Au pays noir is a 1905 French silent short film directed by Ferdinand Zecca and Lucien Nonguet, and distributed in English-speaking countries under the titles In the Mining District (World-wide, English title), Down in the Coal Mines (United States) and Tragedy in a Coal Mine (United Kingdom).
[2] The film shows the hard and dangerous job a coal miner is forced to do, painfully earning his life and that of his family, lost, half of his miserable existence, in the depths of the earth, exposed to the terrible disasters produced by the fulgurating explosions of firedamp, the sudden irruption of water that invades the shafts and galleries, ripping open the walls of the mine, tearing away the woodwork in its irresistible rush.
[3] The film was shot at the new studio of Pathé in Montreuil, on decors painted by Vincent Lorant-Heilbronn (fr).
In addition, in the two copies of Au pays noir that survive, two shots showing "actualité footage of real rescue teams preparing to descend into the mine" were inserted.
[4] The film starts with a medium shot of a miner working lying down in a low galerie.
The shots showing the inside of the mine are tinted yellow before the explosion to evoke the miners' lights and blue afterwards.
A coal wagon is drawn by a horse and pushed by male and female workers.
The camera pans 90° left to show the tunnel where men are extracting the coal.
Workers are extracting coal when there is an explosion and the mine is flooded by torrents of water.
[5] In its presentation of the film, Pathé insisted about the realism of the film, stating that while nobody ignores how hard and dangerous the work of coal miners is, not everybody knows "the daily scenes that take place in the private life and in the work of the miners.
In short, it is the whole daily life of the miner that we describe, since step by step the cinematographic views will show him at the beginning of his day of hard work, at home, then in the village and finally in the extraction pits.
Richard Abel wrote that Au pays noir was "one of Pathé's more popular films during the summer of 1905 (and yet one of the last to depict male working-class conditions for several years)" and includes detailed tableaux representing a working-class milieu.
Referring to scenes 2, On the way to the pit, and 5, In the tunnels, he considers that the "principal attraction of the film (...) - and a Pathé trademark by then - is the 180-degree pan across a painted panorama which follows a group of miners (...) from their houses through the town square to the mine entrance, and the 90-degree pan (...) across the deep-space tunnels leading off from a central shaft underground".
Regarding the last scene, he remarks that "although the film clearly valorizes the patriarchal family bonds, this tragic "tableau" - the very antithesis of the féerie of historical film's apotheosis ending - strongly suggests that the working-class men (and women) endure suffering simply in "the order of things".