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The Moving Image 2.2 (2005) 1-25


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Charlie Silveus Makes a Quotidian Spectacle

An Exhibitor-Filmmaker and His Local View

Michael Aronson


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Click for larger view		 Figure 1
Main Street: Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, circa 1910s. From author's collection.

A Moving History

In 1957, Charlie Silveus Jr. decided to retire and move to Florida. Silveus had until this point spent his life in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, a small coal-and-gas town forty miles south of Pittsburgh. In preparation, he divided his possessions into those he would keep and those he would discard. Into the scratch pile went approximately two dozen cans of 35mm film that had been left to him by his father, Charles Sr.

Although Charlie Jr. had not followed his father into the movie business, he knew enough about the incendiary dangers of nitrate-based film not to simply throw the cans into the trash. Instead, on his way out of town, Charlie brought the reels to the town's volunteer fire department to be safely destroyed. Perhaps because firefighters are less afraid of spontaneous combustion than most and perhaps because they are as curious as the rest of us, they decided to first look inside the cans. What they found were forty-year-old images of their own community, including scenes of an earlier generation of local firefighters fighting local fires. Their pleasure in seeing this past meant that the films, rather than becoming smoke and fire, became history.1

This moment of history making, in both its smallness and its accidental beauty, is neither unusual nor unimportant to larger questions of the archive and historiography. Traveling through time and space, moving through regimes and circuits of exchange, [End Page 2] ephemeral objects like Silveus's films can rapidly shift in value, from meaningful to meaningless, from trash to history. The particular history that saved this film is a function of its localness, of the film's ability to represent a Waynesburg of the past to a local audience of the present. Contemporarily described as "local views," the organizing principle of these films and their considerable power for this audience lies in their quotidian specificity. To an outsider, a scopic interloper like myself, there is nothing cinematically exceptional visible in the celluloid remains of Silveus's oeuvre; collectively it appears as scenes of everyday life, in both its ups and its downs.

This, I should be clear from the start, is not to suggest that I lack enthusiasm for these images, for it is in their ordinariness, their poetics of unextraordinariness, that I find both my own pleasure and their historical value.

However, neither I nor you (unless you come from this part of southwestern Pennsylvania) have easy access to the full and rich signification of the images and their meanings. As an example, the footage that initially captivated the Waynesburg firefighters in 1957 is an approximately five-minute sequence consisting of a single shot of flames leaping into an (apparently) night-darkened sky, followed in the early morning light by a series of extended (and repetitive) pans of the smoldering remains of a three-story brick building on the main street of a town. Along the edges of the frame dozens of people, their backs to the camera, stand still and stare. For those of us removed, in all senses, from a connection to Waynesburg, the images are obtuse or at best generic. Although the sequence clearly signifies trauma, it is a trauma whose causes and victims remain unknowable, images of others' past that have no discernible connection to our present.

But for the town's firefighters, the images were readable not just as someone else's past, someone else's distant loss, but as a part of their present selves, of who they were and why they were. To the local constituency this fire and its aftermath had a name, a place, and a set of meanings. This fire was the Downey House fire (1925) in which six townspeople lost their lives attempting to rescue the hotel's...

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