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Although best known as the director of such celebrated films as "Kings of the Road," "Paris, Texas," " Wings of Desire " and " Until the End of the World ," filmmaker Wim Wenders has also carved out a second career for himself as a documentarian with a special focus on artistic endeavors and the people behind them. Over the years, he has taken a look at such diverse subjects as the life and work of directors Nicholas Ray ("Lightning Over Water") and Yasujiro Ozu ("Tokyo-Ga"), fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto ("Notebooks on Cities and Clothes"), musical history past and present ("Buena Vista Social Club," "Ode to Cologne: A Rock 'N' Roll Film" and "The Soul of a Man") and choreographer Pina Bausch ("Pina"). For his latest documentary, "The Salt of the Earth," one of the nominees for this year's Oscar for Best Documentary, Wenders trains his camera on photographer Sebastiao Salgado and the result, though not without flaws, is an invigorating and interesting observation of the man, his work and the entire medium of photography.

As the film reveals, the Brazilian-born Salgado originally studied economics and worked for the World Bank in France after being exiled from his home country in 1969, before deciding to give it all up in order to pursue a career in photography. After his first major project, a photographic chronicle of South America that allowed him to at least get near to his homeland (his exile would eventually end in 1980), he began a series of expansive projects in which he used his keen eye and ability to create striking images to create works that allowed viewers to bear witness to glimmers of hope and humanity in the face of almost unimaginable misery. "The Workers," for example, famously illustrated such locations as a massive Sierra Pelada mine and the countless people employed to dig out the gold in the hopes that their back-breaking labor will one day pay off and the burning oil fields of Kuwait in the wake of Desert Storm. "Sahel," which he produced in conjunction with Doctors Without Borders, looked at the famine in Ethiopia and the attempt by many to journey to what they hoped to be a better life in the Sudan. In a similar vein, "Exodus" looked at the plight of refugees from Rwanda and Yugoslavia during their respective troubles in the Nineties.

Having "seen into the heart of darkness" (as Wenders puts it in his occasionally purple narration) for so long, a burned-out Selgado returned to Brazil to the drought-stricken remains of his family's once-thriving farm and embarked on a plan of replanting and reviving the land that he dubbed "Instituto Terra." Not only did this effort help begin to bring the farm back to life, it would spread, first to other parts of Brazil and then worldwide. It would also lead to Salgado's most recent project, a collaboration with son Juliano (himself a documentarian who receives a co-directing credit here) entitled "Genesis" that took them from Papua New Guinea to Siberia to chronicle lands and people who have managed to retain their natural ways in the face of the planet's seemingly unstoppable march towards destruction that stands in blessed relief to the horrors he had shown in the past.

One of the challenges that any documentarian must face in making a film about an artist in a particular field is to figure out a way to channel that person's craft into meaningful cinematic terms while still remaining true to the work being examined. Wenders pulls this off through a couple of fascinating artistic choices. While the black-and-white cinematography (Juliano Selgago shot the color footage) that he employs may not be that surprising to fans of his work (it is a choice that he has employed with great skill over the years, especially in the visually stunning "Wings of Desire"), his use of it this time around in collaboration with cinematographer Hugo Barbier certainly evokes the similarly monochromatic look of Salgado's work, especially in the distinct methods of employing light, shadow and space in the compositions. Another striking idea that Wenders deploys here is to project several of Selgado's most famous images in a way that allows Selgado's face to appear to emerge from the works themselves as he offers up memories of those particular shoots. 

I do have a couple of quibbles with "The Salt of the Earth," however. For one, while it does make a strong case for Salgado's undeniable artistic achievements, it does not really go into the nuts and bolts of his process—there is nothing to speak of regarding his photographic influences or how he actually goes about capturing his images. More troublingly, although some critics have charged him with transforming the miseries of the Third World into attractive images for Westerners to gaze at in art galleries, there is no discussion of the moral and ethical repercussions of his work to be had here. Although they do not fatally damage the film as a whole, their absence does leave a bit of a hole at the center of the proceedings that cannot be denied. For the most part, however, "The Salt of the Earth" is a visually stunning and oftentimes affecting tribute to one artist from another. 

Peter Sobczynski

A moderately insightful critic, full-on Swiftie and all-around  bon vivant , Peter Sobczynski, in addition to his work at this site, is also a contributor to The Spool and can be heard weekly discussing new Blu-Ray releases on the Movie Madness podcast on the Now Playing network.

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The Salt of the Earth (2015)

Rated PG-13 for thematic material involving disturbing images of violence and human suffering, and for nudity

110 minutes

Sebastião Salgado as Himsel

Juliano Ribeiro Salgado as Narrator (voice)

Wim Wenders as Narrator (voice)

Hugo Barbier as Himself

• Juliano Ribeiro Salgado
• Wim Wenders

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Movie Review: The Salt of the Earth Is a Look at Two Masters at Work

When I was a kid in the 1980s, Wim Wenders and Sebastiao Salgado were two of the biggest Capital-A Artists in the world: Wenders, the German director who made stoic road movies full of existential longing and wide-open spaces, and whose films were issued in black VHS editions with a huge “WENDERS” on the cover; Salgado, the Brazilian photographer who took images of suffering and labor and war and ruin and turned them into something sensuous and unreal, whose reproductions populated every middlebrow poster store. They had achieved what serious artists simultaneously dread and fantasize about: They had become  brands . But there was a very real achievement beneath the commodification, too. Wenders’s cinematic despair was no less sincere for being fashionable, and Salgado’s willingness to go to the most treacherous places and work under the most intense conditions to get his shots came from a place of genuine artistic inquiry and human anger.

That becomes clear in The Salt of the Earth , a documentary about Salgado made by Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, the photographer’s son. It’s a fascinating meeting of three minds, and perspectives. Chief among them is Salgado himself, narrating the story of his life, of how he fled the Brazilian dictatorship and then abandoned a promising career as an economist to pursue a crazy artistic passion. He would traverse the world, using his hauntingly expressive photographs to expose the harsh existence of his fellow humans. Meanwhile, we hear Juliano, the son, ruminating on a father who was often absent, and Wenders, the admiring outsider, brought in by the younger Salgado to collaborate on this bizarre project. Given this fractured-three-ways perspective, it’s surprising how smoothly The Salt of the Earth moves, how gracefully it switches back and forth between the personal and the objective.

The film is steeped in melancholy. Salgado has had success, fame, and money, but he has also spent much of his life among refugees, war victims, and slaves, and he seems to suffer from something resembling post-traumatic stress. Retiring to his family farm, itself devastated by drought, he tries to repair the landscape around it — an attempt, perhaps, to achieve some kind of tangible healing in a world whose wounds he spent so many years portraying.

What about the contention by some critics that Salgado overtly aestheticized human misery? The film doesn’t directly address that, but it probably doesn’t feel it needs to. The whole point of the movie is that Salgado wanted to reveal the suffering of his fellow man. The fact that he found beauty there, at least in this film’s view, speaks not to callousness or opportunism but an honest belief that beautiful art can cross borders and win hearts and minds. The beauty draws you, while the tragedy compels you. And Salgado’s journey also speaks to something more in keeping with Wenders’s work. Here is a man trying to punch away, in his own way, at the indifference of the world. That’s not so different from the director’s earlier road movies.

But perhaps the most impressive thing about The Salt of the Earth is its ability to revel in the work itself. In his documentaries, Wenders has tended to focus on other creative figures. When I interviewed him recently , he said that he thinks the creative process is “the last great adventure left on our planet.” And, as he did with Pina and with The Buena Vista Social Club , he’s more than happy to cede the screen to the artist at hand: The Salt of the Earth is replete with Salgado’s photography, and the images, seen in succession on a screen, have a mesmerizing effect. Watching Salgado work — giving up on a shoot because he couldn’t find the right background, for example — you realize the thinking and planning that goes behind the shot. A thing of beauty can also be a mechanism, a network of verticals and horizontals and backgrounds and foregrounds. The result may be ineffable, but it’s still constructed from something by somebody.   The Salt of the Earth lays bare the artifice, even as it lets the mystery be.

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How blacklisted Hollywood artists joined forces to make a truly subversive film

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Herbert Biberman, at left, with screenwriter Samuel Ornitz. Photo by Getty Images

By Benjamin Ivry June 6, 2024

Released in 1954, The Salt of the Earth , which was arguably the only major US indie film made by Jewish leftists, was a product of the enduring optimism of progressive thinking.

It was directed by Herbert Biberman, one of the so-called Hollywood Ten, a group of leftist filmmakers (six of them Jews) blacklisted and jailed for contempt of Congress after refusing to answer questions from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947.

Emerging after six months in stir at a federal institution at Texarkana, Texas, Biberman was undeterred; he and like-minded Jewish colleagues decided that if they were sanctioned for supposed subversion, the only thing to do was to create truly subversive films.

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As the producer Paul Jarrico (born Israel Shapiro) later recalled to an interviewer , Salt of the Earth was their chance to really say something, because they had already been punished by the blacklist. “We wanted to commit a crime to fit the punishment,” Jarrico’s biographer Larry Ceplair quotes him as saying .

Other Jewish contributors to the film included the actor David Bauer (born Herman Bernard Waldman), composer Sol Kaplan, theater owner Simon Lazarus, and consulting director/assistant editor Leo Hurwitz.

Salt of the Earth was inspired by a 1951 strike against the Empire Zinc Company in New Mexico. In the film, Mexican-American women take over a picket line when their husbands are banned from participating. The film, Jarrico said, was “unequivocally prolabor, prominority and prowomen.”

Because of its feminist, anti-racist, and economic views, Salt of the Earth , which was investigated by the FBI and rejected by distributors and the movie projectionist’s union, has gained a reputation as being the only film ever blacklisted by Hollywood; otherwise; the blacklist focused on individuals, not specifically their creations.

As a result, at first it was only shown in a scant few theaters nationwide, like a venue in San Francisco’s Chinatown that otherwise screened only Chinese language offerings. In New York, it was projected in a theater whose owner warned moviegoers on the marquee that it was a “Left-wing Controversial Film.”

Reviews were mixed at first. Pauline Kael, despite the fact that she had been raised by Polish Jewish émigré parents on a chicken farm in Petaluma, California, panned it in Sight and Sound as a simple-minded “morality play” and “as clear a piece of Communist propaganda as we have had in many years.”

However, the Canadian Jewish drama critic Nathan Cohen lauded Salt of the Earth on CBC radio as an “exciting experience, a deeply human drama in the documentary manner perfected by the Italians in such masterpieces as Open City , The Bicycle Thief and Shoe Shine .”

With time, the film acquired an aura of prestige, shown repeatedly at social action events in the 1960s and ‘70s. Linguist Noam Chomsky, another admirer, explained that Biberman’s brainchild accurately illustrated how unions organize strikes.

Cinema historian Jonathan Rosenbaum’s viewpoint became representative, calling it “leftist propaganda of a very high order, powerful and intelligent even when the film registers in spots as naive or dated.”

The naïveté may be partly due to the film’s visual style, plainly influenced by the early Soviet propaganda films of Sergei Eisenstein, himself of Russian Jewish origin.

Biberman originally intended the lead female role for his wife, Oscar-winning actress Gale Sondergaard, who before the Hollywood blacklist had capsized her career, had memorably played Lucie Dreyfus, the wife of disgraced Captain Alfred Dreyfus (Joseph Schildkraut) in The Life of Emile Zola starring the Yiddish theater star Paul Muni.

However, all the participants concurred that having genuine Latino actors would be preferable to having Anglo actors in brownface. So Sondergaard stepped aside in favor of Rosaura Revueltas, an experienced Mexican actress from a distinguished artistic family. Revueltas never achieved worldwide fame because she was deported back to Mexico while the film was still being shot, as a deliberate move by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to discourage the politically verboten film.

Movie historians Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt and James Lorence have detailed the myriad other attempts to stop the film from being made and of suppressing it after it was completed. The fact that it exists at all is due in large part to forthright optimism of American Jews who were undaunted even when their careers and livelihoods were destroyed and their family’s security threatened.

When Biberman was in prison, for example, and saw that Hollywood Ten jailbird, Jewish screenwriter Alvah Bessie, was coping less well than he with confinement, Biberman volunteered to serve extra time in Texarkana if his friend could be liberated early. This suggestion was rejected.

The activist and lecturer Jean Pfaelzer has likened the implicit philosophy of Salt of the Earth to the essentially optimistic musings on utopia by the German Jewish thinker Ernst Bloch . Whether by pinning hope on technology or other forces, things in general may improve, and the future can be “re-written, re-imagined.” Inspired by Kabbalah, Bloch believed that hope was a biological activity of the human mind. And Salt of the Earth centered on a domestic center of power and courage in the Jewish balabosta tradition, despite being located in New Mexico for the purposes of the story.

Filmdom has belatedly appreciated and echoed Salt of the Earth . A poorly received screen version of Biberman’s tsuris , One of the Hollywood Ten starred Jeff Goldblum as the director. And a more recent Audible podcast, The Big Lie , featuring Jon Hamm, Bradley Whitford and David Strathairn fictionalized the production process.

But none of these later recreations match the sheer verve of the 70-year-old original, created by a director who remained upbeat even in a Texarkana prison, and a producer with a similar glass-half-full attitude of Jewish hopefulness.

Indeed, Jarrico declared about the world travels necessitated by being shunned by Hollywood: “I would say that I personally found many positive aspects to being blacklisted. I don’t recommend being blacklisted to others. But it really allowed me to have experiences that I would not otherwise have had.”

Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.

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Movie Review: The Salt of the Earth (2014)

• Howard Schumann
• Movie Reviews
• No responses
• --> April 16, 2015

“Suffering is what was born. Ignorance made me forlorn. Tearful truths I cannot scorn” — Allan Ginsberg

Co-directed with Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, Wim Wenders’ (“ Pina ”) The Salt of the Earth chronicles Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado’s essays shot over a period of thirty years in one hundred different countries. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 2014 and one of the five Oscar-nominated films for Best Documentary, the film documents the reality of war, poverty, famine, and deforestation in human terms, captured in indelible photos by a man who has been called the most important photographer of the 21st century. Salgado’s work is without exploitation of human misery, only a respect for the humanity of those caught in the middle of tragic circumstances.

Born in Brazil in Aimorés in the State of Minas Gerais, Salgado received a Master’s Degree in Economics from the University of Sâo Paulo but left his native country for France in 1969 after a coup installed a military dictatorship. In France, he intended to pursue a career in economics but his life was changed when his wife Leila recognized his unique talent and urged him to invest in photographic equipment. While the film does not explore Salgado’s relationship with his wife and two children, it does touch on their feelings when their second son, a special needs child was born. It also makes clear that Juliano, Sebastião’s oldest son who later joined him on a ten-year project, grew up mostly without the presence of his father in the home.

Salgado’s career began in 1973 in Niger, Africa, but the film opens with a collage of photos taken at the Serra Pelada mine in Brazil in the 1980s as part of his “Workers” series. Photographed entirely in black and white, the images show 50,000 men laboring at an enormous mining pit, a scene he describes with deep emotion. Commenting on the photos as they are projected onto a mirror that allows us to see both the artist and his art, Sebastião is an articulate guide to the events. The vast numbers of workers were not slaves, he says, but were “slaves to the cause of getting rich.” Observing the scene, he shared that “every hair on my body stood on edge,” and he felt as if he “had traveled to the dawn of time.”

Salgado’s first major series was called “The Other Americas.” Shot from 1977 to 1984, the project took him to Latin and South America in countries such as Mexico, Peru, and Ecuador (not Brazil). With a vivid memory for details and a natural ability as a storyteller, Salgado talks about the Tarahumara, a Native American people of northwestern Mexico renowned for their long-distance running ability whose existence is now threatened by drug trafficking. He also recollects how the Saraguros, an indigenous people living in the southern highlands of Ecuador, thought that he was an ambassador sent from God to make sure they were living upright lives.

Working with the humanitarian organization “Doctors Without Borders,” the film chronicles how Sebastião undertook a fifteen-month project of recording the drought-stricken Sahel region of Africa in the countries of Chad, Ethiopia, Mali, and Sudan, where approximately one million people died from malnutrition and related causes. After witnessing the disaster in the Sahel, he turned his camera to the burning oil wells of Iraq, fires set by Saddam Hussein at the end of the Gulf War. After he witnessed the genocide in Rwanda during the 90s, Salgado reached an impasse in his life. “My soul was sick,” he recalls. “I no longer believed in anything, in any salvation for the human species.”

The Salt of the Earth , however, is not a film of despair but one of redemption. When Salgado returned to the land in Brazil where he grew up, the task of reclaiming the land from deforestation and drought seemed overwhelming but became the catalyst for his personal transformation. Sebastião and Leila created the Instituto Terra , dedicated to replanting over one million trees to restore the balance of nature in the Atlantic Forest. The success of the project allowed him to return to photography and begin his final series entitled “Genesis” in which he documented arctic and desert landscapes, tropical rainforests, marine and other wildlife, and communities still living according to ancient traditions.

While Salgado’s words are inspiring, the images conveyed by the photographs are what gives the film its astonishing power. His photos are a stinging protest of the disparity between the haves and the have-nots all over the world. “The planet remains divided,” he said. “The first world is in a crisis of excess, the third world in a crisis of need.” The magnificent body of his work underlines this sad reality.

Tagged: death , photograph , reporter , travel

I am a retired father of two living with my wife in Vancouver, B.C. who has had a lifelong interest in the arts.

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Cannes Film Review: ‘The Salt of the Earth’

Wim Wenders confirms his mastery of the documentary form with this stunning ode to Sebastiao Salgado.

By Jay Weissberg

Jay Weissberg

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Wim Wenders ’ mastery of the documentary form is again on display in “ The Salt of the Earth ,” a stunning visual ode to the photographer Sebastiao Salgado, co-directed by the shutterbug’s docu-helmer son Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. Long recognized as one of the camera’s great artists, Sebastiao’s sculptural use of light and space is combined with a deep empathy for the human condition, resulting in richly complex black-and-white images that capture the dignity within every subject. “Salt” guides the viewer on a visual odyssey through the photographer’s career, enriched by Wenders’ monochrome footage and Juliano’s color. More traditional than “Pina,” the docu may not quite reach that film’s heights but will still play strongly worldwide.

Wenders hit upon an exceptionally clever, cinematic way of filming Sebastiao discussing his work, by projecting the master’s photographs onto a semi-transparent mirror that allows audiences to see both image and man. In this way, Wenders teases out memories of various monumental projects, turning normally banal talking-head visuals into a more interactive device. Sebastiao didn’t start as a photographer: Born in the Brazilian mining state of Minas Gerais, he studied economics, even working with the World Bank following his exile in France in 1969, after Brazil’s military coup. Looking for more fulfillment, he and his wife, Lelia, invested in quality camera equipment, and in 1973 Sebastiao left for Niger, where he began his portfolio chronicling nobility in the face of suffering.

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The docu doesn’t start chronologically: Wenders first has Sebastiao comment on his most recognized images, from the Serra Pelada mine that formed part of the “Workers” series of the 1980s. The photos have a haunting, plaintive monumentality (made even more so when blown up onto the bigscreen), akin to frieze reliefs in the way they combine an architectural precision with tensed muscles and energetic forms. It’s fascinating to hear Sebastiao discuss their genesis and the emotions he felt while shooting in this vast, Inferno-like expanse.

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Several series came before, starting with a photographic essay on South America that enabled Sebastiao to get close to his native Brazil without crossing the border, until a return from exile in 1980. He followed that up with “The Sahel, the End of the Road,” his first major exploration of communities suffering from deprivation, and also the first time he worked in conjunction with Doctors Without Borders. After that came “Workers” and then “Exodus,” a project that unavoidably left him psychologically scarred by the horrific misery he witnessed and recorded. Designed as a record of the displacement of populations through famine, war and economic deprivation, the series coincided with the civil war in Rwanda and unimaginable horrors.

Influential critics such as Susan Sontag and Ingrid Sischy accused Sebastiao of turning misery into an aestheticized object for Western consumption, yet reducing these photographs merely to beautiful images corrupts their intent and meaning. Certainly he has a trained eye for striking compositions, but his artistry lies in the way he combines beauty with sensitivity to the inner strength and dignity of even his most wretched subjects. The satisfying beauty of the shot doesn’t work against empathy but rather ennobles those he photographs, resulting in moving, synergistic compositions of deep humanity and drama.

After “Exodus,” Sebastiao no longer believed in mankind’s salvation. Returning to Brazil with a desperate need to assuage his bitterness, he was faced with the desiccated remnants of his family’s formerly verdant farm, parched from drought. With Leila, he began an experimental program of replanting; their technique proved so successful that the project, called “Instituto Terra,” has now reforested parts of Brazil’s Mata Atlantica and is a model for similar efforts worldwide. The experience reinvigorated the photographer for his most recent project “Genesis,” a collaboration with son Juliano that encompasses parts of the globe retaining their primeval aspect, from Wrangel Island in Siberia to the highlands of Papua New Guinea.

As a young man Sebastiao must have seemed a strange sight, his long blond hair and bushy red beard a striking contrast with the appearance of the indigenous people he was photographing. Away for long stretches of the year due to his insistence on living with his subjects, he relied on the remarkably patient Leila to organize their home and professional life, and the docu makes clear she’s a vital force behind all his projects. For Juliano, his largely absent father was an almost legendary figure, so their collaboration on “Genesis” has a satisfying pertinence.

Although “The Salt of the Earth” contains numerous scenes of Sebastiao shooting, there’s little discussion of his working methods and zero mention of artistic influences. Wenders’ narration contains more than a few choice platitudes  — “he looked into the heart of darkness” and such  — but the visuals and subject are so strong that they’re easily ignored. What audiences cannot fail to notice, once again, is the director’s exceptional eye for black-and-white, combining his own sensitivity to the form with the influence of Sebastiao’s work (they both have an intense appreciation for skies decorated with clouds in an array of gray tonalities). Juliano’s color lensing also has a sweep and appreciation for light and reflection. The photos look fantastic enlarged on a cinema screen.

Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard), May 19, 2014. Running time: 110 MIN.

• Production: (Documentary — France-Italy) A Le Pacte release of a Decia Films presentation of a Decia Films, Amazonas Images, Solares Delle Arti production, in association with Vagalume Filmes, Moondog Prods. (International sales: Le Pacte, Paris.) Produced by David Rosier. Co-producers, Lelia Wanick Salgado, Andrea Gambetta. Executive producer, Wim Wenders.
• Crew: Directed by Wim Wenders, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. Written by Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, Wenders, David Rosier. Camera (b&w, color), Hugo Barbier, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado; editors, Maxine Goedicke, Rob Myers; music, Laurent Petitgand; sound (5.1), Regis Muller; additional footage, Hubert Sauper; associate producer, Julio de Abreu.  
• With: Sebastiao Salgado, Lelia Wanick Salgado, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, Sebastiao Ribeiro Salgado, Hugo Barbier, Regis Muller, Jacques Barthelemy.   Narrators: Wim Wenders, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado.   (French, English, Portuguese dialogue)

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Film Review: Salt of the Earth

Mark Murrmann

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Salt of the Earth , a new Sony Pictures Classics doc narrated and codirected by Wim Wenders, is a somber retrospective of the prodigious photographer Sebastião Salgado rendered, fittingly, in black and white. The 71-year-old Brazilian gained his acclaim shooting war, manual labor ( Workers ), and mass displacement ( Migrations ). On screen, as he hopscotches from one calamity to the next, we can see his faith in humanity eroding. “We humans are terrible animals,” he proclaims at one point, later adding: “It’s an endless story of repression, a tale of madness.” This visually stunning film helps us understand why Salgado, like other photographers who focus on human misery, has sought respite in more heartening projects: His most recent, Genesis , documents Earth’s natural wonders.

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The Salt Of The Earth Review

16 Jul 2015

110 minutes

Salt Of The Earth, The

Every second of film is made up of 24 still photographs, so it’s interesting that Wim Wenders, better known lately for his photography than films, has now made a documentary about a photographer. After four decades chronicling humanity, “social photographer” Sebastião Salgado turned his camera on nature itself, with awe-inspiring results.

Wenders lets Salgado tell his own story, while his work speaks volumes about the human condition. Some of his depictions of human suffering are not for the faint-hearted but, like this fine film, demand to be seen. Unmissable.

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By A.O. Scott

• Dec. 11, 2014

“The Salt of the Earth,” Wim Wenders’s new documentary about the life and work of the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado , elegantly inhabits a moral and aesthetic paradox. Mr. Salgado’s photographs illuminate some of the worst horrors of the modern world: starvation, war, poverty, displacement. They are also beautiful, dramatic visual artifacts, and their power has a double effect. We are drawn into the contemplation of terrible realities, but at the same time our attention turns to the person bearing witness.

That is not a fault, either in Mr. Salgado’s lifelong project or in Mr. Wenders’s consideration of it. It’s just a fact of their common vocation. The filmmaker brings his mellow humanism and globe-trotting curiosity into an appreciative, easygoing dialogue with the photographer’s single-minded vision. They are a well-matched pair. Though Mr. Wenders does not appear on camera, he is present as a narrator and a sensibility, recounting his early meetings with Mr. Salgado and his collaboration with the photographer’s son Juliano, who is the co-director of “The Salt of the Earth.”

The elder Mr. Salgado, for his part, occupies the screen with quiet charisma. Speaking in French and Portuguese — he left Brazil during the military dictatorship and lived for many years in Paris — he modestly tells the story of an adventurous life. Raised in a rural part of central Brazil, he was trained as an economist before turning to photography, a career change he undertook with the support of his wife, Lelia, a frustratingly peripheral figure in the film until its final section.

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Salt of the Earth Reviews

A progressive look at the Mexican American experience focusing on the zinc miners in New Mexico. Based on true events, this feminist narrative feels relatable.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 3, 2021

Despite its formal esthetics and narrative didacticism... the movie has a a true force extolled by the austerity derived from the scarce technical equipment. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Aug 6, 2019

Salt of the Earth is a good, highly dramatic and emotion-charged piece of work that tells its story straight. It is, however, a propaganda picture which belongs in union halls rather than theatres.

Full Review | Oct 16, 2007

One of the most daring "social problem" works in American film history, this movie, created by blacklisted artists, also shows the limitations of making a working-class film within the context of American culture.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Nov 26, 2006

This is pretty amazing.

Full Review | Jun 24, 2006

The hard-focus, realistic quality of the picture's photography and style completes its characterization as a calculated social document.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 25, 2006

Kudos are in order for this extraordinary film for all it has to say that rings true about workers' rights, racism, and feminism.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jul 25, 2005

More than a typical Miramax/Tarantino extravaganza, it's films like this that establish the historical precedent and importance of truly independent American filmmaking.

Full Review | Dec 2, 2004

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 3, 2004

This remains a fascinating and powerful movie as well as a significant piece of celluloid history.

Full Review | Original Score: 75/100 | Mar 16, 2004

An extraordinary film, made under extraordinary conditions and based on real events.

Full Review | May 24, 2003

Unavoidable classic on a 1950 mine strike, made by McCarthy era blacklisted filmmakers.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 23, 2003

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 8, 2002

Review:  ‘Salt of the Earth’ captures photographer Sebastiao Salgado

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When he looked over the edge of Brazil’s massive Serra Pelada mine, about to take one of the 20th century’s most iconic photographs, Sebastião Salgado said, “every hair on my body stood on edge. The pyramids, Babel, the history of mankind unfolded. I had traveled to the dawn of time.”

That panoramic shot of 50,000 men working without the aid of machinery in an enormous gold mining pit, each and every one of them “slaves to the cause of getting rich,” is just one of hundreds of justifiably admired photographs that have made Salgado one of the most recognizable names in contemporary photojournalism.

But whether you’re familiar with Salgado’s name and work or not, the documentary “The Salt of the Earth,” a popular prize-winner at Cannes and on the Oscar shortlist, will be a revelation.

Co-directed by the veteran Wim Wenders and Salgado’s son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, “The Salt of the Earth” deals with two kinds of journeys the photographer made. The outward one may have literally taken him to the furthest corners of the Earth and resulted in the stunning images the film features, but it is the inward journey that paralleled it that completely holds our attention.

That’s because Salgado, speaking in French and interviewed by an off-camera Wenders, turns out to be an articulate, thoughtful man whose tale of personal transformation changes the way we look at those photographs.

We also see, in segments of the film shot by his son, Salgado at work in various ultra-remote spots, visiting with the Yali people of Papua New Guinea, the Zo’e of Brazil’s Amazonia, even an island in the Arctic where the photographer literally rolls into position to snap some walruses at their leisure.

It is Salgado’s history, however, that pulls us in, starting with his youth on a large family ranch in remote Aimorés in Brazil. “Your way of seeing comes from where you are from,” the photographer says, and the truth of that becomes evident.

Salgado studied to be an economist, but the key event of his life was meeting his future wife, Leila (who became a driving force in Salgado’s career), when they were both young.

Brazil’s political unrest took them to France in 1969, where she bought a camera and Salgado took his first photograph — of her. A few years later they made the first of many joint decisions: They would invest in equipment and he would abandon his career track and attempt a career in photography.

Salgado’s first major project, “Otras Americas,” shot from 1977 to 1984 and taking him to several Latin American countries (though not Brazil), would establish the photographer’s pattern of complete respect for and immersion in the cultures he shot.

Wenders’ key idea for this film, to have Salgado look at his photographs and talk about them to the camera, works brilliantly because Salgado is a great storyteller and remembers key details about, for instance, the tribes he spent time with, like Mexico’s Tarahumara, who were celebrated long-distance runners, and Ecuador’s Saraguros, who thought he was an observer sent by God.

Gradually, however, Salgado’s photographs began to record tragedy and atrocities, and what he saw changed him. “We humans are a terrible animal; we are extremely violent,” he says. “Our history is a history of war; it’s an endless story. We should see these images to see how terrible our species is.”

Finally, after photographing genocidal killings in Rwanda and the Congo in the 1990s, Salgado had enough and began to deeply question his work as a social photographer.

“My soul was sick,” he remembers with remarkable vividness. “I no longer believed in anything, in any salvation for the human species.” He returned to the family property in Brazil, where something remarkable took place.

Disturbed by the deforestation he saw, Salgado and his wife formed the Instituto Terra and spearheaded an effort to replant an astonishing number of trees, well over 2 million and counting at this point, in an enduring attempt to restore the natural state of the area’s subtropical rainforest.

More than that, this project rekindled Salgado’s interest in photography, resulting in his latest major project, “Genesis,” for which he spent close to a decade taking pictures of the natural world. Those images, like all of Salgado’s work, are exceptional, but what makes “The Salt of the Earth” so special are the words that go along with them.

Twitter: @KennethTuran

-----------------------------------

‘The Salt of the Earth’

MPAA rating: PG-13 for thematic material involving disturbing images of violence and human suffering, and for nudity

Running time: 1 hour, 49 minutes

Playing: Laemmle’s Royal, West Los Angeles

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Salt of the Earth : The Movie Hollywood Could Not Stop

When director Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront opened in 1954, critics and audiences hailed the gritty movie about Hoboken dockworkers and applauded Marlon Brando’s performance as the ex-boxer who ‘coulda been a contender.’ At the next Academy Awards ceremony, On the Waterfront won Oscars for best film, best director, best actor, and best supporting actress.

Another movie about beleaguered workers opened to quite a different reception that same year. Like Kazan’s film, Salt of the Earth was based on an actual situation, in this case a mining strike in New Mexico. Both movies were shot on location with the participation of those who had lived the real stories. And both movies shared a history in the Hollywood blacklist. There the similarities ended. Kazan and his writer, Budd Schulberg, had both named names — identified movie people they said were Communists — when questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Some saw their movie, in which Brando’s character testifies against the racketeers who run the docks, as an allegory in support of informing. The people behind Salt , in contrast, were unrepentant blacklistees whose leftist political affiliations derailed their careers during the Red scares of the 1950s. On the Waterfront was a hit and is remembered as a classic film. The makers of Salt of the Earth struggled to find theater owners willing to show their incendiary movie.

It required a great deal of optimism to make a left-leaning movie like Salt of the Earth in the early 1950s, but director Herbert Biberman was, by many accounts, a great optimist. The director of now-forgotten films such as Meet Nero Wolfe and The Master Race , Biberman had helped found the Screen Directors Guild, which later became the Directors Guild of America. He was also a Communist and one of many movie professionals who found inspiration in the Soviet Union — or at least what dictator Joseph Stalin allowed the world to see of the Soviet Union. Throughout the 1930s, the Communist Party USA remained active in Hollywood, establishing guilds to give writers and actors bargaining clout against the studios, and fighting against Fascism abroad by championing the Spanish Republic and rallying against the Third Reich. Stalin’s pact with Adolf Hitler in 1939 disillusioned many a Beverly Hills Bolshevik, though some, like Biberman, remained unswayed.

When the United States entered World War II in 1941, the Soviet Union became an ally, and Hollywood began to make movies that celebrated our newfound comrades. Those films returned to haunt the movie industry when World War II ended and the Cold War pitted the United States against the Soviet Union. Suddenly the U.S. government began casting a critical eye on the movie industry, and HUAC began investigating Communist influences on the silver screen.

HUAC’s most visible targets were the so-called Hollywood Ten, filmmakers the committee charged with contempt of Congress in 1947 after they refused to answer questions about Communist affiliations. In 1950 the Supreme Court declined to consider the filmmakers’ appeals, and the Hollywood Ten began serving their sentences. Herbert Biberman, 50, served six months at a federal institution at Texarkana, Texas. Incarcerated with him was another of the Ten, writer Alvah Bessie. Compared to the ebullient Biberman, Bessie was a dour cynic. He cringed at Biberman’s incessant good manners and his penchant for preaching politics to guards and prisoners, but he did have to admire Biberman’s dedication to his beliefs, especially when he learned that the director had offered to serve six extra months to get Bessie released earlier.

In 1951, HUAC increased the pressure on the movie industry with a new batch of subpoenas for Communist Party USA members, past members, and even non-affiliated liberals. The studios fell in line and expanded their unofficial blacklist. Actors, producers, directors, and other industry professionals whom the studios deemed tainted by leftist beliefs suddenly found themselves unemployable. Biberman, fellow Ten member and producer Adrian Scott, theater owner Simon Lazarus, and blacklisted screenwriter Paul Jarrico saw possibilities for that discarded talent. They teamed up to form Independent Productions Corporation and set out to find a story to tell.

Jarrico found the subject matter while on a family vacation in New Mexico, where he heard about a mining strike in Grant County. The strikers were predominantly Mexican Americans, members of the Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, a union the Congress of Industrialized Organizations (CIO) ejected in 1949 for alleged Communist influences. The strikers demanded that the Empire Zinc Corporation give them the same benefits and wages it gave the region’s Anglo miners. ‘The central issue, really, was dignity, equality, being treated like anybody else,’ remembers Clinton Jencks, a decorated World War II veteran the union sent to help out Local 890. He found that company housing for Mexican Americans lacked indoor plumbing and that the company organization was stacked in favor of Anglo workers. ‘They had separate change rooms, separate payrolls, separate places to eat your lunch, strict locks on promotions with all the better jobs reserved for Anglos,’ Jencks says. ‘We eventually broke all that down, but it was very consciously being used as a way to keep people fighting each other instead of the company.’

The strike nearly collapsed after eight months when Empire Zinc opened the mine to scab labor and obtained a court injunction prohibiting union pickets on company property. Then the wives and mothers of the union’s Ladies’ Auxiliary circumvented the injunction by marching in place of the men.

Jarrico was invigorated by what he had seen. The filmmakers had found their story. Biberman would direct and Jarrico would take on the role of producer, as Adrian Scott dropped out due to illness. Jarrico asked his brother-in-law and fellow blacklistee, Michael Wilson, to write the screenplay. Wilson traveled to Grant County and attended union meetings, visited the miners’ homes, and watched and listened as the strike unfolded.

It was a violent time. ‘The company would hire guys who were out-and-out gunmen and send them over to the sheriff and the sheriff would deputize them,’ says Jencks. At one point the sheriff locked up 45 women and 17 children, an action that appalled New Mexico’s governor. In late summer, strikers descended upon three carloads of strikebreakers nearing the company entrance. The scabs attempted to push their cars past the picketers and knocked down three women. A strikebreaker shot into the crowd, wounding a picketer in the leg. News of the confrontation flashed through the mining district. Nearby mines emptied as their workers went to bolster the picket line.

The strike was settled on January 21, 1952. The company agreed to higher wages and insurance benefits but denied the union’s demand for paid holidays and remuneration for all time spent underground. Although it wasn’t part of the settlement, the company soon provided hot running water for the miners’ homes.

For Wilson, the strike provided an opportunity to tell a story that wove together the struggles of Mexican Americans, labor, and women. He saw the dramatic potential to examine how the mineworkers reacted when their wives took over the picket lines and they had to sit on the sidelines. And he wanted to tell the story from the participants’ point of view and use their feedback to fine-tune his screenplay. So when he finished his script treatment, Wilson took it to Grant County. People there objected to one scene where the main character had an extramarital fling and another in which he purchased whiskey with his last paycheck. Wilson cut the scenes. They were perfectly acceptable as drama, he explained to his partners, ‘But we’re dealing with something else. Not just people. A people.’ As Wilson labored to complete a final script over the next year, he had union members and their wives look over all his drafts.

In the meantime, Simon Lazarus began the process of assembling a crew. When he approached Roy Brewer, head of the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees Union (IATSE), Brewer, not surprisingly, refused to cooperate. ‘There has been a real Communist plot to capture our unions in Hollywood,’ he had told HUAC in 1947. Furthermore, Brewer warned Lazarus that further association with the blacklistees would finish the theater owner’s career.

Producer Paul Jarrico, a diehard Communist whose optimism may have even surpassed Biberman’s, remained undeterred. He was not someone who would back down from a fight, as Howard Hughes, who owned the RKO studio, learned when he removed Jarrico’s writing credit from The Las Vegas Story . Jarrico sued him but lost. (He finally received the credit, posthumously, in 1998.) So despite Brewer’s stand, Jarrico began scouring the country for craft people willing to ignore industry edicts. Some were blacklistees, others were documentary filmmakers who wanted to break into features, or greenhorns eager for experience.

Finding a cast would be equally difficult. Anglo actors such as Will Geer and David Wolfe, both blacklisted, signed on as the sheriff and the chief foreman, respectively. The lead roles proved more difficult to fill. The filmmakers first cast a blacklisted white actor for the role of the striking miner, Ramon, and picked Biberman’s wife, blacklisted actress Gale Sondergaard, as Ramon’s wife, Esperenza. Realizing the hypocrisy of this casting, they started looking for Mexican-American actors, with no luck. In Mexico, the company found award-winning actress Rosaura Revueltas, whose young career included only a few films. They signed her to play Esperenza. But when the production arrived in Silver City, New Mexico, in January 1953, it still lacked a male lead.

Clinton Jencks remembers the community’s initial response to the Hollywood attention. ‘They found it hard to believe that their lives were interesting enough to make a movie,’ says Jencks. ‘I think we romanticized the Hollywood people, and the Hollywood people romanticized us.’ Some locals pitched in to help build a mine façade on the ranch of Alford Roos, an elderly independent mine owner, archeologist, explorer, writer, and rifle-toting Mohammedan with Jeffersonian political leanings. Roos rented his land to the filmmakers for one dollar. Many other locals found roles in front of the camera. Biberman hired the Roderick brothers, two lanky white miners from another union, to play redneck deputies. Local 890 vice-president Ernesto Velasquez portrayed a union official. Jencks played the Anglo representative from the union’s headquarters, his real-life role, and his activist wife, Virginia, played her counterpart on screen. The production cast other members of Local 890 as miners and their wives.

Juan Chacon was the union’s newly elected president, and both Revueltas and Biberman’s sister-in-law, Sonja Dahl Biberman, suggested that the director consider him to play Ramon. The director thought that ‘Johnny’ Chacon was too gentle, too small, and too shy for the part, but he let him audition. Chacon gave an unimpressive reading, but the women insisted he had potential. With only three weeks left until shooting, the exasperated director finally decided to take a chance and cast Chacon as Ramon.

Throughout the shooting, Biberman marveled as Chacon grew into the part of Ramon. ‘We found we didn’t have to ‘act’,’ Chacon would later write about the experience. ‘El Biberman, as we came to call him, was happiest when we were just ourselves.’ In the first scene Biberman shot with dialogue, Jencks’ character restrains Ramon from attacking the foreman. The material touched sensitive nerves, and Biberman let the tension build. Afterwards, if Biberman still doubted that Chacon could get into character, Jencks had the bruises to prove he could.

At the end of January, the miners and their wives flocked to Silver City’s theater to watch the first ‘rushes,’ and they laughed and applauded at their images on the big screen. Yet even as the movie progressed, storm clouds were forming. A Silver City schoolteacher wrote to Walter Pidgeon, president of the Screen Actors Guild, and expressed concern that a Communist film company was manipulating the local Mexican Americans. Soon the media and the government began scrutinizing the maverick movie troupe. Columnist Victor Riesel pointed out the production’s proximity to the Los Alamos atomic research facility. Congressman Donald Jackson said the film was ‘deliberately designed to inflame racial hatreds and to depict the United States of America as the enemy of all colored peoples.’ It was, he said, ‘a new weapon for Russia.’

The critical reaction created problems. Pathé Laboratories suddenly refused to process the daily rushes, so Biberman could no longer review each day’s work and had to print scenes blind. Immigration officials came for Revueltas — they had sudden concerns about her passport — and deported her back to Mexico. Biberman had to use a stand-in for some sequences, but he still needed the actress for voice-overs and frontal shots. Eventually, Revueltas recorded narration under clandestine circumstances in a dismantled Mexican sound studio, and the crew shot final footage of her in Mexico and then smuggled it like contraband over the border.

‘It’s Time To Choose Sides,’ read a headline in the Silver City Daily Press . Late one night in early March, someone fired shots into Clint Jencks’ parked car. The next day two carloads of troublemakers broke up the filming in front of the union hall. Jencks emerged from the fracas with a black eye, and the violent crowd nearly destroyed the camera. That night the vigilantes selected 10 emissaries to relay an ultimatum to the movie people: If they did not leave by noon the next day they would leave in black boxes. The sheriff was forced to call in the state police, who kept the peace as the crew finished the final scenes. Several weeks later someone burned the home of one of the film’s Anglo miners.

The film was still far from completed. Now the laborious job of post-production — the assembly and polishing of the film — began, and the movie industry made the process more difficult by throwing up as many roadblocks as it could. As Howard Hughes explained in a letter to Congressman Donald Jackson, the studios could effectively kill the picture if they denied the production access to the facilities they needed — to edit, dub, score, and otherwise prepare the movie for theaters.

Biberman and Jarrico refused to quit. They found a company willing to process the film after several labs refused, and they recruited an editor and installed him in a house in Topanga Canyon, north of Los Angeles. The editor, who had worked only on documentaries, proved unsuitable. Worse, the tin-roofed editing quarters became so hot the film began to shrivel. As the filmmakers scrambled to find another editor, they moved operations into the ladies room of an empty theater that Simon Lazarus owned in Pasadena. After firemen came snooping they relocated again, this time to a vacant studio in Burbank. By the time it was finished the film used four editors, one of whom was an FBI informer.

By the beginning of 1954, the moviemakers had turned their raw footage into a movie. The next hurdle would be finding theaters to show it. Roy Brewer, the anti-Communist head of the IATSE, represented projectionists, and he was hardly likely to steer Salt on to movie screens. As he wrote to Congressman Jackson, ‘The Hollywood AFL Council assures you that everything which it can do to prevent the showing of The Salt of the Earth will be done.’ In New York City the production found a theater owner whose projectionists belonged to a different union. After much persuasion he agreed to host the film’s opening. Salt of the Earth premiered at the Grande Theater on March 14, 1954, to mostly positive reviews. The New York Times ‘ Bosley Crowther wrote that ‘an unusual company made up largely of actual miners and their families plays the drama exceedingly well.’ While several found it unfairly pro-labor, few saw it pro-Red, save a young writer named Pauline Kael, who wrote that it was ‘as clear a piece of Communist propaganda as we have had in many years.’

Communist or not, lines such as ‘This installment plan, it’s the curse of the working man,’ indicate the shortcomings of writing for ‘a people’ instead of people. In his account of the blacklist era, writer Stefan Kanfer referred to Wilson’s ‘clanking, agitprop prose.’ In some scenes the shortcomings of an inexperienced crew and amateur cast are obvious. Elia Kazan may have named names, but with On the Waterfront he also made the superior picture. Salt ran at the Grande for nine weeks, taking in a more-than-respectable $50,000, and opened in another dozen or so American theaters. The film was warmly received overseas, especially in France, and it won the grand prize from the Paris Academy of Film. Salt also triumphed at its premiere in Mexico City, where audiences considered Rosaura Revueltas a star. In 1956 the film company filed an anti-trust suit charging more than 100 industry figures with conspiracy. That done, Biberman and Jarrico resigned from the company to move on to other work. After eight years of litigation, they lost their suit.

Today the movie is largely forgotten, but the passions and upheaval behind its creation have refused to completely die away. When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced it would give director Elia Kazan a lifetime achievement award at the 1999 Academy Award ceremonies, it reopened wounds that had not yet healed. In the end, Kazan received his award without incident.

Many of the people blacklisted never found work in movies again. Some writers found employment by working under pseudonyms or having acceptable writers ‘front’ for them. Michael Wilson won Oscar attention for his scripts, even though his name did not appear on the final films. In later, friendlier years he would get credit for writing Friendly Persuasion and for his contributions to The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia .

Biberman developed land in Los Angeles and wrote a book, Salt of the Earth: The Story of a Film , published in 1965. He directed one more movie, Slaves , a poorly received variation on Uncle Tom’s Cabin . He died of bone cancer in 1971.

Jarrico wrote scripts in Europe and returned to the United States in the late 60s, his Communist years long behind him. ‘I’m probably the only writer who has been blacklisted on both sides of the Iron Curtain,’ he said. He found television work and wrote films such as The Day That Shook the World . He also fought to get blacklisted writers the screen credits denied them. He died in 1997 in an automobile accident near Ojai, California, at the age of 82. The day before he had received honors at a star-studded Beverly Hills soiree entitled ‘Hollywood Remembers The Blacklist.’

This article was written by Steve Boisson and originally published in the February 2002 issue of American History Magazine. For more great articles, subscribe to American History magazine today!

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The Salt of the Earth

This documentary about the great, adventurous photographer Sebastião Salgado is a bit of a missed opportunity

Time Out says

Here’s a meeting of two great cultural minds: filmmaker Wim Wenders (‘Pina’) and Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, whose vision and compassion turned his camera into an indispensable witness of inhumanity in the twentieth-century. Wenders (co-directing with the photographer’s son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado) reverently details every chapter of Salgado’s life, tracing his evolution from an economist to photographer, layering the 71-year-old’s wistful reflections over a breathtaking selection of monochrome photographs. His most renowned images are projected onto a semi-transparent mirror, Salgado standing in front, his silhouette clouding the photographs (and vice versa) in a succinct expression of how inextricable the artist is from his art. Although ‘The Salt of the Earth’ is peppered with new and archival footage of Salgado at work (it’s a delight to see the old man barrelling along a stony beach to sneak up on a seal for the perfect shot), the film often plays like an annotated slideshow. One frame at a time, we follow along as Salgado isolates moments from the Ethiopian cholera epidemic to the Rwandan genocide, his faith in humanity wavering with every new atrocity. ‘Everyone should see these images,’ he concludes, ‘to see how terrible our species is’. But while Wenders makes the case that Salgado found peace, his documentary ultimately lets its subject slide out of focus.

Release Details

• Release date: Friday 17 July 2015
• Duration: 110 mins

Cast and crew

• Director: Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, Wim Wenders
• Screenwriter: Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, Wim Wenders

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The Salt of the Earth

The life and work of photographer Sebastião Salgado, who has spent forty years documenting societies in hidden corners of the world. The life and work of photographer Sebastião Salgado, who has spent forty years documenting societies in hidden corners of the world. The life and work of photographer Sebastião Salgado, who has spent forty years documenting societies in hidden corners of the world.

• Juliano Ribeiro Salgado
• Wim Wenders
• David Rosier
• Sebastião Salgado
• Lélia Wanick Salgado
• 51 User reviews
• 104 Critic reviews
• 83 Metascore
• 14 wins & 15 nominations total

Top cast 11

• Self - Photographer

• Self - Narrator
• Self - Sebastião's wife and collaborator

• Sebastião's Sister-in-Law
• Sebastião's Son
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia The title of the film is a biblical reference, Matthew 5:13: 'You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.'

Sebastião Salgado - Photographer : We are a ferocious animal. We humans are terrible animals. Our history is a history of wars. It's an endless story, a tale of madness.

• Connections Featured in The Oscars (2015)
• Soundtracks The Salt of the Earth Written by Laurent Petitgand Performed by Laurent Petitgand

User reviews 51

• Apr 26, 2015

Everything New on Hulu in August

• How long is The Salt of the Earth? Powered by Alexa
• October 15, 2014 (France)
• Official site (Japan)
• The Salt of the Earth: A Journey with Sebastião Salgado
• Yalimo, Papua, Indonesia (Yali tribe)
• Decia Films
• Amazonas Images
• Solares Fondazione delle arti
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• Mar 29, 2015

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 50 minutes
• Black and White
• Dolby Digital

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The Insane Saga of ‘Salt of the Earth,’ the Only Film to Be Blacklisted

“One of the reasons we made ‘Salt of the Earth’ after we were blacklisted was to commit a crime worthy of the punishment,” producer and screenwriter Paul Jarrico said.

Allison McNearney

Photo Illustrations by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty/Everett

For over a decade beginning in 1947, the anti-communist witch hunt that was the Hollywood Blacklist ruined careers, families, and lives. Anyone who came to the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and who refused to name names or publicly denounce communism was put on the proverbial list, the notoriety of which stripped them of their ability for gainful employment. No Hollywood player wanted to be guilty by association.

Director Herbert Biberman was named in the earliest, most infamous wave of HUAC victims known as “The Hollywood 10.” He was sentenced to jail for six months for refusing to answer Congress’s question about his communist affiliation. Producer and screenwriter Paul Jarrico was swept up in the second wave and also stayed silent. Soon after screenwriter Michael Wilson won a 1952 Oscar for A Place in the Sun , he was blacklisted for—you guessed it—refusing to cooperate.

Most of the men who were blacklisted either never worked again or struggled to produce work under pseudonyms or outside of the country. But in 1953, these three men took a different path. They decided to form their own production company to make films they were passionate about, movies about “real people and real situations.”

For their first (and only) film, the Independent Productions Corporation (IPC) decided to tell the story of an important social justice movement taking place in New Mexico where a group of mostly Mexican American mine workers were engaged in a 15-month strike against the Empire Zinc Company.

On viewing it today, Salt of the Earth could be considered one of the most American of movies, a rare mid-century gem that deftly portrays a fight for both racial and gender equality as well as the social justice struggle of an important labor movement. But at the time, any “message movie” that wasn’t pure patriotic propaganda was seen as subversive.

Before even the first frame was shot, the red, white, and blue powers that be in Congress and in Hoover’s FBI heard about Salt of the Earth and saw, well, red. During the length of its production and attempted distribution, the movie became enemy number one. Today, it is the only film considered to have been blacklisted.

Howard Hughes, center, and Congressman Donald Jackson, right, did everything they could to hinder the production of The Salt of the Earth, left.

“One of the reasons we made Salt of the Earth after we were blacklisted was to commit a crime worthy of the punishment, having already been punished for subverting the American films,” Jarrico says in the 1983 documentary A Crime to Fit the Punishment. “It was all ridiculous.”

Power to the workers

On Oct. 17, 1950, mine workers and members of Local 890 in New Mexico went on strike against the Empire Zinc Company. The mostly Mexican American strikers were demanding better safety standards at the mine, as well as fighting for pay and living conditions equal to that of their white colleagues. In addition to being paid more, the white miners and their families were given homes that had basic necessities like running water that were denied to the Mexican-American workers.

But there was an added twist to this strike. After a few months, the powers that be invoked the Taft-Hartley Act , which made it a crime for the men to picket. So, their wives stepped in. With the men now watching on the sidelines, keeping the homes, and babysitting the kids, the women spent their days picketing and facing arrest and violence. Their involvement was a win in its own right as the women had to fight to convince the men to allow them to take over and, in doing so, to become sisters in the brotherhood of the union.

From the beginning, well before the powers that be began to weasel their way into the production, Salt of the Earth was not going to be your standard Hollywood movie. Biberman the director, Jarrico the producer, and Wilson the screenwriter knew that they wanted to use actual mineworkers as actors in their film and that they wanted the story to be a collaboration with the real people who had lived it.

As Biberman and Wilson later put it , it was to be the “first feature film ever made in [the U.S.] of labor, by labor, and for labor” and one that “does not tolerate minorities but celebrates their greatness.”

Wilson set about writing the script, not an easy task as his first few attempts were rejected by the strike workers, who thought the early versions didn’t fully and accurately represent their lived experience.

But once the script was ready to go, the members of the IPC threw their full effort into making the movie just one year after the strike had ended. What they didn’t at first realize is that from that point on, they would be dealing not just with the normal problems that plague production, but also with the long arm of McCarthyism.

Early on in the production, Congressman Donald Jackson of California began to crusade against the movie. He sent letters to everyone he could think of asking for advice and help with sabotaging the project. He also took to the floor of Congress to publicly denounce it. Howard Hughes, who had fired Jarrico the minute he was subpoenaed by HUAC a couple years earlier, responded to Jackson laying out all of the steps along the way of production that the government could interfere. (“We can stop them in the labs, we can stop them in the sound studios, we can stop them in the cutting rooms.”)

With these two big names publicly against the film, Salt of the Earth lost many of the actors who had already agreed to star alongside the mine workers, who would be acting after putting in full shifts at the mine. A new slate of actors was secured, with the movie now set to star famous Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas as the lead and real-life union leader and striker Juan Chacón as her union leader husband.

Securing a cameraman was the next big hurdle. No one in Hollywood would take the job, and the Mexican and American governments collaborated to prevent any Mexican cameramen from getting the proper visas to be able to do the work. So, Jarrico went to New York and found a documentary cameraman willing to take the risk.

Once production began, the problems only intensified. First there were the threats, calls to set to let the parties involved know that they would be leaving the production in black boxes. Then violence broke out, with local vigilantes interfering wherever and whenever they could, including firing guns at the set.

If the physical violence weren’t bad enough, the parties involved also had to deal with the psychological violence of constant surveillance. “There was a point when nobody knew whether they were being followed by the FBI, by [anti-communist Film Craft Union member Roy Brewer’s] boys, or bruisers per se. But the fact is, being followed we were and throughout the making of this film this was one of the greater hazards,” recounted composer Sol Kaplan.

When those steps didn’t shut the film down, the government got bolder. Towards the end of shooting, immigration enforcement came onto set and arrested lead actress Revueltas, claiming she was in the country illegally. They detained and eventually deported her. While Biberman got creative and was able to finish the film with a stand-in, the experience was life changing for 32-year-old Revueltas, who was blacklisted in Mexico and who never had a major role again .

When production wrapped—or more like they finished up enough to be run out of town accompanied by police protection —the filmmakers encountered a whole new set of problems. As Hughes had laid out, they had a terrible time finding studios to finish up the sound and editing of the movie.

Kaplan remembers that in order to produce the music for the film, which at that time was done via recording a live orchestra playing alongside the film, Jarrico had to pose as a representative for a Mexican film in order to rent a sound studio in New York. But they couldn’t let any outsiders see the actual movie, or they would be immediately kicked out. So rather than playing alongside the movie, Kaplan had sheet music with notes telling him when the starts and stops of each scene were. Basically, he and his orchestra had to wing it.

“Every conceivable obstacle was thrown in our path and the fact that we were able to complete the film despite these obstacles was a very heady experience. It was a triumphant experience,” Jarrico said.

Completing the movie might have been an incredible achievement, but what followed was a big disappointment. While the critics who were able to see the film widely praised it, distribution was nearly impossible, so the film fizzled out with very few people having had the opportunity to view it.

Over the decades, that slowly began to change. Early on, a cult following began particularly among labor scholars. Then, in the 1980s, Turner Classic Movies picked up the film and it began to be seen by more and more people. In 1992, the film was inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry List of significant U.S. films.

Clockwise: Jarrico the producer, Biberman the director, and Wilson the screenwriter of Salt of the Earth all were investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

But even as that period of American history became more distant and Salt of the Earth finally began to get its due, memories of the struggles the team went through and the heartbreak of the blacklist never really faded for those involved.

“I did a lot of research and I talked to a lot of blacklisted people, and Paul [Jarrico] was really no different from anyone else,” screenwriter John Mankiewicz tells The Daily Beast. Their experience during the blacklist era was still very much “alive to them…I mean, Paul, in his 80s, if he had encountered someone who'd named names, would cross the street to avoid walking past them.”

In the mid-1990s, Jarrico approached Mankiewicz, grandson of Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, about creating a new movie telling the story of the making of Salt of the Earth from the perspective of the main FBI agent who surveilled the production. Jarrico died shortly after their meetings began in a tragic car accident on his way home from an awards ceremony where he was honored for helping to get credits restored for the work of all who had been blacklisted. But over 20 years later, the fruit of that idea is now out in the world as a scripted podcast, The Big Lie . The story may be set in the 1950s, but it could not be more timely.

The story of the blacklist and the making of Salt of the Earth , “has to do with propaganda being used to divide Americans,” Mankiewicz says. “I’ve got the [Jan. 6] hearings on, and it’s really the same thing. It’s dividing America. You know, there’s a whole bunch of people who believe in this Big Lie, in the current Big Lie [of the stolen 2020 election]. And they believe it’s true, just as in the ’50s the American government was saying that communism was the Big Lie.”

In 1976, Wilson received the Writer’s Guild Laurel Award, and gave a moving and prophetic acceptance speech. In it, he said:

“I fear that unless you remember this dark epic, and understand it, you may be doomed to replay it. Not with the same cast of characters, of course, or on the same issues, but I foresee a day coming in your lifetime, if not mine, when a new crisis of belief will grip this Republic, when diversity of opinion will be labeled disloyalty, when chilling decisions affecting our culture will be made in the boardrooms of conglomerates and networks, when the powers of the programmers and the censors will be expanded, and when extraordinary pressures will be put on writers in the mass media to conform to administration policy on the key issues of the time.

“If this gloomy scenario should come to pass, I trust that you younger men and women will shelter the mavericks and dissenters in your ranks, and protect the right to work.”

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Salt of the Earth Reviews

• 74   Metascore
• 1 hr 34 mins
• Watchlist Where to Watch

Hispanic mining workers form a union and fight to improve working and living conditions in their New Mexico town. Based on a true story, the film stars mostly nonprofessional actors and people who were involved in the real-life strike.

Landmark semi-documentary account of a strike by Mexican-American mineworkers in the American Southwest which was released at the height of McCarthyism and led to the imprisonment and/or blacklisting of several of the key figures involved. This was one of the first films to deal with the rights of Chicanos and to depict women as playing a central role in the labor movement. SALT OF THE EARTH was filmed using actual participants of the real-life struggle on which it is based (Chacon, a non-professional actor, does an amazing job in his real-life role). The film rises above the level of agitprop by avoiding sloganeering and using the real words of real people to tell its story. Its feminism, too, is real and unforced, with women simply being shown struggling alongside--and when necessary defying--their male counterparts. Naturally a film with such liberal leanings became a source of controversy in the 1950s; SALT OF THE EARTH was doubly cursed, for its content and its background. Producer Paul Jarrico had been banned from Hollywood, but this could not stop him. He joined with director Herbert Biberman, a member of the "Hollywood Ten," who had served a 5-month prison sentence for being an uncooperative House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) witness. They wanted to create a film company which would give work to blacklisted members of the film industry. Their intent was to create stories, as the two wrote 20 years later, "drawn from the living experiences of people long ignored in Hollywood--the working men and women of America." As it turns out, this was their only production, made in association with the International Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers. They were lucky to make the film at all; shortly after production began in early 1953 the pro-McCarthy establishment press sought to discredit the film and filmmakers. Hollywood actor Walter Pidgeon, then president of the Screen Actors Guild, upon receiving a letter from a New Mexico schoolteacher warning of "Hollywood Reds...shooting a feature-length anti-American racial-issue propaganda movie" alerted his contacts in government, ranging from members of HUAC to officials of the FBI and CIA. Donald Jackson, a member of HUAC, claimed he would do everything he could to prevent the screening of "this communist-made film," citing non-existent scenes as examples of the film's Red leanings. Even billionaire Howard Hughes, head of RKO, got on the bandwagon and came up with a plan to stop the film's processing and distribution. The local population near the shooting site also got into the act. Vigilante groups took action, picking fights with crew members and setting fire to real union headquarters. Local merchants refused to do business with anyone in the production. One group threatened to take out the company "in pine boxes," and finally the New Mexico State Police had to come in to protect the filmmakers. Problems were compounded when Revueltas, a Mexican actress, was arrested by immigration officials for a minor passport violation. She returned to Mexico, and the film had to be completed with a double. Some of her scenes were also shot in her native country on the pretext of being test shots for a future production. (Sadly, the Red fever of this country spilled over into Mexico, and Revueltas was blacklisted there for her work in this film. The talented actress would never work again.) SALT OF THE EARTH enjoyed critical acclaim in Europe but, due to continued blacklisting, did not enjoy wide US release until 1965, when it became a rallying point for the political activism of that decade.

'Heart of Stone' review: Gal Gadot shoots but Netflix superspy thriller doesn't score

There are a bunch of interesting ideas at play in the Gal Gadot star vehicle “Heart of Stone” although, unlike the main superspy, none ever really take flight.

The latest Netflix attempt at a blockbuster action franchise, the thriller (★★½ out of four; rated PG-13; streaming Friday ) features the “Wonder Woman” actress as an ace operative for a secret global peacekeeping operation that uses an innovative artificial intelligence to pull off missions and predict terrorist attacks. (Yes, AI was also a huge plot point in Tom Cruise’s recent “Mission: Impossible” movie .) Various spycraft tropes litter director Tom Harper’s globetrotting narrative, though Gadot’s charm offensive and her character’s righteous fervor help counter the film’s wilder plot swings.

Rachel Stone (Gadot) is an MI6 tech expert who's not supposed to leave the van, and her leader Parker (Jamie Dornan) and the rest of their team are wary when she has to go into the field during a mission in the Italian Alps. The mousy demeanor is a front, though: Rachel is actually a highly skilled agent who can fight, shoot, drive and skydive like a champ.

'It was really juicy': Gal Gadot enjoys 'messy' superspy life and being an Evil Queen

Working undercover for The Charter as “Nine of Hearts” – there’s a whole playing-card hierarchy for this shadowy spy network – she helps solve missions when her teammates aren’t looking and, through the Jack of Hearts (Matthias Schweighöfer), she gets real-time AI updates about escape routes, number of bad guys and other important info.

Speaking of hearts, Rachel has a big one, and to her Charter boss' dismay, she grows close to her MI6 crew. But Rachel's cover is in jeopardy when she discovers prodigious Indian hacker Keya (Alia Bhatt) is attempting to steal The Charter’s powerful AI – and more importantly, she’s got help on the inside. In a twisty adventure that sprawls from Lisbon to Iceland to the skies over Senegal, Rachel gets in all manner of scuffles trying to keep this tech from getting into the wrong hands.

It’s an ambitious franchise starter that, like so many of its action-movie ilk, tries to roll out too much in two hours and change. The initial premise of a secret agent having to “tone down” her skills so her team doesn’t notice is a cool idea. So is a hush-hush intelligence operation that takes care of global problems on the down low (and features a nifty cameo from a notable Oscar nominee).

But tossing those into an earnest action-flick stew with an all-powerful AI, rival hackers and endless nondescript goons for Gadot to kick in the face just doesn’t help tell a focused story. If this was, say, the seventh movie in the franchise, it’d be one thing. But the plot overload stymies world-building and character development: While Rachel seems nice and all, we don’t really get a sense of her backstory until later in the film, and then it’s only in cryptic dribs and drabs.

New movies to see this weekend: Skip 'Last Voyage of the Demeter,' stream 'Heart of Stone'

Unfortunately, that’s par for the course with the buckshot approach of these A-list Netflix action movies – it might hit, likely won’t. “Red Notice” bungled the no-brainer pairing of Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds. (Gadot also was a part of that forgettable outing.) Chris Evans and Ryan Gosling’s “The Gray Man” was great on paper, middling in execution, while Chris Hemsworth at least muscled together a couple of above-average “Extraction” films.

“Heart of Stone” is better than the usual two-fisted streaming affair, mainly because of Gadot. She carries over Wonder Woman's infectious goodness to this new superspy – who has John McClane’s hard-luck determination crossed with James Bond’s coolness under fire – and as a producer, Gadot refreshingly tries to create something original. There are no Rachel Stone novels, comic books, movies, TV shows, toys, or breakfast cereals to pull from in crafting her character and high-tech world.

This heroine has plenty of “Heart," her movie just needs more soul. And a sniper’s focus wouldn't hurt.

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Still from Cat Video Fest. Contributed/Cat Video Fest

Hello, August!

The dog days are summer are here, so let’s celebrate with the Cat Video Fest at Portland Museum of Art and Strand Theatre. Or head to the Maine Lobster Festival in Rockland. Those are just a few of the choices in this week’s events roundup .

Maine Lobster Festival, Wild Blueberry Weekend and Lyle Divinsky

Lily Philbrook, Kathleen Turner and Colin Anderson in the Ogunquit Playhouse production of “A Little Night Music.” Photo by Nile Scott Studios

Actress Kathleen Turner is one of the stars of “A Little Night Music” at Ogunquit Playhouse,  playing through Aug. 17. You’ll recognize her from her many film roles, including “Peggy Sue Got Married,” or maybe as Chandler Bing’s father in “Friends.” Here’s an interview with Turner, who unpacks how she got the role and how the show is going.

Actress Kathleen Turner, now performing in Ogunquit, on being in her first musical

Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins in Memphis, Tennessee in 2022. L Paul Mann/Shutterstock.com

There are still tickets left to see The Beach Boys at Snow Pond Center for the Arts in Sidney on Friday and the Smashing Pumpkins at Maine Savings Amphitheatre on Sunday. We’ve got details on these and dozens of other upcoming concerts .

See The Beach Boys or Smashing Pumpkins in Maine this weekend

Styx. Left to right Todd Sucherman, Lawrence Gowan, Chuck Panozzo, James “JY” Young, Tommy Shaw, Terry Gowan and Will Evankovich. Photo by Jason Powell

Two other notable shows are Jerry Harrison (Talking Heads) with Adrian Belew tonight in Portland and Styx with Foreigner on Saturday in Bangor. Here are interviews with Harrison and Lawrence Gowan from Styx. Tickets are still available for both shows.

Members of Talking Heads, Styx and Foreigner all perform in Maine this week

Twin Tin ice cream sandwich. Photo by Peggy Grodinsky

Sweeten up your weekend with a quintessential summer treat. The Twin Tin Ice Cream Sandwich combines ice cream from Twin Swirls with cookies from neighbor Tin Pan Bakery. Find them at the ice cream shop on Brighton Avenue in Portland.

Twin Tin Ice Cream Sandwich is the taste of summer

Hazy IPAs from Allagash, Fogtown and Rising Tide. Photo by Ben Lisle

Fans of hazy IPAs have reason to celebrate because Allagash has finally come out with its own take on the style. Want more options? Beer writer Ben Lisle also recommends a couple from Fogtown and Rising Tide. Read his tasting notes on all three.

Allagash has finally joined the hazy IPA party, and it was worth the wait

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