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The Knight of Black Art
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Wikipedia article
'The Knight of Black Art' is a 1907 French short silent film by Georges Mlis. It was sold by Mlis's Star Film Company and is numbered 10301034 in its catalogues.
Plot
A magician, aided by his assistant and two women dressed as pages, constructs a large tambourine from two hoops and a piece of cloth. The magician paints a face on the head of the tambourine, and magically extracts wine bottles and clothing, including old-fashioned dresses, from the face. Multiplying the pages into four, the magician throws the dresses upon them, and they perform a brief dance.
Next the magician takes the frame of the tambourine (now without its head), and, suspending it from wires, makes one of the women rise up from it. He then disappears into the frame himself, to the astonishment of his servant, before returning for a final trick: separating the frame back into two hoops, he turns them into the wheels of a bicycle, and rides cheerfully away.
Production
The cast includes Mlis as the magician, an actor called Manuel as his servant, and Suzanne Faes as one of the four women. Manuel was a frequent collaborator with Mlis, and since 1906 he had been supervising some of the films made in Studio B, the larger of Mlis's two studios. The film's special effects are created using stage machinery (including hidden structures, painted black, for concealing actors and props), substitution splices, and multiple exposures.
A guide to Mlis's work, published by the Centre national de la cinmatographie, notes that it is amusing to see Manuel, so often Mlis's deputy director, here playing "the role of servant who mimics all his master's gestures."
References
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