“Bisbee 17” is a film about a 1917 labor strike against Phelps Dodge, a copper mining company based in Bisbee, Arizona, a town seven miles from the Mexican border. The labor action was cut short when roughly 2000 strikebreakers and sheriff’s department (beefed up with hastily deputized citizens) rounded up 1300 protesters, many of them members of the radical and sometimes violent Industrial Workers of the World, aka The Wobblies. The strikers were taken across state lines by train and dumped in the New Mexico desert with a warning to never return. The event broke up families and created political divisions in Bisbee and the surrounding county that linger to this day. One of the most harrowing anecdotes recounted here finds a sheriff’s deputy arresting his own brother, a striking union member, at gunpoint in his own home. At the same time, “Bisbee ’17” is a film about a many other, related things besides the events themselves—so many things, in fact, that when director-writer-editor Robert Greene cuts to a series of shots of carved-out quarry rock, the multicolored layers stacked up in the frame become metaphors for the movie you’re watching, one of many that “Bisbee ’17 supplies as it goes along. First and foremost, the movie is about what it’s about: the strike, the deportation, and the aftermath. But it’s also about labor relations in the United States, a country that prides itself on having a democratic spirit yet has a long history of breaking the back of labor whenever it gets too uppity, and brutalizing and relocating or imprisoning people (including Native Americans and Japanese Americans and now Mexican Americans) who’ve been deemed enemies by the ruling class, which has historically consisted of rich white men. (According to the film, the overwhelming majority of deportees were recently arrived immigrants from Mexico and Europe.) And the film is about how hard it is to reconstruct and imagine a long-gone past when all the first-person witnesses have died. And it’s about how history lives on in the imaginations of the descendants of those who originally experienced it, and how the meaning or “takeaway” of events depends on the experiences and politics of the people who handed the stories down to their descendants, who then had to decide to pass that version on verbatim or make a few tweaks so that it suits their own understanding of life. “Bisbee ’17” is also about the artifice of storytelling and the alchemy of acting, and that magic moment when we decide to forget that we’re seeing performers pretending to be long-dead people, acting out scripted material on sets that aren’t even decorated in period detail, and just roll with the story, as we might roll with a stage production in which a dozen judiciously placed chairs and couple of card tables represent a courtroom. “Bisbee ’17” starts with a wide shot of Richard Hodges, the caretaker of Bisbee High School, standing silently, waiting for Greene’s direction. Another man wanders into the frame and asks what he’s doing; he says they’re shooting a movie and convinces the man to walk offscreen. Then Hodges becomes the first of probably three dozen major witnesses to tell us bits and pieces of the story of the strike. Cinematographer Jarred Alterman shoots the movie in CinemaScope dimensions, a wide format more commonly used for action films, historical epics and Westerns than documentaries. The town and the surrounding landscape are—including the mining company’s fenced-in sites, and the mansion where Walter Douglas, the company’s president, ruled with an iron fist—are sometimes shot as if they were battlegrounds for gods and warriors, other times as if they’re sets waiting to be brought to life by a cast of thousands. There are many scenes where witnesses (or “characters”) seem to be waiting for Greene to cue them to start talking, or silently listening as he gives them instructions. The movie builds towards a historical re-enactment of the deportation, with townspeople portraying strikers and strikebreakers, the entire story climaxing with the 1300 soon-to-be-exiled citizens being forced at gunpoint onto boxcars guarded by rifle-toting snipers. It’s an image that resonants with American atrocities past and present, from the Trail of Tears and the Japanese-American internment to present-day abuses by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE). Most, if not all, of the people we’ve met become participants in the drama, which is filmed by Greene’s camera crew, some of whom are visible in the shots. It’s a bit like watching a fact-based cousin of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” (with Green himself perhaps acting as stage manager, even though other characters do the verbal narrating) or Lars von Trier’s “Dogville,” a Wilder-influenced account of a small town living with hideous, suppressed truths. These are all angles or approaches that Greene has taken many times before, in a career of nonfiction work that has included the likes of “Actress” and “Kate Plays Christine.” His filmography employs self-consciously virtuoso techniques that are more commonly seen in meticulously directed, scripted movies (although the films of Errol Morris, a formalist to the bone, are clearly a huge influence). He sometimes indulges in quasi-experimental touches that might briefly make the viewer wonder, “Why is the movie showing me this? Is this a miscalculation or indulgence, or is it leading somewhere?” To Green’s credit, in “Bisbee ’17,” there’s a not-always-self-evident purpose behind everything he does with image, sound, editing and performance (an odd word to apply to nonfiction, in most cases—but one that makes sense in films that are explicitly about getting into character and imagining past lives). But it’s not a smooth ride by any means. Even at two hours, a slightly longer running time than most theatrical documentaries, “Bisbee ’17” feels overstuffed, rushed, and too eager to jump to the next point when it hasn’t fully developed the last one. This feels like a case where a somewhat simpler (or more “square”) approach early on—say, immediately and concisely laying out the details of the historical event in chronological order, and listing all the major players, rather than doling it all out gradually—might have oriented the viewer more quickly, and better paved the way for the movie’s detours, flourishes and tricks of perception (such as letting you think that a conversation is present-tense when it’s really two Bisbee citizens running lines or performing in the film-within-a-film). “Bisbee ’17” moves in fits and starts—by design, it often seems—with major players being introduced with great fanfare (Green gives movie star entrances to several of them) only to have their narratives cut short after a minute or two, and not rejoined for some time. But in the second half, the movie’s internal logic belatedly becomes clear. The pieces start to come together. The accumulated details of past and present combine with the emotional weight of all the fragments of stories we’ve heard, and all the different takes on what the strike and deportation meant to Bisbee. And we’re plunged into the thick of the historical re-enactment, with citizens becoming actors in a drama based on fact, re-living the traumas of their ancestors, and coming through the other side feeling as if their pre-existing opinions have been either validated or challenged. If you’re looking for a clean and forward-moving story that’s mainly interested in delivering a string of facts, this movie is not for you. It stubbornly, at times obstinately resists giving viewers conventional story signposts that might orient them in the 1917 story. But the sheer audacity and originality of the exercise makes it a must-see, regardless of what you might think of the success of failure of any particular choice. The movie’s guiding spirit seems to be young Fernando Serrano, a lanky Mexican-Ameican actor who plays one of the strikers, and whose own journey teaches him about the history of labor and his own people, and seems to politically radicalize him. He has the angular, vaguely haunted face of a character in a Diego Rivera mural, and he has powerful screen charisma; unlike a lot of more experienced actors, he seems to have figured out that the best acting often consists of just being in the scene and doing as little as possible. Greene and Alterman keep finding ways to put him in period clothes and place him at the margins of present-tense scenes, of often shooting him in partial shadows or full silhouette, as if he’s a ghost from the past watching us, and wondering if we learned anything.
