While moving picture technology was still in its infancy, the Copper Country was at the forefront in adopting moving pictures. In fact, within two years of the opening of the first documented movie house in the world, nickelodeons began appearing in the Copper Country.

On June 19, 1905, some 450 people attend the opening day of the world’s first nickelodeon, located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, according to history.com. The storefront theater boasted 96 seats and charged each patron five cents. Nickelodeons (named for a combination of the admission cost and the Greek word for “theater”) soon spread across the country.

By 1907, some two million Americans had visited a nickelodeon, according to the website of the Theatre Historical Society of America. Copper Country residents were among them.

Sue Collins, in the 2020 book, Home Front in the American Heartland: Local Experiences and Legacies of WWI, wrote that as early as 1907, playhouses throughout the Copper Country were installing motion picture projectors to “complement their dramatic or variety fare.”

In Oct. 1909, the publication The Nickelodeon, Vol 2, No. 4 reported that the Grand Theater, in Calumet, had a seating capacity of 400. The programs were changed three times a week and included two illustrated song singers and music by a four-piece orchestra.

Vol. 2, No. 1 of the same publication, printed in July, 1909, reported that the Lyric moving picture theater had opened in Houghton. The Lyric was the first moving picture theater to advertise in local newspapers, on Nov. 10, 1909.

“A strictly moral, clean, Family theater where your children can enjoy a pleasant evening,” the ad declared. “Ladies especially invited.”

As was suggested by the Lyric’s ad, moving pictures had met with criticism from members of the entertainment industry, members of the clergy, and many political heads in both the U.S. and in Great Britain.

Many immigrant residents in the Copper Country soon found a new value in the controversial cinema industry, however, as did the heads of governments of countries involved in the war in Europe.

Political views began to change quickly during the Great War, however, due to the actions of an English motion picture photographer named J. Frank Brockliss.

Brockliss was in the town of Alost, Belgium in October, 1914, when it was attacked and captured by German forces in their drive to the North Sea. Having his equipment with him, Brockliss set up his camera and began filming. Among the footage he captured from behind a barricade was the defensive fighting of contingents of the Belgian army, including the deaths of a number of soldiers who were struck and killed by shrapnel as German artillery found the range of the street. Brockliss became the first known cameraman to capture actual combat on film.

As Frank J. Wetta pointed out in his oxfordbibliographies.com site article, World War I in Film:

“Governments realized quickly how valuable the cinema could be in explaining the meaning and experience of the war to both soldiers and civilians by encouraging enlistments, defining the nation’s goals, and vilifying the enemy. Filmmaking became part of war-making through documentary films, newsreels, and film narratives produced by governments or by private film companies.”

Brockliss is seldom remembered for his contribution, but his filming of the battle of Alost paved the way for the organization of the British Topical Committee for War Films, which employed an English moving picture photographer named Geoffrey Malins and an assistant, J.B. McDowell whom, thanks to Malins, nearly escaped his place in history.

According to firstworldwar.com, Malins is chiefly remembered today for the film The Battle of the Somme shown to huge success in British cinemas in the late summer of 1916. The film was released to general audiences, selling as many 20 million tickets, but was thought by many to be merely a propaganda film, which indeed it was. As the website points out, the film was subject to editing during post-production. It was later learned that a number of the ‘over the top’ scenes have since been demonstrated to be fake (actually filmed before the attack began on 1 July). Although made for propaganda purposes by all sides during the Great War, the films and footage have become invaluable for their accurate recording of World War I combat, troop movements, as well as the devastation of cities, towns, and the impact of the war on the civilian populace.

War films did something else too, however, that were probably not intended to do.

Such films offered immigrants living the U.S. (including the Copper Country) a way by which they could see with their own eyes events in their home countries.

As early as Sept. 1914, the Daily Mining Gazette had printed letters from soldiers in the British army who were residents of the Copper Country and, like other European immigrants, returned to their home countries when called upon. While printed letters such as those used words to describe situations and events in areas or on battlefields, cinema allowed the viewer to see the area, rather than read it. Additionally, technology of the time did not yet allow for sound; immigrants viewing the moving pictures did not have to understand a spoken language to understand the viewed pictures. In fact, many if not most of the immigrants from the Balkan states did not need narration to understand the war footage they were viewing.

According to the federal census for 1910, there were 26 immigrants from Belgium in Houghton County. French immigrants numbered 95. In contrast to those ethnicities, the menus counted 1,723 residents of German birth and 4,450 of English birth. War films visually exposed the males of those groups to the battles and actions in which the soldiers of their homelands were involved. The war created a feeling of discomfort. In 1914, the German military invaded and conquered neutral Belgium as the route to invading France. When Germany violated Belgium’s neutrality, Great Britain declared war on Germany, becoming allies with France. It was not a smooth alliance in the beginning, because Great Britain and France were by no means political allies before the war.

Jennifer D. Keene, professor of history and chair of the History Department at Chapman University, remarked in the documentary How WWI Changed America: Immigrants and World War I that:

“America is a nation of immigrants in 1914 when Europe goes to war, and Woodrow Wilson recognizes this. In fact, in his address for neutrality, Wilson urges Americans to avoid violently taking sides, afraid that the different ethnicities might line up against each other.”

The war in Europe created tensions in the U.S. that do not appear to have become major issues in the Copper Country. In fact, the historical record presents evidence that residents of district were sympathetic to affected immigrants.