These 1894 films, mostly fifty feet in length, survived either as positive photographic paper strips in the U.S. Library of Congress or as films in Paris, France, archives. They were filmed at Thomas A. Edison’s West Orange, NJ, studio, called the Black Maria, by William K. L. Dickson and William Heise. Most of the performers were vaudevillians. Several of the acts, including various Native Americans and Annie Oakley, were part of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, and made films at the Black Maria to promote their American and European tours. Carmencita was an entertainer at Koster & Bial's Concert Hall on Twenty-third Street in New York City; she performed for the camera in the second week of Mar 1894.
       The Kinetoscope was an early version of a motion picture film projector, first submitted for patent by French inventor Louis Le Prince and later by U.S. inventor Thomas A. Edison. In 1989, Edison commissioned his laboratory assistant, William K. L. Dickson, to invent a motion picture camera. By 1892, Dickson and his team had created a heavy camera called the Kinetograph, as well as a Kinetoscope for viewing its images. Dickson’s device used perforated celluloid filmstrips, usually about forty-seven feet long, which ran through the camera synchronized with the shutter. These strips could then be played back in a loop inside the battery-driven Kinetoscope, illuminated by an incandescent lamp. Each Kinetoscope machine allowed only one viewer at a time. Kinetoscopes were marketed to privately owned public gathering spaces, such as amusement parks and hotels. In 1894, the first Kinetoscope Parlor opened in New York City, charging twenty-five cents for access to its five machines. Kinetoscopes were immediately popular, and to supply them with new films, Edison built a one-room studio called the Black Maria near his West Orange, NJ, laboratory.
       For more information about the early history of Thomas A. Edison’s film production, see Edison Kinetoscopic Records (1893).