Author: Paul Henley

Shot on 60mm film. Footage lost, duration unknown.

Background: Most of this footage was shot on 22 August 1898 at the Hopi village of Orayvi and is possibly the first film of a North American Native people.

Certainly, it predates the footage shot at the Hopi village of Wàlpi by an Edison crew in 1901 which is sometimes identified as the first film on the Hopi Snake Dance. It also considerably predates the Snake Dance material shot by the celebrated photographer, Edward S. Curtis, also at Orayvi, in 1904 and 1906.

This footage is sometimes erroneously attributed to Thomas Edison, but in fact was shot by Oscar Depue, a cameraman working for the celebrated travel lecturer, E. Burton Holmes. In the photograph above, Depue is seen standing behind the camera, while Holmes is standing by his side, to the left. In 1899, they returned to the region and shot further footage of the Snake Dance ceremony in the Hopi village of Wàlpi.

The camera is particularly interesting as it is a modified version of the rare Chronophotographe, devised by the French inventor Georges Demenÿ for the media entrepreneur Léon Gaumont. A distinctive feature of this camera was that it operated with 60mm film.

Acting on Holmes’ behalf, Depue had purchased an example the previous year in Paris and had modified it so that it could carry a longer roll of film. In this modified form, the camera became known in the US as the “Depue Chronomatograph”.

Apart from a single damaged frame reproduced in a study of the work of the photographer who took the image at the head of this entry, Adam Clark Vroman, the Holmes-Depue footage is currently lost.

However, its content can be reconstructed from various sources: the extensive photographic record made of this  performance of the Hopi Snake Dance, the written testimonies of eyewitnesses, including Holmes himself, and the many subsequent reports on the footage that appeared in the press as the Snake Dance films became an important part of Holmes’ lecture repertoire. 

Content : We know from the eyewitness account of Paul Ehrenreich, a German anthropologist, that Depue began early in the morning of 22 August when he filmed a preparatory ceremony, some hours prior to the main event, in which a group of women and girls attempted to wrestle away sheaves of cornstalks from a group of men and boys who were arriving in the village at the end of an early-morning footrace. 

As for the main event, the single surviving frame suggests that after filming from the initial position shown in the photograph above, Depue moved his camera a few metres to the left, probably in order to get a better view of the snake-dancing that constitutes the second phase of the ceremony.

There is no evidence that on this occasion Depue was able to film the last phase of the ceremony in which the snakes are taken back to the desert so that they can carry a plea to the spirits who control the rain. Holmes’ account suggests that by this point , light conditions had deteriorated badly, so Depue may have found it impossible to film. It may be for this reason that Holmes and Depue returned the following year to Wàlpi, i.e., to film the final phase that they had been unable to capture at Orayvi.

There is some evidence for this is the newspaper reports of Holmes’ lectures since it is only  in the autumn of 1899, after Holmes and Depue had been to Wàlpi, that they mention the returning of the snakes to the desert.

What is not in doubt is that the Snake Dance films provoked a great deal of interest. They remained a staple of Holmes’ lectures for the following six years, culminating in 1904 when he took them to London. Thereafter, however, he seems to have set this material aside and turned his attention to European and Asian subjects.

Texts: Ehrenreich 1899: 155, Holmes 1901, Depue 1947, Mahood 1961: 97, Webb and Weinstein 1973: 20, Henley and Whiteley ms.