This Edison Kinetoscope feature provides a small sample of Hadj Cheriff's act, which may well have been rather interesting to watch in person. Some of the footage here is rather bland, but this seems like the kind of performance that would be significantly enhanced by the use of color and sound, especially in the background. Many of the earliest Edison movies featured performers from vaudeville and other sources, and some worked better than others on film.
Cheriff was supposed to be known for an assortment of offbeat skills, ranging from knife juggling to displays of physical strength to wild dance-like movements. Here, most of the footage focuses on a rapid series of gymnastic- or dance-like motions, such as cartwheels and the like. Since it was performed in Edison's 'Black Maria' studio, it has a very plain background that does not do anything to enhance the performance.
One interesting aspect of many of the Kinetoscope films is that so many of them were designed to cash in on things that were then currently popular. But today they provide a look into the forms of entertainment that were popular in the past, and even these brief glimpses at popular performers of the era can be interesting, even aside from the merits of the movies themselves.