Hiawatha (1913)

Interesting facts

Hiawatha is a 1913 American silent drama film directed by Edgar Lewis and based upon Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem The Song of Hiawatha (1855). The film stars Jesse Cornplanter of the Seneca people and Soon-goot, a 17-year-old unknown actress. The movie is the first feature film to use a cast of Native Americans.

Production

Producer Frank E. Moore had previously staged the outdoor spectacle Hiawatha: The Indian Passion Play for nearly a decade before he launched his filmed version. Newspapers reported that 150 "full-blooded" Seneca of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) from the Cattaraugus Reservation in upstate New York participated in the movie's production.

The Anglo-American musical theater conductor John Joseph Braham, Sr. composed the musical score for Hiawatha. Braham would later compose the score for the 1913 Edward S. Curtis film, In the Land of the Head Hunters.

The movie's cinematographer Victor Milner suggested to Moore that Edgar Lewis, a former stage actor, should direct. Milner said that to achieve a superimposition of two images, he had to shoot the visioning of the famine of death on a separate negative and double print it.

Although other silent versions of Hiawatha existed before 1913, Moore's film was the first to use a cast of Native American actors. In 1909, Carl Laemmle, who founded Independent Moving Pictures (later absorbed into Universal Studios) had released an earlier one-reel version of Hiawatha. Years later Laemmle acknowledged that his "white cast smeared with bronze paint" was a target for ridicule.

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