DS30
Tyneside Cinema/Touring
5/5

OVER the last few years there’ve been many treatments of the 1984 miners’ strike — the fiercest industrial and political struggle in living memory — in film, literature and music.

While some attempt to relate the significance of what happened then to the present most, like Bill Morrison’s elegiac film The Miners’ Hymns, evoke nostalgia, sadness and a sense of commemoration.

But DS30, by the industrial music group Test Dept, adds another colour to that palette — the deeply red, radical colour of anger.

An explosive synthesis of industrial and politically committed film and music, its editing and montage is inspired by the constructivism of the Soviet era. Its next screening is at the Durham Miners’ Gala in two weeks time.

In its opening sequence an old map of Newcastle and the north east, with dots marking the pits, is mixed with archive footage of miners trooping out of shafts and tunnels accompanied by blasts of noise from massive mining machinery and dancing and speeches at the Big Meeting in Durham.

As the heavy industrial beats intensify, so does the barrage of images of organised state violence at Orgreave, with the blurred batons of the police cracking open the skulls of defenceless pickets.

Miners’ leader Arthur Scargill presciently states: “They’ve come for the miners and I warn the rest of trade unionism that when they come for you there’ll be no-one to protect you.”

There is footage of pithead towers being blown up and a moving sequence of ghostly before-and-after images in which collieries, railways and all the yards and spoil heaps of the coal industry morph into green, landscaped fields and concrete car parks.

The dots on the map disappear, one by one.

In fusing bitter memories of the past with anger and despair at the injustices of the present DS30, like all effective political art, provokes questions about the here and now.

As ex-miner and former NUM official Dave Temple says, DS30 shows that the working class’s apparent disconnection with politics is illusory. “What they’re disconnected from is professional politicians who do not change their lives for the better and those who shout revolutionary slogans without relevance to the day-to-day problems of ordinary people.

“But people have to face these problems, which are getting worse.

“Building self-help networks such as foodbanks — as our mining communities did in the past — helps people to cope. A large anti-capitalist movement could develop from these micro-movements.

“The emancipation of working-class people is down to themselves. That’s what the film shows.”

There can’t be a stronger recommendation to go and see this important work.

A screening of the film, followed by a Q and A session, is at the Durham Miners’ Association, Redhills, Durham, at 5.45pm on Thursday July 9, details: testdeptds30.co.uk. The Big Meeting: A History of the Durham Miners’ Gala by Dave Temple is available from durhamminers.org. Dave Temple, Owen Jones and Sean O’Brien will be discussing the struggle for democracy at the Durham Moot at 1pm on Sunday July 12 at the Palace Green Library, Durham. The Durham Miners’ Gala takes place on Saturday July 11.