This article was prompted by a plate published in the foundational text, Principles of Visual Anthropology, which purports to show a film being made by Thomas Edison of the Snake Dance as performed in the Hopi village of Orayvi, Arizona, in August 1898. This footage is now lost but could still have been one of the first ethnographic films ever made—depending on how one defines “ethnographic.” Here, contesting its attribution to Edison, we seek to reconstruct the content of this footage, drawing on the extensive photographic record made at the event, along with textual accounts by eyewitnesses and contemporary newspaper reports of subsequent screenings of the film material. We conclude by discussing the ethnographic status of the film footage, which also included sequences of a Navajo “tournament,” shot in the course of the filmmakers’ return journey, which foreshadows the tropes of the travelog and the Western movie. We hope that, if this material still exists, by correctly identifying the filmmakers and by describing the content of the footage, this article will help in locating it, particularly given the recent great improvements in the cataloging of and access to early film archives made possible by digital technology.

这篇文章是由基础文本《视觉人类学原理》中发表的一个板块提示的，它声称展示了 1898 年 8 月在亚利桑那州奥拉维的霍皮人村上演的蛇舞的托马斯·爱迪生正在制作的电影。这段镜头现在已经丢失，但仍然可能是有史以来最早制作的民族志电影之一——取决于人们如何定义“民族志”。在这里，为了质疑其归属于爱迪生，我们试图重建这段视频的内容，利用在活动中制作的大量照片记录，以及目击者的文字叙述和当代报纸对随后放映的电影材料的报道。最后，我们讨论了电影镜头的民族志地位，其中还包括在电影制作人回程过程中拍摄的纳瓦霍“锦标赛”序列，这预示了游记和西方电影的比喻。我们希望，