Herbert J Biberman: the indie cinema pioneer sentenced to prison
Anyone remotely interested in the history of cinema, particularly independent cinema, ought to take a moment to look into the life of Herbert J. Biberman, one of the pioneers of indie film. Biberman was best known for his 1954 film Salt of the Earth, which told of a miners’ strike in New Mexico.
The film is considered one of the first times that a movie tried to advance the feminist politics that had begun to gain traction midway through the 20th century. It was based on an actual strike that occurred in 1951 against the Empire Zinc Company in Grant County, showing how the miners, police and the company itself reacted to the ongoing trouble.
Biberman is perhaps best known outside of his actual film works, though, and is part of the infamous Hollywood Ten, the first systematic blacklist which was issued shortly after ten film and television writers and directors refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) when asked about their political affiliation.
In 1950, Biberman was convicted of contempt of Congress and had to serve six months in prison at a Federal penitentiary in Texas. When Biberman was asked by HUAC, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist party?” the director refused to answer, citing the First Amendment of free speech and assembly.
Biberman was convicted along with Alvah Bessie, Lester Cole, Ring Lard ner Jr, John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, Edward Dmytryk, Samuel Ornitz and Dalton Trumbo, who were all blacklisted from Hollywood for several years and their works scrubbed from any further projections.
Upon his release from prison and the completion of Salt of the Earth, Biberman was again caught up in Communist accusations, and his film was denounced as a work of left-wing propaganda. The distributors boycotted it, it was not advertised in newspapers nor on radio stations, and a series of projectionists refused to play it.
However, thankfully, the film was well received in Europe and received the International Grand Prize from the Academie du Cinema de Paris in 1955. Ten years later, Salt of the Earth was re-released in the United States to critical acclaim and has since been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the US Library of Congress in a rather ironic turn of events.
Check out the trailer for Herbert J. Biberman’s 1954 movie Salt of the Earth below.
