Horst in Translation ([email protected]) 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.

cricket crockett . . . or at Thomas Alva Edison's East Orange, NJ, Black Mariah Tinseltown forerunner. Why not brainwash the American public via ZERO DARK THIRTY that the well-documented ruthless indiscriminate non-stop torture of hundreds of random minority people (like the guy murdered in the Oscar-honored TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE) turned up one guilty guy who blabbed something which allowed SEAL Team 6 to interrupt Usama Bin Laden's late-night porn choking session, shoot him in the face, and ditch him in the Pacific (though all the evidence proves this just did NOT happen, and all the American tax dollars spent to torture family men taxi drivers to death was just more government waste)? Edison waited about as long after the assassination of Sitting Bull and the machine-gunning of a couple hundred women and children of his extended family as the ZERO people waited after the SEAL team raid to come out with this anti-Lakota propaganda. First, he insulted them by cramming the Black Mariah film studio beyond its capacity, leaving the braves with not enough room to turn around, let alone ghost dance. What follows is a necessarily fake "performance," shot haphazardly, met to assure the Eastern public, "Hey, buy some train tickets and buy some camping gear: if this is all those Injuns can muster up, itz safe to go back West, young man, woman & child!"

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/

José Luis Rivera Mendoza (jluis1984) 1894 was an extremely important year for American cinema, as finally after 5 years of hard work, the Edison Manufacturing Company showed to the world the first motion picture exhibition device: William K.L. Dickson's Kinetoscope. It wasn't anything like what we now know as cinema (it wasn't a projector), but it was the first device that allowed people to be able to contemplate moving images. Soon the first public Kinetoscope parlor was opened and motion pictures started to become part of our world, opening the way to new pioneers like the Lumière brothers, inventors of cinema as we know it, who found a lot of inspiration for their work in Dickson's invention. When the Kinetoscope debuted, it offered short films depicting vaudeville artists, common activities like horse shoeing or metal forging, and some sports; but soon everyone wanted to be captured by the camera and among those first movie stars were the members of the "Buffalo Bill's Wild West" show.According to historians, on September 24, 1894, several members of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show arrived to Edison's famous Black Maria studio in order to perform in front of the camera and be part of the motion pictures revolution. Among the films done that day by Dickson and cinematographer William Heise, were two short films about Native American dances, which are considered as the very first movies where Native Americans appeared. "Sioux Ghost Dance" and "Buffalo Dance" were those two films, and both showed a group of Native Americans performing a song. In "Sioux Ghost Dance", a group of Sioux people make the ritual dance inspired by prophet Jack Wilson's (known as Wovoka) religious teachings. Sadly, due to the limitations of Dickson's early camera-work the magnitude of the Ghost dance can not be fully appreciated.While a product of the late 1800s, the Ghost Dance was based on the traditional circle dances that Native Americans had been performing for centuries, so "Sioux Ghost Dance" (and its companion piece, "Buffalo Dance") allowed to Kinetoscope's audiences a small look at real Native American traditions. Despite being a show were the actors reenacted scenes from the wild west, "Buffalo Bill's Wild West" had many extremely accurate and realistic elements, and the Native dances were one of them, proudly portraying their traditions under the protection of Buffalo Bill Cody (who was very respectful of them). It's true that without the sound, the dance loses a lot of its impact, but this movie is still an early example of documentary film. 6/10