Geoff Gimse saw our film last Thursday evening, at Michigan Tech. Here, Ken and I agree, he nails it, and we especially dig his last comment about the film as “another layer of…memory.”
Since the actual facts of the tragedy are impossible to discern, the film instead focuses on how the events are remembered and how that memory becomes internalized in a community. It is memory, especially familial memory, that becomes particularly important to the film. It tracks the event through the stories that were passed down from the survivors to their children and grandchildren. This familial context is then further explored through Woody Guthrie’s song, from which the film takes it title. Arlo Guthrie, Woody Guthrie’s son, is interviewed at length regarding his father and the impact of the song itself. It is apparent by the end of the film that the Italian Hall Disaster, now almost 100 years past, remains a living memory that continues to have a real impact on the community today. Indeed, even the movie itself can be seen as another layer of that memory. It is a recording of voices. Voices that were previously unheard but are now remembered.