Fernando Serrano in a still from ‘Bisbee ’17’.
In a version of the famous union ballad, “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,” Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, and Joan Baez sing: “The copper bosses killed you Joe.” The line refers to Joe Hill, musician and activist, who organized miners for the Industrial Workers of the World, and was executed by a firing squad in 1915 in Utah.
Robert Greene’s Bisbee ’17 tells the story of another copper miners’ strike led by the rabble rousing I.W.W., and one of U.S. labor’s most explosive episodes. In recounting this long covered-up chapter of American history, Greene inventively uses a film form that’s as radical as its content.
On July 12, 1917 striking copper miners in Bisbee, Arizona—including many Mexican and Eastern European immigrants—were rounded up at gunpoint on order of mining company Phelps Dodge, loaded onto freight trains, and carted off to New Mexico. It was vigilante justice with a taint of ethnic cleansing, further justified by the fact that the Wobblies (as I.W.W. members were nicknamed) protested U.S. entry into World War I and were attempting to hamper the war effort on the home front.
In recounting this long covered-up chapter of American history, Greene inventively uses a film form that’s as radical as its content.
Refused access at a military base, all 1,200-plus deportees were unceremoniously transported another forty-five minutes out into the desert, dumped there, and told never to return to Bisbee. After a sixteen-hour journey made without food and with little water, the miners were left to struggle back on their own in the summer heat. Ironically, many were soon drafted and shipped off to Europe to die in the war they’d opposed.
Like Errol Morris’s 2017 Wormwood, Greene’s stylistically imaginative work is a genre-bender, blending elements of nonfiction and fiction filmmaking, enhanced with ballads from the Wobblies’ Little Red Songbook and original music by Keegan DeWitt. Greene shows the power of historical anniversaries and commemorations of them, especially in a forgetful country that author Gore Vidal called “the United States of Amnesia.”
To shoot Bisbee ’17, Greene filmed a mass spectacle similar to Civil War reenactments. In addition to some professional thespians, including James West, who played mine manager John Greenway, many contemporary Bisbee residents portray their own ancestors on both sides of the gritty class struggle a century ago. In one poignant case, a brother even arrested his own brother, who was then shipped out to war, and both are depicted by direct descendents.
Greene’s camera candidly captures the townsfolk preparing to portray miners, owners, sheriffs, and their deputized minions in the company town, as well as the grand finale of hundreds of strikers sent away in boxcars (only thirty-six ever returned to live in Bisbee).
Among the Bisbee residents in the cast is Chicano Fernando Serrano, who plays a copper miner. He is actually a young man of humble origins whose own mother was deported to Mexico.
Initially, when Greene’s crew catches up with Serrano, he seems passive. During a rehearsal the uneducated youth has difficulty correctly pronouncing the word “solidarity.” But by the film’s powerful ending, both “onscreen” in character and “offscreen” as himself, Serrano has emerged as a more self-conscious, empowered person who asserts he has to participate in politics. The concept of working class unity is a recurring theme throughout Bisbee ’17, and the classic labor anthem “Solidarity Forever” is repeatedly heard like a leitmotif, sung in both Spanish and English.
After a special screening in Beverly Hills, Greene spoke of his interest in how the process of historical reenactment affects individuals involved. He went so far as to assert that the process of dredging up this suppressed history has changed the townsfolk who took part in the historical recreation.
Bisbee ’17 brings to life the I.W.W., infused with a fighting spirit and inspired by songs such as Joe Hill’s “There is Power in a Union,” and “The Rebel Girl.” But the film is much more than a history lesson, as Greene insists his “film is more about Bisbee in 2017 than in 1917.”
The director asserts that the process of dredging up this suppressed history has changed the townsfolk who took part in the historical recreation.
“We needed to tell this story so it doesn’t happen again. Subtext is 100 percent text—it didn’t need to be said,” Greene noted, apparently referring to the I.C.E. raids, roundups, and deportations of undocumented immigrants that have accelerated under the Trump regime, as well as the separation of refugee/immigrant children from their parents at the border.
For some Bisbee inhabitants, the unearthing of the unspoken of trauma which haunted the town was a sort of exorcism. At the film’s end, one local calls the reenactment “group therapy.” As Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest, “what’s past is prologue,” and revisiting history, as Greene does in his approximately two hour account of Bisbee 1917/2017, is an attempt to understand and learn from our mistakes—and to heal.
Bisbee ’17 is in limited theatrical release. For more info visit https://www.bisbee17.com/.