The Miners' Hymns

Directed by Bill Morrison

5 Stars

This country is haunted by the ghosts of miners - and by one insistent question arising from their monumental labours.

What has happened to all the wealth they created?

Millions of miners in this country dug coal out of the ground for hundreds of years, providing the energy that powered industry, fuelled transport and heated houses. The dangerous, unhealthy and backbreaking work of men and women in pit communities made rapid capitalist development possible in this country and elsewhere.

It powered the industrial revolution, sustained the British empire and ultimately helped create the modern day global dominance of industrial and financial capitalism.

That labour produced vast fortunes and huge power for individuals, companies and countries.

The miners' economic sacrifices were matched by their political achievements.

They helped create and propel to power trade unions and the Labour Party and through them the welfare state, free and universal education and healthcare and benefits to alleviate the suffering of unemployment, sickness, and old age. That is their legacy to us.

The Miners' Hymns is a magnificent film about the economic and political struggles of those mining communities.

Its director, US multimedia artist Bill Morrison, uses contemporary and archive film footage to create a poetic and elegiac memorial to the industrial and political culture of the Durham miners before their jobs and communities were snuffed out by Thatcherite economics in the '80s and '90s.

The film itself is a kind of blessing. Each of the sequences, like seams of coal, lays down veins of meaning about work, history, struggle and celebration,

Avoiding nostalgia and sentimentality and showing clearly the brutal and destructive class war unleashed on mining communities, it is a dignified homage to the miners and their families, to their sheer hard work and to a cultured, collective and co-operative way of life that has been all but destroyed.

You will not see a more beautiful, moving and truthful memorial to the industrial working class.

The film works too as a kind of dialogue with the ghosts of those miners. They gaze out at us as the wealth they created is transmuted into capital and used to exploit new generations of proletarians across the world.

They watch us cheerfully and hopefully as the Labour Party they supported and sustained severs its links with trade unions.

And they stare at us as the welfare state they struggled to create is dismantled and destroyed, like their jobs, their industry and their communities.

They are asking, what has happened to the wealth we created?

They being dead yet speaketh. What do we say back to them?

The Miners' Hymns gets a 7.30pm screening tomorrow, accompanied by a live concert performance of the original score by Johann Johannsson, at the Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London EC1, box office: (020) 7638-4141. It is available on DVD from the British Film Institute at www.filmstore.bfi.org.uk.