by Cameron Mays

   (Plain Press April 2026) It is now probably accepted that the big bang that started our universe was not some great explosion but a simple happening. Thus, it is fitting that which started Cleveland film history was no epic tale but a routine industrial occurrence.

   Giant Coal Dumper was the first film made in Cleveland. It was made by James White and William Heise, filmmakers for Thomas Edison. By sheer chance they captured the ethos of the city in under a minute.

   A gritty genre scene in the world of smoke and soot, the task of a machine, it is an awkward task, Sysphean in its lumbering attempts, something that must be captured in paradox. Despite this, the workers stand proud and domineer over the Earth they move and the metal they command.

   It’s an actuality for the city. This ain’t no damn train arriving at a station. This is no place for serpent dances, cowboy games, or cockfights. This is the place where you work hard and be proud. Fred Ott wouldn’t last five seconds in this joint. No sneeze from him, he’d crumble under the intensity.

   Giant coal dumper, the machine, was a bankable star, and a sequel was inevitable.

   Three years later in November 1900, American Mutoscope and Biograph Company released Showing a Giant Crane Dumping a 40-Ton Car, featuring the same exact machine depicted in Giant Coal Dumper.

   The stars of the Midwest are machines; Cleveland is no exception. If the Huletts are an industrial Marilyn Monroe, the idealized port machination beloved and tragically gone too soon, then the giant coal dumper is the mystical Biograph Girl. Bizarrely sexy in an antiquated way, soundless, nameless besides a generic description, our attraction is dismayed by the fact it is as old as our grandma’s grandma.

   The Huletts’ death is common knowledge, but there is little information on giant coal dumper. If one were to scour the history of the Erie Railroad or the Port of Cleveland, perhaps they would find the factual answer, an answer unfit for those whose hearts beat at the poetic verse of twenty-four frames a second. For the fate of giant coal dumper is that of all the passing stars of the silent era.

   Giant coal dumper failed to keep up with the vanguard of sound and color, richly destitute, retreating to its shackled mansion until it withered away — it might be vanquished, its charm forsaken, its youth held together by cheap replacement parts of plastic and inferior ore.

   Like those old stars, a grave cannot contain the giant coal dumper’s memory. Only the cenotaph of celluloid is a tomb capable of its glory. To know the machine was disassembled, repurposed, or scrapped is to know dogs and wolverines licked clean the bones of stars.

   Thomas Edison was an inventor, but more than that, he was an American. Afraid people would watch movies without paying, he devised the kinetoscope, a single viewing device for viewers to watch films. Kinetoscopes were found in parlors around the country. Cleveland’s was in the Old Arcade. Projectors soon won out, giving rise to the Mutoscope Company’s Biograph projector.

   American Mutoscope and Biograph Company eclipsed Edison’s company in the task of documenting early Cleveland, contributing the bulk of the city’s screen heritage. Its most productive month came in September 1901 during an encampment of the Grand Army of theRepublic. Ironically, much of these images are of posts comprising of people not from Cleveland, so the images of early Cleveland are focused on non-Clevelanders.

   Outside of the documenting the event, the film company captured other scenes in Cleveland, classics including The Empire Theater, Cuyahoga Gorge, and arthouse flick Panorama, Public Square, Cleveland, O.

   These early Biograph Pictures were all shot by Billy Bitzer. Bitzer was early cinema’s Hephaestus, clubfooted by the shadow of his future boss, D.W. Griffith, but crafty in his use of the camera. Despite his cinematic innovations, the silent era’s coppersmith could not survive the world of sound.

   Would he have made a talkie had he not surrendered his shrewd cinematic abilities to the task of Southern mythology? It is hard to say. In Cleveland, he filmed morsels of truth. In Hollywoodland, his talent was used for the grandiosity of evil.

   In the end, the greatest challenge this ancient regime of cinema faced was not sound, but digital. Of the seventeen early actualities made of Cleveland, all old enough to be in the public domain, three were digitized. The rest are not lost media, but imprisoned media. Their triptych mugshots found in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art is all the public can access.

   The two remaining films, made six years apart, operate as contrasting movements of the same symphony. Cleveland Fire Department was made 1902 by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, follows a trend of firefighter actualities and predicts Porter’s narrative opus Life of an American Fireman.

   It is a simple training run from a street that does not exist anymore at a headquarters that has since relocated, running east or running west, not fast enough to stop The Collinwood School Fire from being made.

   In 1906, Lakeview Elementary School in the then village of Collinwood caught on fire, killing one-hundred and seventy-two children and two adults. William Bullock, local filmmaker and theater operator, captured the smoldering ruins of this holocaust and showed it at his American Theater.

   Bullock’s operation attracted scorn from the Cleveland Vice Squad and Chief of Police Fred Kohler, arresting Bullock’s business partner and projectionist for their parts in spreading lewd and criminal images.

   The theater itself was part of a network of the rowdy Cleveland nickelodeon circuit, narrow joints that resembled do it yourself spots. The projection room was a large metal box hanging from the ceiling, the image swaying as the projectionist moved.

   Various other Cleveland theaters were subject to such scrutiny from authorities regarding the pictures they showed. In December of 1907, Cleveland’s film community made an internal agreement to sanitize their offerings, committing to “nothing naughty or even suggestive; no pictures of bandits or burglars or holdups or other incentives to crime”.

   Bullock was a part member of a three-man committee that presented this agreement to Chief Kohler, who was satisfied. Bullock, however, was not, and ten weeks later showed the newly created The Collinwood School Fire.

   The film quickly attracted outrage from the public in Cleveland and Chief Kohler shut down public exhibition of the film in Cleveland, so Bullock went on tour with the film, rebranding it as an educational experience and offering half off admission for children.

   Bullock soon moved out to Los Angeles, ostensibly to join the burgeoning film industry. With no work, he returned to Cleveland, first working at a neighborhood theater with his father and later working as a projectionist at the Palace Theater, today the crown jewel of Playhouse Square.

   Much like Cleveland Fire Department, The Collinwood School Fire simply follows a national trend amongst filmmakers, this time documenting horrific destruction common in the industrial era. At the same time, The Collinwood School Fire predicts a Cleveland trend in independent film: the documentation and exportation of our decay.

   The ruins of Cleveland have distorted into a cultural product fit for the cinematographic medium. Throw a dart in a crowd of Cleveland State or Case Western Reserve film students and chances are you’ll hit one whose thesis project captures “the postindustrial metropolis”.

   Of course, Bullock’s decay comes by accident, contemporary decay not so much. Still, the shock of collapse is not just interesting, but artistically veritable. Bullock had to rebrand his filmed carnage as “educational”. Today’s filmmakers need only call it “Lynchian”.

   An inevitable question arises in both cases: do we wish to show the world this Cleveland, or does the world wish to see Cleveland as this? Perhaps both, but the Cleveland movie smith ought to strive for noble goals. The spirit of the Cleveland moviemaker must evoke the lessons taught from Giant Coal Dumper.

   In the advertising catalog associated with the film, the Erie railroad series that includes Giant Coal Dumper is described as presenting “novel and interesting views” that “do not always come within the observation of the general tourist”. Novel and interesting can mean many things, but neither one is played out.