Exploring the Integration of Struggles in 'Salt of the Earth' (1954)

This essay provides a detailed film studies analysis of the 1954 American drama film 'Salt of the Earth,' directed by Herbert J. Biberman. The film, written by Michael Wilson, is examined for its integration of the struggles of women, an ethnic minority, and workers, which contributed to its controversial suppression. The analysis focuses on the film's neorealist style, its depiction of the 1951 strike against the Empire Zinc Company, and its exploration of themes such as feminism, racism, and class struggle. The essay also considers the film's structure, its portrayal of Mexican-American culture, and its lasting impact, while referencing various critical perspectives and highlighting the film's complex political and social context. Desklib offers more solved assignments and study tools for students.

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Film Studies

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Salt of the earth (Biberman;1954), successfully attempts to integrate the struggles of
women, an ethnic minority and workers to such a degree it guaranteed its
suppression”8278666751
Salt of the Earth is an American drama film which was written by Michael Wilson in 1954. This
film was directed by Herbert J. Biberman, and produced by Paul Jarrico. It was the first movie to
advance the feminist social and political point of view. The main focus of this movie is on the
long and difficult strike which was based on the 1951 strikes against the Empire Zinc Company
in Grant County, New Mexico. The running time of movie is 92 minutes and the movie was
released in 1954 at New York City. Salt of the earth is one of the controversial movies of all time
which is based on the real time incident surrounding the 1951 strike (Apercu, 2010).
The company was recognized as "Delaware Zinc," in the film and the setting of movie was held
in Zinc town, New Mexico. The film defined the impact of strikes on the miners, company and
the police reaction and during that time what action had been made (Hodeghatta, 2013). The
neorealist style had been adapted by this movie in which the real miners and their families were
shown in the film by the producers and director. It has been found that this film was blacklisted
in the USA for 11 years and not shown until 1965- it has been reflected that the group of
Hispanic Miners were living in the New Mexico for a long period. Esperanza Quintero and her
husband and their three children were working in the company where they were provided poor
sanitation facilities. The working style of the Zinc Company was very careless in which Ramon-
Esperanza Quintero’s husband was working. The company was not concern about the men’s
safety. After a mining accident, the miners had decided to go on strike for demanding a safety at
least. Their protest protected scabs from replacing them but after 6 months of protesting, the
company had attained the order successfully to remove the protesting miners from the company.

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At that stage, women took step in and replaced them; this action leaded many to jail before
leading them to conquest (Eyben. et. al., 2013).
As per the details of the movie, there are various things to be said about the movie of Salt
of the Earth. The focus will be made on the retaliation between its ideology and its structure. The
issues of “sectoral” struggles are reliant on the nationalism, ethicality and feminism which have
become the reason of debate for the political movements. The title of the movie “SALT OF THE
EARTH” is considered as the art. The story of the film reflects the struggles of the women. In the
film, these struggles were against racism, sexism and the unevaluated power of the decision
class. In the film, they conflict with one another and became the issue of separate against
themselves. It has been found that the major thrust of the film is towards the unified class
identity (Mirosa, Wooliscroft and Lawson, 2011). But it cannot be said that “SALT OF THE
EARTH” is a revolutionary film. It does not clearly support workers to take control in the
context of production. If it is done, it would have been politically impossible and inaccurate as
per historically. Argue could be made for the strong and democratic union capable of forcing
effective condition of working from those people who knows the meaning of production
adequately. It shows that the winning the single strike is not considered as the triumph for all
(Hornborg, 2008). It has been researched that in the context of class struggle, SALT OF THE
EARTH’s feminism, though invasive, prevents short of the radical. In the movie, Ramon comes
to know about the importance of household task at the time of Esperanza’s three days in jail. But
it has not been found in the film about the criticism of the nuclear family itself along with the
fundamental distinguishes of labor along the line of traditional sex roles. But it is appreciated
that film presents the household works child care and the sanitation along with the political
issues. The film is not only shown the growth and heroism central of Esperanza. The reaction of

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filmgoer is dependent on the interpretive voice of him. The feminism in the film was sufficient to
provoke male unionists ranging in the international union of mine (Shindler, 2014).
The structure of the film was picturized systematically but the struggle against racism is
in some zone was less dynamic due to produce less conflict between the protagonists and there
were a less suspense as it was expected. As it is described in the film that the role of Ramon
Quintero as “Ray” and “Pancho,” was not effective, they were taunting of Ramon in the care of
police and the statements were made like child mentality which was not expected. Along with
the ideology defines that the film was not only depicted the “evils of racism” that is the verbal
abuse and the cruel discrimination in the conditions of living and working. It also depicted the
economic usefulness of racism (McCallum, 2012). Racism serves the higher authority of the
company by distinguishing the workers and settled down the policy against one another
(Rosenfelt, 1979). Lastly, it dynamically emphasizes the importance of tradition and the history
which was varied from the culture of Anglo (Belmonte, 2013). In the entire film, the Mexican
American cultures are weaved like the Spanish language. A fighting song was also picturized in
the film. The film were criticized by many of people as UCLA’s Bob Rosen points out that the
movie was not perfect and it had lack of dialectic common. The picture was not picturized as per
traditions of an ethic or national group as both elements are considered as the strength. In the
movie even the church reflects as generous, although it had been warned the women back into
their shelters lest they sin. It has been found that where ethnicity is concerned, self criticism was
shown in the entire film (Shaw and Youngblood, 2014). Usually, the film was made on the
reliable in its interpretation about the lifestyle of the Mexican America, observing a clear
pleasure in the culture without patronizing it.

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The film is the example of the political issues which was correct in the point of view of some of
them but ideologically it was heavy handed and uninteresting movie. Movie was made up to take
different techniques such as combined approach of suspense and action. Bibremen
interconnected the various aspects of daily routine life of the community of mining that was able
to elaborate the hard life of the miners and the impact of it on their family. The working
conditions of miners had been depicted in effective manner. Collective decision making
approach had taken by the directors of the film to make difference not only the preparation of the
script but all elements of the production of the film that marking an unexpected change in the
context of the hierarchal collaboration that defined the feature of the Hollywood filmmaking
(Biberman, et. al., 2011). There were so many roles in the film that was filled by the miners
involving the male lead Ramon, rolled by unionist Juan Chacon. A highly famed superstar was
appeared in the movie in the role of female lead. Her involvement in the film led to her expulsion
from the US which ended the film career of her. The production of movie was effected by
continuous harassment from political as well as industrial leaders. Various union personnel were
disallowed to participate in the union crew. There were so many issues arise due to
accomplishment of the movie. However, there were many conflicts regarding this film but it was
accepted by people. The clear concepts regarding the mining workers and their families had been
shown in the movie. There were dual focus given by the film which makes the Salt of the Earth a
captivating and prevailing (Yin, 2009). There were not shown only running against the politics of
America of the time, extensive with uncertainties of the things which is unclear socialist, but it is
also connecting with the concern of the rights of women and the equality of the female, that
exactly had not been recognized in film prior.

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References
Apercu, 2010. Film Review:- Salt of the Earth (1954). Accessed on 19th December, 2017, from:
https://berryapercu.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/film-review-salt-of-the-earth-1954/.
Belmonte, L.A., 2013. Selling the American Way: US Propaganda and the Cold War. University
of Pennsylvania Press.
Biberman, H., Revueltas, R., Chacón, J. and Geer, W., 2011. Salt of the Earth. Independent
Prod./Internat. Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers.
Eyben, F., Weninger, F., Squartini, S. and Schuller, B., 2013, May. Real-life voice activity
detection with lstm recurrent neural networks and an application to hollywood movies.
In Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2013 IEEE International Conference
on (pp. 483-487). IEEE.
Hodeghatta, U.R., 2013. Sentiment analysis of Hollywood movies on Twitter. In Proceedings of
the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and
Mining (pp. 1401-1404). ACM.
Hornborg, A.C., 2008. Protecting Earth? Rappaport’s Vision of Rituals as Environmental
Practices. J. Hum. Ecol, 23(4), pp.275-283.
McCallum, R., 2012. Ideologies of identity in adolescent fiction: the dialogic construction of
subjectivity. Routledge.
Mirosa, M., Wooliscroft, B. and Lawson, R., 2011. Dynamic Ideologies: The Case of Slow
Food. ACR North American Advances.

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Rosenfelt, D. 1979. Ideology and Structure inSalt of the Earth," inJumpCut.
Shaw, T. and Youngblood, D.J., 2014. Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet struggle
for hearts and minds. University Press of Kansas.
Shindler, C., 2014. Hollywood Goes to War: Films and American Society, 1939-1952.
Routledge.
Yin, L., 2009. On the translation of English movie titles. Asian social science, 5(3), p.171.