Tour of a British Coal Mine (1928)

Overview

This astonishingly ambitious amateur documentary examines the working lives of Barnsley's pitmen, whose muscle and machinery cut deep into the South Yorkshire Coalfield. It's an industrial process film at heart, following the miners' journey to work, descent at the pithead, labour underground, and the cut coal's journey by rail to Grimsby docks. Stylish and poetic, the scenes at the coalface are charged with elemental drama.