Hiawatha, the Messiah of the Ojibway Hiawatha, the Messiah of the Ojibway Hiawatha, the Messiah of the Ojibway is a 1903 dramatic short film shot in Canada directed by the American pioneering cinematographer and director Joe Rosenthal, based on the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's famous poem, "The Song of Hiawatha", made in Desbarats, Ontario, with a cast of Ojibway First Nations people. According to the "Canadian Journal of Film Studies", it was the first dramatic narrative film to be shot in Canada. At 15 minutes, "Hiawatha" was considerably longer than the usual productions of 1903, which rarely exceeded three minutes. The film's subtitle was "The Passion Play
The Song of Hiawatha his "Hiawatha" (c.1874) a visionary statement superimposed on the fading light of the sky. Toward the end of the 19th century, artists deliberately emphasized the epic qualities of the poem, as in William de Leftwich Dodge's "Death of Minnehaha" (1885). Frederic Remington demonstrated a similar quality in his series of 22 grisailles painted in oil for the 1890 deluxe photogravure edition of "The Song of Hiawatha." One of the editions is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dora Wheeler's "Minnehaha listening to the waterfall" (1884) design for a needle-woven tapestry, made by the Associated Artists for the Cornelius Vanderbilt