DVDs & BOOKS

From Copper Mines at Bingham, Utah (1912)
Production Company: Thomas A. Edison Inc. Transfer Note: Copied at 20 frames per second from a 35mm print preserved by the Library of Congress (AFI / George Marshall Collection). Commentary: Jennifer Peterson. New Music: Michael D. Mortilla. Running Time: 1 minute.

Edison’s Copper Mines at Bingham, Utah, released in October 1912, survives only incomplete, but it nicely evokes the lost mining West. The steep hillsides of Bingham Canyon were divided into ethnic enclaves, and in the excerpt we glimpse the neighborhood known as Highland Boy, home to Italian and eastern European immigrants. Bingham grew to a population of 15,000 in the next few years—through copper, gold, and silver mining—but every trace of the town, and indeed of much of the canyon itself, was swallowed decades ago by the Kennecott Copper Mine, the world’s deepest open-pit excavation.—Scott Simmon

About the Commentator
Jennifer Peterson is Assistant Professor in the Film Studies Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She contributed to American Cinema’s Transitional Era, edited by Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp (University of California Press, 2004); Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, edited by Jeffrey Ruoff (Duke University Press, 2006); and Learning with the Lights Off: A Reader in Educational Film, edited by Dan Streible, Marsha Orgeron, and Devin Orgeron (Oxford University Press, 2011). Her book Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film will be published by Duke University Press.