The Miners’ Hymns deserves recognition as the best documentary released this decade. The film’s relatively maligned state—maligned in the sense that too few have seen the film; those who have praise it almost universally—probably has a lot to do with director Bill Morrison and his unique approach, which exists somewhere on the periphery of documentary, narrative and experimental forms. His best known work is 2002’s Decasia, a feature-length collage piece that utilizes deteriorated film strips to both lament the decaying nature of American film history and marvel at the unique beauty of decomposing film stock, a celluloid meditation on celluloid itself. Morrison directed, edited and produced the work, but he doesn’t call Decasia a film. In the title credits, it’s called a “Michael Gordon Symphony,” referring to the composer who wrote the soundtrack.
In other words, Morrison is reticent to label himself a true filmmaker, and his work suggests why. He works almost exclusively with found footage and archival material, conjuring up history in a way that makes the past feel vividly and almost dizzyingly present. Original images, at least in the sense of what we consider “original images” to be, are nonexistent. The only “new” elements in his work are the pieces of music he commissions from contemporary composers like John Adams, Erik Friedlander and Julia Wolfe, to name a few. But The Miners’ Hymns is somehow different. It follows the same model—found footage, a stirring score courtesy of master Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson—but it’s the first work Morrison described as a “real documentary,” a notion that reveals itself over the course of 52 beautiful, elegiac minutes.
The film is bookended by aerial tours of the former mining community of County Durham, once the site of the region’s major collieries. Morrison imposes birth and death dates over shots of the former coal pits, now replaced by big-box retail stores and soccer stadiums, a testament to an industrial society turned consumer. This footage leads directly to the archival material. Here, the vague impressions of a narrative, previously absent in Morrison’s work, emerge. Miners uniformly file down a darkened mineshaft, their stoic faces anticipating a long day’s work. One of them kisses his safety light, a quasi-spiritual gesture that imparts the job’s inherent and ever-present danger. The hymns referred to in the title can therefore be considered the unheard clang of man and machine loosening darkened, glittery anthracite; all we hear is Jóhannsson’s haunting music, which renders the action overwhelming, sublime and somehow balletic.
Outside of the mines, we see footage of Durham townsfolk. Children romp around the worksite, transforming them into play spaces rather than labor spaces. We see the uniformity of the village’s residential layout, a curious reflection of the uniform labor practices. Unsurprisingly, in both custom and form, Durham’s identity appears metaphysically tied to the mines. The images, most of which derive from the National Coal Board’s stock footage, are technically gorgeous, but their quality decays over time, and like Decasia, The Miners’ Hymns suggests that the loss of a cinematic past means losing a part of history, and part of ourselves. From rich celluloid, we move to television footage of the 1984-5 miners’ strike, the event that closed Durham’s industrial era. We witness violent rioting and police brutality, weathered faces twisted in emotion. We also detect a sense of kinship. Morrison, after all, is something of a miner himself, a collier of forgotten stories and bygone images; like the colliers in Durham, his life is tied to his labor, and so the hymns take on another meaning: the songs of profound loss.
The final segment returns to a happier time with the Miner’s Gala, Durham’s ceremonial march to the local cathedral, where a brass band, beautiful banners and grateful congregation await the celebratory laborers and their families. By depicting the momentary merger of two disparate factions—the socialist labor unions and the decidedly anti-socialist Church of England—and illustrating the country’s conservative and progressive histories, Morrison illustrates the historical footage’s contemporary relevance. And not because of how it existed in reality, but how it exists on film. Here, above all else, is a record of peace, proof of societal harmony. The mind’s eye loses sight of such moments, but the cinematic eye—in its most rudimentary form, the camera lens—never forgets. With the grace of a poet and without a hint of didacticism, Morrison reminds us of that.