‘Bisbee ‘17’
History is written by the victors. That's certainly true in Bisbee, Ariz., a small border town where, in 1917, a sheriff backed by local mining companies rounded up striking workers and exiled them to the New Mexico desert, never to be seriously thought of again. “Bisbee ‘17” addresses that traumatic event in a bracing documentary that blends fiction and reality in ways that both complicate and enhance the material's core themes. Premiering at this year's Sundance Film Festival, it's an investigation into memory, intolerance, corporate-labor conflicts and race relations that's as audacious as it is timely — and further confirms that director Robert Greene is one of America's finest new voices in nonfiction.
When the radical Industrial Workers of the World in Bisbee convinced German and Mexican miners to unionize and strike for better wages and safety measures, their bosses and neighbors viewed them as traitorous rabble-rousers. That, in turn, resulted in the Bisbee Deportation of July 12, 1917, carried out by sheriff Harry Wheeler and a 2,000-man posse supported by bigwigs of the region's mining conglomerates. Seized at gunpoint by white armband-sporting gunmen, the powerless Bisbee proletariat were summarily shipped off to the middle of nowhere, New Mexico, via box car — a mode of transportation whose unmistakable associations to the Holocaust are bolstered by the presence of an Israeli transplant's participation in the subsequent proceedings.
Greene's aesthetics prove not only arresting, but in sync with his larger depiction of a community wracked by dissonance and in search of unique ways to come to terms with its heritage. Lawrence Everson's soundtrack is marked by anxiously strident strings and thudding foot-stomping beats. Jarred Alterman's cinematography, generates unease from gliding pans and interview set-ups that begin before the speaker starts talking and end long after they've finished. It's a formally dexterous portrait of a municipality and its people, using both drama and documentary filmmaking to look in the mirror, and — by finally seeing, and confronting, an ugly truth — discovering a measure of healing and solidarity.