Mark Reviews Movies: BISBEE '17

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 4, 2018

The narrative of Bisbee '17 revolves around the re-creation of the mass kidnapping and deportation of 1,196 people in the mining town of Bisbee, Arizona, on July 12, 1917. They were mostly immigrants—workers in the local copper mine run by a company that basically controlled everything about the town. They were rounded up by a posse of deputized citizens, overseen by the county Sheriff, and held at the town's baseball field, until they were loaded on to cattle cars and sent to town in southern New Mexico. The Sheriff warned them that, if they ever returned to Bisbee, they would be killed.

Director Robert Greene's documentary follows a group of people living in Bisbee on the 100th anniversary of the deportation, as they prepare for the re-creation. The copper mine has changed owners since 1917, and now, it remains untouched. There's still copper in the pits, but the company keeps it there like a bank keeps its money in the vault—ready for a rainy day.

The only people working in the mine are security guards and tour guides. These men are keeping up the tradition of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfather. They might not be miners, but technically, they're still working underground. One man says this with a great sense of pride. Another man notices his late father's name on the in-out board of the mine, and he's brought to tears.

Bisbee was once the richest town in Arizona. Today, it's the poorest. A mining town without a mine is a ghost town, one denizen says, but Bisbee definitely isn't. There are still plenty of people there, making a living as best as they can. The mining company doesn't care about the fate of the town. There's a fence around their property, and if or when the time comes to start mining again, they'll find workers, even if Bisbee itself is empty.

Greene's film is ambitious in scope but intimate in approach. It tells the story of a town and how it has changed over a century. It tells the individual stories of a select collection of the population, who take pride in, feel ashamed of, or don't have much of an opinion at all about the past. They're all holding out for something, though, because that copper can't stay underground forever.

Ultimately, though, the film is a deep lesson about a forgotten, covered-up, or unknown piece of American history, when one group of Americans decided that they had had enough of another group of Americans. The official reason was that the miners, on strike for better wages and safer working conditions, were agitators, working for a radical and seditious labor organization that was trying to sabotage the American effort during the Great War. That's the real reason for some in Bisbee still. They truly believe that, because their fathers or grandfathers were company men who might have been part of the deportation. Also, their own contemporary politics fit into that way of thinking.

Others, though, see it as a great injustice (which it was, by the way, lest I appear neutral on the subject). It needs to be brought to light. The people of Bisbee have to come to a reckoning with what their ancestors did to other people's ancestors—and their own ancestors, too. One family, who says they are completely neutral on the subject, had family members on opposing sides of the confrontation. Their grandfather arrested his own brother and had him sent away, never to be seen in Bisbee again. The brothers' descendants are trying to reunite them, finally, in death, while the grandsons are preparing to play the brothers in the re-creation.

There's a lot to process in this film. Greene begins it as a profile of the town, transitions it into a study of how the locals (with or without any prior acting experience) prepare to play their roles, sneaks in some subtle observations about how the politics of the past have continued into the present, and, finally, captures the town's re-creation of the deportation. Each aspect of this story bleeds into the others. The actors discuss how they're trying to get into the heads of the historical figures they're about to play. For most of them, it's quite easy. The man playing the president of the mining company feels just as outraged at the idea of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" being turned into a union song as his character must have. A professional actor, playing one of the mining executives, used to work for a private prison that routinely deported people to Central America, so he's not exactly opposed to the company and Sheriff's decision a hundred years ago.

The truth of history is all in the telling. The newspapers at the time, run by the company, didn't publicize the deportation, obviously, and when they did, it was always sympathetic to the company and the vigilante mob. Most of the locals don't know much about it, except what they had been told by family members, and those are prejudiced accounts, too, since the only families in Bisbee who would have stories to tell about the event would have been on the side of the company. The host of a local radio show narrates a more complete version of the story, while members of the local historical society try to piece it together better.

The point, of course, is that history is always in flux, based on contemporary accounts and modern reassertions, and never really changing. Greene films the re-creation with that latter idea in mind. He easily could frame the show in such a way to eliminate any trappings of modernity, but instead, he includes them—modern cars, neon signs in a bar (even though a side room looks of the period), the dates on the baseball field. This is what happened then, but it's still happening now—the hatred, the distrust, the questions of what citizenship means, the deportations.

We have to confront it, or we'll never learn. Ultimately, Bisbee '17 shows some of these people learning. It's one thing to think about the past as an abstract idea. It's an entirely other thing to be holding a rifle, rounding up American citizens, and forcing them on to train cars. Art, even of the amateur variety, has that singular power to transform hearts and minds, and that's what we get to witness here.

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