in Lexington Herald-Leader
July 14, 2006

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When the dam broke and sludge enveloped West Virginia's Buffalo Creek, the opportunities, the need, for a documentary film were clear in the numbers: 125 killed, 4,000 homeless.

But it was 1972, and technology wasn't what it is today. So Mimi Pickering's 1975 film, which recently was released on DVD by Whitesburg's Appalshop, remains a product of its time. The soundtrack is appropriate, but not catchy. The film is black-and-white. The event is detailed like a long news report, not a narrative story.

The strength of the DVD is the inclusion of Pickering's 1985 follow-up, Buffalo Creek Revisited. The film shows how the community rebuilt, or rather, tried to rebuild on ruined land with broken trust. Paired with Pickering's original film, it's a powerful statement about the long-term effects of towns run over, not by acts of God, but by acts of man.

For all the grim reminders in Pickering's films, it wasn't the last time an area was ruined by coal waste, and it wasn't the last film to document it. Appalshop filmmaker Robert Salyer spent four years documenting the clean-up in Martin County after 306 million gallons of coal sludge went down two tributaries of the Tug Fork River in 2000. The product of Salyer's work, Sludge, features the stories of teachers, reporters, activists and residents looking for answers and assurance but includes little comment from the coal company.

The footage is vivid and sickening, shot as the cleanup occurred and years later, as people picked slurry from the streams, kids went to school below sludge ponds and the coal company paid reduced fines.

With the benefit of technology and timing, Sludge is the most compelling of the films. It builds on the historical aspects of the Buffalo Creek films and shows how very little has changed.

Even as Pickering's 1975 film was chosen last year for preservation and remembrance in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry, the bittersweet curiosity is whether we would have seen Salyer's film at all if we'd remembered Buffalo Creek earlier.

dvd review