An Injury to One

‘An injury to one’ takes us from the 19th century to the eve of the 21st, from Butte, Montana as land of frontier promise to Butte as land of death and environmental destruction. It provides a corrective - and absolutely compelling - glimpse of a particularly volatile moment in American labor history: the rise and fall of Butte. Cities history was entirely shaped by its exploitation by the Anaconda Mining Company, who, at the height of WWI, produced ten percent of the world's copper from the town's depths. War profiteering and the company's extreme indifference to the safety of its employees led to Frank Little's arrival. "The agitator" found in the desperate, agonized miners overwhelming support for his ideas, which included the abolishment of the wage system and the establishment of a socialist commonwealth. Through this action he signed his brutal death. Wilkerson mixes archival footage with deftly deployed intertitles, while the lyrics to traditional mining songs are accompanied by music from William Oldham, Jim O'Rourke, and the band Low, producing an appropriately moody, effulgent, and strangely out-of-time soundtrack. The result is an astonishing document that combines painterly images, incisive writing, and a bold graphic sensibility to produce an articulate example of the aesthetic and political possibilities offered by filmmaking in the digital age.