‘Not through the lens of Hollywood’

Posted by Alysa Landry | May 7, 2015 | Arts |

Ninety-five years later, silent film resurfaces showing real Native life

Dawn, played by Esther LeBarre, and White Eagle, played by White Parker, share a private moment in the 1920 film “Daughter of Dawn.” (Special to the Times – Alysa Landry)

WASHINGTON

A long-lost silent film that stars more than 300 Kiowa and Comanche actors and offers a rare look at unscripted culture and history is now showing in select locations.

The cast of the 1920 film “Daughter of Dawn” includes about 300 Kiowa and Comanche actors. (Special to the Times – Alysa Landry)

“The Daughter of Dawn” was produced in 1920 by a small independent filmmaker in Texas, but a warehouse fire the following year destroyed all known copies of the film.

For the better part of a century, historians believed the film was lost, but a copy of the 87-minute movie, shot on five reels of nitrate celluloid, resurfaced in 2004 when a North Carolina resident offered it as payment to a private detective in an unrelated matter.

“We know there were a couple different copies,” said Jeff Moore, project director for the Oklahoma Historical Society, which purchased the film from the private detective in 2007. “The one we have looks like it was sent off for the night scenes to be tinted. We think that’s why this copy wasn’t destroyed.”

“The Daughter of Dawn” first showed in Los Angeles in 1920, but it got limited screen time, Moore said. Records reveal that it showed at theaters in Oklahoma and Kansas and at the Interior Department in Washington, D.C., but it was never publicly released.

“We’re still trying to piece together what happened,” Moore said. “The filmmaker noted that there was a fire at the facility, so probably the rest of the story about what happened disappeared in that fire.”