He_who_lurks This is a pretty interesting little film from the Edison Company, and is among the various films they made of Buffalo Bill's performers. Basically, it's a performance of the Sioux Ghost Dance, or at least a bit of it. Historians won't want to pass this up, and because of the fact these Indians are not actors. Here, Edison filmed real live Native Americans in real costumes, which is lucky for us so we can watch it today. On the con side, however, the picture is pretty contrasty. It's hard to watch the dance and the Natives dark skin doesn't help. I'm not sure why the result was so contrasted but at least we can still see the dance. Nothing special by today's standards or ground-breaking at all but it remains a good record of a time long gone.

Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de) I'd say the title is exactly what you see in this 20-second-long short movie, but I wasn't really sure where the "ghost" reference was. Maybe the way they were moving? It was actually rather boring and not too artistic and certainly didn't seem too supernatural or spooky to me to be honest and if you asked them, they might even agree. It's still an okay film for the beautiful dresses and especially hair-dresses these Indians were wearing. As a whole, though, I'd really only recommend it to silent film enthusiasts. Everybody else can do very well without this experience. The physical quality of the film is not great either, even for 1894. Dickson and Heise have delivered some more impressive works even in the same year.

Boba_Fett1138 Well, not much to say about this really, since it isn't anything too remarkable or groundbreaking, other than the fact that this was the first time ever native Americans got captured by the Thomas A. Edison's camera.Appereantly the native American's in this movie were part of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show but indeed they were real Sioux Indians. They are in full war paint and costume and show of one of their dances. We see how they start out, dance around a bit before the movie suddenly comes to an end.It got not shot on location but in the Black Maria studio, with William Heise behind the camera, on September 24, 1894. The same day other similar type of movies got shot, featuring natives.They were probably interesting in capturing the complicated movements of several people at the same time and distributed for the people to have a change to see actual Indians doing their stuff. It's quite good quality all and all of the movements seem smooth and natural. The movie got definitely shot in the right speed.Only really relevant or interesting if you are into movie history or that of native American Indians.6/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

Snow Leopard While much of the print of this feature has deteriorated badly, and while the footage itself may strike many present-day viewers as simply emphasizing stereotyped portrayals of Native Americans, it is still of some interest as an example of early studio practices. It was one of a number of features that the Edison Company filmed at around the same time using performers from the Buffalo Bill Wild West exhibition, but this one in particular was made not for domestic viewing, but rather for European distribution.The Edison Company was always on the lookout for money-making and money-saving ideas, and many of their early features were financed by potential distributors, at little or no cost to Edison. According to film historian Charles Musser (in an interview accompanying Kino's DVD collection of Edison films), this particular movie was one such example, having been made as part of promoting the Wild West's upcoming tour of Europe.The footage itself is not especially impressive, in large part because of damage done to the film over time. It does apparently use genuine members of the Sioux tribe, and in viewing it, it should also be remembered that the constraints of filming inside the Edison Company's 'Black Maria' studio almost certainly hindered the dancers' ability to do the dance on its usual scale. As a result, they seem to be unnaturally scrunched together for most of the running time.In any case, the fascination with the 'wild west', its myths, and its figures seems to have been at least as strong in Europe as it was in the USA, and this brief movie is one illustration of that. It is also one of many illustrations of the competitive business practices of the earliest film-makers - there seems never to have been a time when movie-making was not a serious business to some.