Give history a voice, give memory a history. In 2010, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, Kessler traveled to Matewan, West Virginia, to trace a much older American history of labor uprising: the 1920s union battles that ended in the Matewan Massacre and, further down the road, the Battle of Blair Mountain — the largest armed labor uprising in US history since the Civil War. In Matewan and the mountaintop-removal sites around it, he found activists and miners on opposite sides of the same crisis — economic survival for the few still employed by the mines, against towns emptied to make way for strip mines, water contamination, coal dust, and flash floods.
A parallel media strand follows the 1920 Matewan Massacre itself — the shootout between private detectives hired by a coal company and striking miners — through its yearly civic reenactment, examining how media and memory keep producing new, competing versions of the same event. This culminated in Staging Narratives: Matewan Massacre, filmed with the local reenactment community.
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