Spang’s First Century is a provocative time capsule in 35 mm, a beautifully preserved window into Pittsburgh’s rich and complicated industrial past. This full-length silent film documentary was originally produced by Lang Film Co. circa 1926 and recently restored by Pittsburgh Sound + Image led by Steve Felix, Steven Haines, and Hannah Kinney-Kobre.
Sponsored at the time by Etna-based iron and steel manufacturers Spang, Chalfant & Company to celebrate their 100th anniversary, it offers a close look at the height of the Pittsburgh steel industry. It could be said that the perspective cropped a little too close, even, both literally and figuratively: a large majority of the content featured intimate shots of steel products, machinery, and furnaces, and the minimal emphasis on the laborers who actually made the industry possible seemed to make as much of a statement as the film itself. Spang’s debuted in early December in two sold-out screenings at the Harris Theater. Those lucky enough to snag a ticket witnessed the steel pipe manufacturing process in complex detail, some of the extensive live footage even accompanied by animated diagrams which conveyed the quality of the product with a particularly fervent old-timey zeal.
The 35mm print of this seven-reel relic has had an interesting journey: after being originally salvaged by Pittsburgh’s very own David Newell (the famed Mr. McFeely of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood), it was ultimately found in storage at the (no longer operational) Regent Square Theater in 2020. With funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation and backers on Kickstarter, Pittsburgh Sound + Image was able to achieve a 4K digital transfer and preserve a new 35 mm internegative and print of the film. Discovered without any accompanying music, a group of local musicians were invited to compose their own unique scores, one for each of the seven reels. The result is a kind of aural patchwork, a provoking collaboration between artists both named and unnamed across different mediums and centuries.
The opening reel of the film operates as a bridge between our world and expectations and the world we are about to see and hear. It outlines the historical significance of the invention of the steel pipe (many relied on wooden pipes prior to this invention) and the general technological climate of the United States at the time. Several frames of what is likely found footage sweep us through a loose narrative, depicting society as a whole, laborers installing a pipe on a city street, and people traveling by railway carriages. The bright, playful piano score bops along and we’re eased into what we believe will be a relatively traditional silent film experience.
The second reel throws this presumption off its axis as the emphasis quickly shifts to the factory protocol and scenery; the music is pleasant, tinkering, and cheerful, but it’s taken an experimental turn, and the audience can feel it. By the third reel, everything has changed. The film is intimate, if a film about the steel industry can be described that way. The steel pipe is the protagonist. Factory interiors and morphing metal is artfully shot, simultaneously achieving a view that’s both revealing and guarded at the same time. The music has slowly evolved into cacophonous dissonance full of motion, metallic clangs, machinery. Repetitive movements and a cyclical, industrious score reveal a scene that’s inextricably tied to Pittsburgh’s identity: labor, the unrelenting rhythm of work.
During the Q&A session at the end of Sunday’s screening, someone asked, “Who was the intended audience for this film?”
Steven Haines, PS+I’s Director of Programming, simply did not have the answer. He recounted how they searched near and far for records of when or how this film might have been screened, but came up empty-handed. The best we can do is speculate. Based on content alone, it seems likely that it was either a rose-colored preview for new employees of the company or maybe a sales tool targeting potential clients or investors–the need to emphasize the quality of the product and Spang’s foolproof manufacturing process is so unabashedly in earnest.
But sitting in the tiny, historic Harris Theater, a venue almost as old as Spang’s First Century, with an audience packed with Pittsburgh pride, I couldn’t help but wonder if we were the intended audience. There was a certain level of grandeur and posturing in the film that felt like an intentional dispatch from another time, as if the people who sent it to us were saying, look at us, look at what we did, aren’t you proud of where you live? In fact, many of us are. But all this blustery love for the Steel City ignores the very real and intentionally off-camera plights of the factory workers themselves, including the brutal injuries and health risks that were simply a hazard of the workplace and the rampant classism of the early 20th-century American city. After all, no one loves to rewrite history more than a historic entity who has caused the most harm, and the steel industry, which has been responsible for much of our city’s creation and destruction, is no different.
As the film unfolds, the limited presence of humans on camera becomes more and more apparent. At one point, the title card suggests something is being done by skilled “hands” (referring to the workers themselves, I assumed), then the camera cuts to a close-up of three men’s hands, the individuals instantly reduced to their functional body parts like mere extensions of the machinery. In another shot, the jointed arms of two giant machines move metal from one conveyor belt to another. It takes several seconds to notice the operators, barely visible behind the glass windows of the machine’s cabs. In the words of Steven Haines, it isn’t a “realism documentary” because it’s been “sanitized”–the true nature of the steel industry and those involved in it is noticeably absent from the film.
What we get instead of the realism is the pipes–their journeys from steel “skelp” into bars, their piercing, shaping, threading, “upsetting,” and pickling (does it get more Pittsburgh than this?), the many ways they are analyzed, measured, and marked for quality control. How they swing over the river in an impossibly heavy crane load, a stack of gleaming metal suspended mid-air above a barge–there are echoes of Mark Twain’s America here, what with all that shiny civilization and invisible humanity.
Savin Kann has written some beautiful pieces for this magazine on what it means to be from Pittsburgh and in Pittsburgh and in his article “Pittsburgh Gothic,” he writes, “Hundreds of years of history and industry have passed and converged to put these [gothic] characters in Pittsburgh, and while they struggle with their own identity, the city around them does as well.”
We get to see one version of Pittsburgh’s early identity in the glittery, golden-aged ego of Spang’s First Century, a phase that will eventually fade with the rise of the competing international steel industry. Pride comes before a fall, but what comes after that? To me, part of the beauty of Pittsburgh’s personality today is that it seems to have exhausted its capacity for gaudy fanfare and posturing during its industrial heyday; it now asks and expects very little. Unlike many other major cities that feel as though they have a point to prove or a reputation to uphold, Pittsburgh is the late career artist who no longer feels the need to sell out; it no longer answers to anyone or does things it’s not interested in. Spang’s is the type of backward glance that allows us to remember this sense of freedom–a sentiment that the musicians who scored the film seem to have embraced, as well as countless other individuals I know around town. Pittsburgh has prevailed through so much change. As a result, it has freed itself to be whatever it wants, and reminds us that we can do the same.
Kelsey Leach is a Pittsburgh-based writer and creative director.
PETRICHOR 
Leave a comment