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MAYBE LATER I ALREADY DONATED CLOSE For the 2014 film about the works of photographer Sebastião Salgado, see The Salt of the Earth (2014 film). Salt of the Earth is a 1954 American drama film written by Michael Wilson, directed by Herbert J. Biberman, and produced by Paul Jarrico. All had been blacklisted by the Hollywood establishment due to their alleged involvement in communist politics.[1]
The drama film is one of the first pictures to advance the feminist social and political point of view. Its plot centers on a long and difficult strike, based on the 1951 strike against the Empire Zinc Company in Grant County, New Mexico. In the film, the company is identified as "Delaware Zinc", and the setting is "Zinctown, New Mexico". The film shows how the miners, the company, and the police react during the strike. In neorealist style, the producers and director used actual miners and their families as actors in the film.[2] In 1992, the film was added to the National Film Registry.
Salt of the Earth Theatrical release poster Directed by Herbert J. Biberman Screenplay by Michael Wilson Produced by Paul Jarrico Starring Rosaura Revueltas Will Geer David Wolfe Mervin Williams David Sarvis Ernesto Velázquez Juan Chacón Henrietta Williams Cinematography Stanley Meredith Leonard Stark Edited by Joan Laird Ed Spiegel Music by Sol Kaplan Distributed by Independent Productions Release date March 14, 1954 (New York City) Running time 94 minutes Country United States Languages English Spanish Budget $250,000 1:32:20 The full film
The drama film is one of the first pictures to advance the feminist social and political point of view. Its plot centers on a long and difficult strike, based on the 1951 strike against the Empire Zinc Company in Grant County, New Mexico. In the film, the company is identified as "Delaware Zinc", and the setting is "Zinctown, New Mexico". The film shows how the miners, the company, and the police react during the strike. In neorealist style, the producers and director used actual miners and their families as actors in the film.[2] In 1992, the film was added to the National Film Registry.
Plot Edit Esperanza and Ramón Esperanza Quintero (Rosaura Revueltas) is a miner's wife in Zinc Town, New Mexico, a community which is essentially run and owned by Delaware Zinc Inc. Esperanza is thirty-five years old, pregnant with her third child and emotionally dominated by her husband, Ramón Quintero (Juan Chacón).[3] We know from her concern about her onomásticos or día de mi/su santo or Name Day that it is the 12th November as that is the onomásticos of persons named Esperanza.
The majority of the miners are Mexican-Americans and want decent working conditions equal to those of white, or "Anglo" miners. The unionized workers go on strike, but the company refuses to negotiate and the impasse continues for months. Esperanza gives birth and, simultaneously, Ramón is beaten by police and jailed on bogus assault charges following an altercation with a union worker who betrayed his fellows. When Ramón is released, Esperanza tells him that he's no good to her in jail. He counters that if the strike succeeds they will not only get better conditions right now but also win hope for their children's futures.[4]
The company presents a Taft-Hartley Act injunction to the union, meaning any miners who picket will be arrested. Taking advantage of a loophole, the wives picket in their husbands' places. Some men dislike this, seeing it as improper and dangerous. Esperanza is forbidden to picket by Ramón at first, but she eventually joins the line while carrying her baby.[5]
The sheriff, by company orders, arrests the leading women of the strike. Esperanza is among those taken to jail. When she returns home, Ramón tells her the strike is hopeless, as the company will easily outlast the miners. She insists that the union is stronger than ever and asks Ramón why he can't accept her as an equal in their marriage. Both angry, they sleep separately that night.[6]
The next day the company evicts the Quintero family from their house. The union men and women arrive to protest the eviction. Ramón tells Esperanza that they can all fight together. The mass of workers and their families proves successful in saving the Quinteros' home. The company admits defeat and plans to negotiate. Esperanza believes that the community has won something no company can ever take away and it will be inherited by her children.[7]
Cast Edit
Professional actors
Rosaura Revueltas as Esperanza Quintero Will Geer as Sheriff David Bauer as Barton (as David Wolfe) Mervin Williams as Hartwell David Sarvis as Alexander Non-professional actors
Juan Chacón as Ramón Quintero Henrietta Williams as Teresa Vidal Ernesto Velázquez as Charley Vidal Ángela Sánchez as Consuelo Ruiz Joe T. Morales as Sal Ruiz Clorinda Alderette as Luz Morales Charles Coleman as Antonio Morales Virginia Jencks as Ruth Barnes Clinton Jencks as Frank Barnes Víctor Torres as Sebastián Prieto E.A. Rockwell as Vance William Rockwell as Kimbrough Floyd Bostick as Jenkins and other members of Mine-Mill Local 890
Production
Reception Edit Critical response Edit
Miners before they strike With McCarthyism in full force at the time of release, the Hollywood establishment did not embrace the film.[14]
Pauline Kael, who reviewed the film for Sight and Sound in 1954, panned it as a simplistic left-wing "morality play" and said it was "as clear a piece of Communist propaganda as we have had in many years."[15]
Bosley Crowther, film critic for The New York Times, reviewed the picture favorably, both for its screenplay and direction, writing: "In the light of this agitated history, it is somewhat surprising to find that Salt of the Earth is, in substance, simply a strong pro-labor film with a particularly sympathetic interest in the Mexican-Americans with whom it deals....But the real dramatic crux of the picture is the stern and bitter conflict within the membership of the union. It is the issue of whether the women shall have equality of expression and of strike participation with the men. And it is along this line of contention that Michael Wilson's tautly muscled script develops considerable personal drama, raw emotion and power." Crowther called the film "a calculated social document".[16] Michael Wilson, who worked under a nom de plume for some years afterwards, later won an Academy Award for the screenplay of Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).[17]
The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 100% of critics gave the film a positive review, based on eleven reviews.[18]
Accolades Edit Karlovy Vary International Film Festival: Best Actress: Rosaura Revueltas; Crystal Globe Award for Best Picture, Herbert J. Biberman, received Ex aequo also by True Friends. Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad), Czechoslovakia; 1954.[19] Academie du Cinema de Paris: International Grand Prize; 1955.[20] In 1992, the Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."[21] The film is preserved by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Later history Edit
Juan Chacón as Ramón Quintero The film found an audience in both Western and Eastern Europe in the few years after its American release.[22] The story of the film's suppression, as well as the events it depicted, inspired an underground audience of unionists, leftists, feminists, Mexican-Americans, and film historians. The film found a new life in the 1960s and gradually reached larger audiences through union halls, women's associations, and film schools. The 50th anniversary of the film saw a number of commemorative conferences held across the United States.[23]
Around 1993, Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguistics professor and political commentator Noam Chomsky praised the film because of the way people were portrayed doing the real work of unions. According to Chomsky: "[T]he real work is being done by people who are not known, that's always been true in every popular movement in history...I don't know how you get that across in a film. Actually, come to think of it, there are some films that have done it. I mean, I don't see a lot of visual stuff, so I'm not the best commentator, but I thought Salt of the Earth really did it. It was a long time ago, but at the time I thought that it was one of the really great movies—and of course it was killed, I think it was almost never shown."[24]
The "Salt of the Earth Labor College" located in Tucson, Arizona is named after the film. The pro-labor institution (not a college per se) holds various lectures and forums related to unionism and economic justice. The film is screened on a frequent basis.[25]
Other releases Edit
Union meeting. On July 27, 1999, a digitally restored print of the film was released in DVD by Organa through Geneon (Pioneer), and packaged with the documentary The Hollywood Ten, which reported on the ten filmmakers who were blacklisted for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). This Special Edition with the Hollywood Ten film is still available through Organa at organa.com. In 2004, a budget edition DVD was released by Alpha Video. A laserdisc version was released by the Voyager Company in 1987 (catalog # VP1005L).[26]
Because the film's copyright was not renewed in 1982,[27] the film is now in the public domain.[28][29]
Adaptations Edit The film has been adapted into a two-act opera called Esperanza (Hope). The labor movement in Wisconsin and University of Wisconsin–Madison opera professor Karlos Moser commissioned the production. The music was written by David Bishop and the libretto by Carlos Morton. The opera premiered in Madison, Wisconsin, on August 25, 2000, to positive reviews.[30]
A documentary titled A Crime to Fit the Punishment, about the making of the film, was released in 1982 and was directed by Barbara Moss and Stephen Mack.[31]
A drama film, based on the making of the film, was chronicled in One of the Hollywood Ten (2000). It was produced and directed by Karl Francis, starred Jeff Goldblum and Greta Scacchi, and was released in European countries on September 29, 2000.[32]
A fictionalized account of the movie's production featured prominently in the Audible original podcast series, The Big Lie (2022). Based on source material written by Paul Jerrico, the production features voice performances from Jon Hamm, Kate Mara, Ana de la Reguera, Bradley Whitford, John Slattery, Giancarlo Esposito, and David Strathairn, and was written by John Mankiewicz and Jamie Napoli.[33][34]
See also References Further reading
External links Last edited 16 days ago by InternetArchiveBot RELATED ARTICLES Rosaura Revueltas Mexican actress (1910–1996) One of the Hollywood Ten 2000 Spanish film International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, Local 890 Wikipedia Content is available under CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Privacy policy Terms of Use Desktop
What Does It Really Mean to Be the Salt of the Earth? AUGUST 6, 2021 | Andrew Wilson
“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.” (Matt. 5:13)
Few things in creation are more ordinary than salt.
Most of us have interacted with it in the last couple of hours, whether we realize it or not. We use it to make leather, pottery, soap, detergents, rubber, clothes, paper, cleaning products, glass, plastics, and pharmaceuticals. It sits largely unnoticed on hundreds of millions of café and restaurant tables around the world.
Unlike pepper, which is often sitting next to it, salt is essential for our health and has always been eaten by human beings wherever we have settled. We add it to so much of our food that many languages simply distinguish between sweet and salty flavors. We spread it across roads when it snows. More than half of the chemical products we make involve salt at some stage. And that’s without mentioning the trillions of tons of it that sit in our oceans, covering 70 percent of the surface of our planet.
Salt is everywhere.
Jesus’s Illustration
Its ordinariness and its use in all cultures make it an obvious candidate for Jesus to use as an illustration. Jesus, as we know, loved using everyday items to communicate truths about God and his people, and his description of the disciples as “the salt of the earth” (Matt. 5:13) is arguably the best-known example. To this day, people use the phrase to describe good, honest, humble people. Less predictably, it also features as the name of a Rolling Stones song, a D. H. Lawrence poem, and an intriguing variety of products including deodorants, water softeners, and (bafflingly) wine.
Here is the really odd thing, though: an awful lot of Jesus’s disciples, the very people whom he identified as the salt of the earth, are still not entirely clear on what he meant. Lots of us have heard explanations of it—our job is to make the world taste better or stop it from rotting—but these explanations often conflict with each other and suffer from various problems. Jesus was talking about salt in relation to the earth, not food. Salting the earth was something people did after destroying their enemies, rather than blessing them. Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus connects salt with fire and with living at peace together (Mark 9:49–50), neither of which seems to fit with the idea of tastiness or preservation. Technically, sodium chloride doesn’t lose its flavor anyway. So what on earth is Jesus talking about?
The reason it’s confusing is that salt had a number of purposes in the ancient world. At least five of them are relevant to Jesus’s words about his disciples: salt was used for flavoring, preserving, sacrificing, destroying, and fertilizing. Rather than assuming that Jesus’s statement is confusing and then debating which particular use of salt he had in mind, it’s best to assume he knew what he was doing and that metaphors can function in multiple ways. Followers of Jesus are like salt: although we’re ordinary and everywhere and get involved in pretty much everything whether we’re noticed or not, we also have a variety of roles to play as God’s kingdom comes on earth.
Let’s consider each of those five purposes.
1. Flavoring
Salt makes food taste better, either by adding flavor to something that would otherwise be bland (chips or fries), by enhancing flavors that are already there (vegetables), or by providing a contrast with a very different sort of taste (mmm, salted caramel). This is probably the use of salt that most of us think of, because it’s the only one of the five that still applies today. Regardless of whether Jesus’s original audience would also have thought of it first—and they may not have—it is a powerful illustration of the way Christians are to serve the world. We’re intended to spread throughout the world and enhance it, adding flavor to things that would be bland, drawing out the blessings of whatever is good, and providing a contrast by being distinct and different. When Paul tells us to ensure that our speech is “seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person” (Col. 4:6), this is the kind of thing he has in mind.
We’re intended to spread throughout the world and enhance it . . . drawing out the blessings of whatever is good, and providing a contrast by being distinct and different. 2. Preserving
Salt was the ancient equivalent of refrigeration. If you wanted to stop meat or fish from decaying, you could rub in salt and make it edible for longer. This was the main reason salt was so valuable. Roman soldiers were sometimes paid in salt, which (as an aside) is the origin of our word “salary.”
Disciples of Jesus, in this sense, are sent into the world to keep it from decay, preserving its goodness and preventing it from becoming corrupted or ruined, which is a helpful thing to bear in mind as we go to work every day.
Salt does not just savor. It saves.
3. Sacrificing
This may well be related to the previous two functions of salt, although it is probably less familiar to us. Early in Israel’s history, Moses explained how Israel was to offer sacrifices to the Lord: “You shall season all your grain offerings with salt. You shall not let the salt of the covenant with your God be missing from your grain offering; with all your offerings you shall offer salt” (Lev. 2:13). Perhaps because it flavored food and kept meat from going bad, salt was a necessary part of all of the Isrealites’ sacrifices and even represented God’s covenant with them.
“Disciples are salt in this sense, too,” Peter Leithart writes. “The world is an altar. Humanity and the world are to become a single great offering to God. As we offer ourselves in obedient, suffering self-sacrifice, we become the seasoning on a cosmic sacrifice that makes it well-pleasing to God.”
4. Destroying
This is one we find much less appealing, but we can’t get away from it: there are more scriptural references to salt being used in judgment or destruction than to any of the other purposes.
When Lot’s wife turns back to look at the city of Sodom, she is turned into a pillar of salt (Gen. 19:26), a story Jesus refers to when describing the day of his coming (Luke 17:32). Moses warns the Israelites that if they break God’s covenant, their land will be “burned out with brimstone and salt, nothing sown and nothing growing, where no plant can sprout” (Deut. 29:23). When Gideon’s son Abimelech tries to set himself up as king of Israel, the men of Shechem rebel against him, and he responds by razing the city and sowing it with salt (Judg. 9:45). The psalmist describes God turning “a fruitful land into a salty waste, because of the evil of its inhabitants” (Ps. 107:34). Jesus himself, in one of the fiercest judgment paragraphs in the Gospels, says simply that “everyone will be salted with fire” (Mark 9:49). Salt, in the ancient Near East, was used to express judgment upon evil.
There are more scriptural references to salt being used in judgment or destruction than to any of the other purposes. There’s a sense in which disciples have the same purpose. God scatters salty Christians into the world as a way of judging evil, destroying wickedness, and preventing lust or greed or murder or injustice from taking root. The very existence of the church, preaching and living out the gospel, proclaims judgment against the enemies of God and serves as what Paul calls “a clear sign to them of their destruction” (Phil. 1:28); this may be why Jesus says we are the salt of the earth immediately after describing the persecution we will face if we follow him. Frequently, of course, the church has failed to live this way and has been an accelerator of worldly evil, not a brake. But Jesus knew that would happen.
That’s why almost all his words of judgment are directed to the people of God rather than the unbelieving world. We need to be salted too.
5. Fertilizing
Several ancient civilizations used salt as a fertilizer for the soil, and depending on the conditions, it could help the earth retain water, make fields easier to plow, release minerals for plants, kill weeds, protect crops from disease, stimulate growth, and increase yields. The reason this matters is that Jesus specifically describes his people as the salt of the earth, which in a rural, farming culture would have been significant.
Disciples are fertilizers. We’re meant to be in those places where conditions are challenging and life is hard. We are sent to enrich the soil, kill weeds, protect against disease, and stimulate growth, and as we scatter, life springs up in unexpected places. Barren lands become fruitful. When the people of God are redeemed, as the prophet says, “the wilderness and the dry land shall be glad; the desert shall rejoice and blossom like the crocus” (Isa. 35:1).
So when Jesus said we are the salt of the earth, what did he mean? Did he mean that God will use us for flavoring, preserving, sacrificing, destroying, or fertilizing? In a word, yes. If people tell you that it’s about only one of those things, by all means hear them out. But take it with a pinch of salt.
Editors’ note: This is adapted from Andrew Wilson’s God of All Things: Rediscovering the Sacred in an Everyday World (Zondervan, 2021).
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