Buffalo Dance
About Buffalo Dance
Hair Coat, Last Horse, and Parts His Hair, three Sioux dancers in feathers and war paint, circle through a buffalo dance inside the Black Maria. Pine and Strong Talker drum beside them. Two of the dancers wear decorative tails.
Cast & crew
More about Buffalo Dance
William Heise filmed it on 24 September 1894, the same day as Sioux Ghost Dance. William K. L. Dickson produced it for the Edison Manufacturing Company. In Edison Motion Pictures, 1890–1900, Charles Musser links the five performers to Buffalo Bill's Wild West.
Themes
Background
Kinetoscope parlors opened in New York in 1894, and Buffalo Bill's Wild West was touring the East when the dancers came to West Orange.
In film history
The performers are Sioux men from the Wild West show, filmed in their own regalia.
Making
The Black Maria in West Orange was a tar-paper shed on a turntable. The roof opened so daylight fell on the dancers while the Kinetograph stayed put.
Reviews
Film historian Alex Bordino argues that Buffalo Dance and Sioux Ghost Dance offered a repeatable 'tourist gaze,' recycling racist ideas of exotic peoples while also showing Native Americans as living performers rather than only figures in old photographs.
Look
William Heise shot 35mm with a fixed Kinetograph against the studio's black backdrop, using daylight from the open roof.
Preservation
The Library of Congress holds a 35mm viewing print from the Gordon Hendricks Collection.
Notes
- The Library of Congress summary notes feathers in all three headbands.
- The print was never registered for copyright.
- A 35mm viewing print from the Gordon Hendricks Collection reached the Library of Congress on 13 May 1994 and was renumbered from FEC 8098 to FYA 1430.
- Musser's 1997 catalog treats this film and Sioux Ghost Dance as the first motion pictures of Native American performers.
- Edison had already recorded a Hopi snake dance for the 1893 Chicago fair, so the 'first' claim is Musser's, not a settled date.
Scenes
- Pine and Strong Talker drum as the three dancers move in a circle, two of them in decorative tails.
Influenced by
- Buffalo Bill's Wild West
Also available
- Internet Archive (buffalo_dance_1894)
- Library of Congress item 00694114
