Two Actors try their hands at stage comedy.Two Actors try their hands at stage comedy.Two Actors try their hands at stage comedy.
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Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaFilm was made by the 'Historical Feature Film Company [us]' which was a white-run company; but, distributed by the Ebony Film Company [us]' to make it appear that it was released by a black-controlled company.
- Quotes
Knight I: We'vll all dall up.
Featured review
Doubled Representation on Stage and Screen
Although unique in regard to being a rare instance in the early history of film to feature African Americans in leading roles, "Two Knights of Vaudeville," otherwise, follows a familiar slapstick scenario of audience members disturbing and interacting with the act on stage. Charlie Chaplin's "A Night in the Show" (1915) is a similar variation on this formula. It was a popular act, I think, because it was a good one rife with self-referential possibilities, as it's essentially a play-within-a-play, with some actors playing performers and others standing in and acting up as our surrogate spectators. Chaplin furthered this by playing dual roles. The first of its kind on screen was probably R.W. Paul's "The Countryman and the Cinematograph" (1901) (remade as "Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show" (1902)), which exploited the inherent doubling theme of cinema to have a patron fight with his doppelgänger upon the film-within-the-film. Perhaps, the best iteration of this trend in silent cinema was Buster Keaton's "The Playhouse" (1921), though, which featured Keaton in every role of the film's first, play-within-the-play part and which expanded the doubling to another narrative in the film that references the doubling in the first part.
In "Two Knights of Vaudeville," the doubling is doubled by the African-American trio, after being kicked out for disrupting the white vaudeville show, venturing to put on their own performance. Whether this truthfully reflects the actual making of the film, including its distribution by the Ebony Film Corporation, which had a controversial history, may be debatable and shrouded in mystery from the loss of historical records (such as details about the company that produced it, who the director was and such). In a sense, I suppose, its making is a partial reflection of both the white and black vaudeville shows. The distributor of it, however, was white owned while being managed by Luther Pollard, an African American, and the Chicago Defender paper led a boycott against the studio and its films' alleged perpetuating of racial stereotypes--leading to its closure in 1919.
Although, largely, "Two Knights of Vaudeville" seems no worse than the usual knockabout comedy of the era, such as one could see in a Keystone comedy or the play on the white character's stupidity in the aforementioned "The Countryman and the Cinematograph," film historian Charles Musser ("Race Cinema and the Color Line") makes the point that those white characters are coded as nonracial--the ubiquity of whiteness on screen rendering individual characters as unrepresentative of their race, thus allowing white audiences to freely laugh at their foolishness. It may not be the same case for a persecuted racial minority, though, whom for one contemporary viewer in particular critical of the Ebony Film Corporation, Musser summarizes that "To her mind, the two knights were badly chosen representatives of black people in general, and she saw them through the eyes of white viewers whom she imagined watching the film. She envisioned their amused contempt and internalized it. She could not laugh at these comic characters, she could only imagine white people laughing at her because she was one of them."
The imitation of a supposed black dialect in the intertitles hardly has the intended affect in this light. Even more offensive are the misspellings for the signage of the black characters' show. And if not stereotypical, the humor tends to be outdated, but "Two Knights of Vaudeville" remains a historically interesting take on a familiar formula.
In "Two Knights of Vaudeville," the doubling is doubled by the African-American trio, after being kicked out for disrupting the white vaudeville show, venturing to put on their own performance. Whether this truthfully reflects the actual making of the film, including its distribution by the Ebony Film Corporation, which had a controversial history, may be debatable and shrouded in mystery from the loss of historical records (such as details about the company that produced it, who the director was and such). In a sense, I suppose, its making is a partial reflection of both the white and black vaudeville shows. The distributor of it, however, was white owned while being managed by Luther Pollard, an African American, and the Chicago Defender paper led a boycott against the studio and its films' alleged perpetuating of racial stereotypes--leading to its closure in 1919.
Although, largely, "Two Knights of Vaudeville" seems no worse than the usual knockabout comedy of the era, such as one could see in a Keystone comedy or the play on the white character's stupidity in the aforementioned "The Countryman and the Cinematograph," film historian Charles Musser ("Race Cinema and the Color Line") makes the point that those white characters are coded as nonracial--the ubiquity of whiteness on screen rendering individual characters as unrepresentative of their race, thus allowing white audiences to freely laugh at their foolishness. It may not be the same case for a persecuted racial minority, though, whom for one contemporary viewer in particular critical of the Ebony Film Corporation, Musser summarizes that "To her mind, the two knights were badly chosen representatives of black people in general, and she saw them through the eyes of white viewers whom she imagined watching the film. She envisioned their amused contempt and internalized it. She could not laugh at these comic characters, she could only imagine white people laughing at her because she was one of them."
The imitation of a supposed black dialect in the intertitles hardly has the intended affect in this light. Even more offensive are the misspellings for the signage of the black characters' show. And if not stereotypical, the humor tends to be outdated, but "Two Knights of Vaudeville" remains a historically interesting take on a familiar formula.
helpful•21
- Cineanalyst
- Feb 19, 2020
Details
- Runtime11 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.33 : 1
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