Barbara Kopple
Barbara Kopple (born July 30, 1946) is an American film director known primarily for her documentary work. She is credited with pioneering a renaissance of cinema vérité, and bringing the historic french style to a modern American audience. She has won two Academy Awards, for Harlan County, USA (1977), about a Kentucky miners' strike,[1] and for American Dream (1991), the story of the 1985–86 Hormel strike in Austin, Minnesota,[2] making her the first woman to win two Oscars in the Best Documentary category.[3]
Barbara Kopple
July 30, 1946
Film director
Kopple gained acclaim for the film Bearing Witness (2005), a documentary about five women journalists stationed in combat zones during the Iraq War. She is also known for directing the documentary films Wild Man Blues (1997), A Conversation With Gregory Peck (1999), My Generation (2000), Running from Crazy (2013), Miss Sharon Jones! (2015), and Desert One (2019).
She received a Primetime Emmy Award for Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson (1993), and directed episodes of television drama series such as the NBC police drama series Homicide: Life on the Street (1999) and the HBO prison drama series Oz (1999), winning a Directors Guild of America award for the former.[4]
Kopple received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences on September 28, 2023.[5]
Style and themes[edit]
Kopple is a documentary filmmaker and has validated her art form in response to criticism that documentaries seem past their prime: "people want to get a sense of truthfulness in terms of what's happening and what's going on. Documentaries do that."
She has noted her major influence to be director Lucy Jarvis, for her both her approach to life and prolificness. Kopple's documentaries are in the style of cinema vérité. Reflecting on her documentaries in 1991, Kopple said “the kind of films that influenced me have more to do with watching people, letting scenes come alive so you actually see people change through the course of the film...almost like you're right there.”[15] Her work typically consist of observational footage, minimal voice-overs and intimate interviews with her subjects. She is quoted saying "I really love people, and I love telling their stories and I feel so excited when I get to do so" and "I try so hard to let the characters be the ones that carry the story and say the things they want to say." Thus she is humanist in her approach to storytelling. She has listed the Maysle brothers and D. A. Pennebaker as notable influences on her technique.[28] “I absolutely loved Don't Look Back because he got so close to Dylan,” Kopple said of Pennebacker. “I wanted to make films that were as intimate as that.”[15]
Kopple's work is often politically driven. She has made several films on U.S. labor issues, as well as worker's unions, and has been a longtime advocate for the American labor movement.[29] Many of her documentaries revolve around political subject matters, but her more recent work has taken a shift towards music documentary and celebrity portraiture.[30]
For her documentaries, Kopple works in small crews of two to five, almost always acting as her own sound operator.[23]
Kopple embraces a collaborative approach to filmmaking, particularly in the editing process.The collaborative models of working originates from her internship with the Maysles Brothers in Gimme Shelter (1970) and later joining the film collective that would produce Winter Soldier (1972). While editing Harlan County, USA, Kopple sought multiple editors for the nine-month post-production process. She used the same process when editing Shut Up & Sing, stating, "We were working with so many different editors and different sensibilities but the discussions we had were sensational, because you couldn't say no. You had to explain how it moved the story forward or what it gave the characters so it was very egalitarian in the editing room."[24]
Ethics[edit]
Past financial struggles influenced Kopple's embrace of commercial projects, her recent partnership was with YouTube's production of This is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous. She has partnered with studios such as ABC, NBC, Lifetime Television, Disney Channel and The Weinstein Company. Kopple responds to criticism surrounding lack of authenticity in commissioned films citing the conventions of cinéma vérité and direct cinema that she followed in her first films. She relies on a neutral outlook when approaching the subject matter of her films, some of whom were controversial figures such as Woody Allen and Mike Tyson.[24]
She upholds the strength of women filmmakers citing Rory Kennedy, Mirra Bank, Liz Garbus, and Kristi Jacobson as both colleagues and inspirations. She notes also that there is a benefit to being a woman filmmaker in that "it's easier because people are not intimidated by you." She utilizes the underestimation of women as a positive bridge to understanding her subjects. When asked about the domination of men in the film industry she explains that, for better or for worse, this does not impact her; there are few men in her field as there is little money in documentary filmmaking.
Kopple actively participates in organizations that address social issues and support independent filmmaking.
Personal life[edit]
Kopple describes herself as a "filmmaker and mom." She is a niece of the American playwright Murray Burnett.[16]
Miscellaneous awards