising in the coal mines of West Virginia in 1920 that runs its course like a train coming down the track.
Film critic Vincent Canby: ‘There's not a weak performance in the film, but I especially admired the work of Mr. Cooper, Mr. Tighe, Miss McDonnell, Miss Mette, Mr. Gunton, Mr. Strathairn and Mr. Mostel…each manages to make something personal and idiosyncratic out of the material, without destroying the ballad-like style’.
Empire Magazine: ‘Chris Cooper's superb performance and numerous authentic details makes this a little gem’
Time Out: ‘Sayles’ marvellously gripping movie never compromises its political content. It possesses a mythic clarity, yet there’s also a welcome complexity at work…the result is witty, astute, and finally very moving’.
Virgin Film Guide: ‘Sayles captures the feel of a 1930s Popular Front film but grounds it in a complex reality of a world that refuses to present easy choices. Matewan is beautifully shot and there is not a weak performance in the film’.
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