Author: Ben Model
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ep. 42: End of the Year 2021 Recap – Part 1
“End of the Year 2021 Recap” – in the first half of this 2-parter, Ben Model recaps the past pandemic year of silent film live-streaming, rediscovering the meaning of providing entertainment for fans, the return to in-person accompaniments, and ponders the future of the silent movie virtual cinema. Episode 42 Show Notes: Live shows return…
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ep. 41: Live-Scoring for the Virtual Cinema (part 2)
“Live-Scoring for the Virtual Cinema” – in part two of this conversation, Ben Model discusses what it’s been like to accompany silent films throughout 2021 via live-streams he’s produced and presented out of his home. Ben and co-host Kerr Lockhart discuss: the differences for Ben between the creative mindsets of scoring a silent film while…
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Screening Slapstick, Unrestored
The silent comedy film series that Steve Massa and I and Ron Magliozzi put together in the late 2000s had two hooks. One we utilized to organize the shorts into programs and the other was the real inspiration for the series. The latter was crystallized in an introduction Eileen Bowser gave to one of the…
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Back in the Podcast Saddle, Again (…Again)
Several years ago, I ventured into podcasting as a way of making it easier for me to blog. I figured talking into a mic instead of writing things out saved a bunch of steps, mentally, and would be more efficient. In some ways it was, and in some it wasn’t. It was about the same…
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ep. 40: Live-Scoring for the Virtual Cinema (part 1)
“Live-Scoring for the Virtual Cinema” – in part one of this conversation, Ben Model discusses what it’s been like to accompany silent films throughout 2021 via live-streams he’s produced and presented out of his home. Ben and co-host Kerr Lockhart discuss: the differences for Ben between the creative mindsets of scoring a silent film while…
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Scoring “Spirals” for the Met
I’ve scored a few films over the past year-and-a-half for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Spirals”, a 2½ minute “art film” made for the Met in 1970 by Joyce Chopra, is the first one I’ve done for the museum that was not a silent movie, per se. But I drew on my accompaniments to other…
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Why We Like Silent Film
I hope this series of posts that I began in January 2021 has been useful, educational, thought-provoking or food for thought. In providing answers to questions about silent movies that I’m asking in interviews, I have tried over and over for years to come up with a simple and concise and accessible answer to why…
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Stories for Today, Just Like in the Silent Era
Like the other points I’ve made about the culture and styles of the era of the 1910s and 1920s being unessential for Silent Film, the same should be held for storylines and story tropes. As ubiquitous as many typical plots and character archetypes may have been in the silent movies we know, some core aspects…
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Intertitles for Modern (Contemporary) Times
I’ve covered what I’ve observed in titles cards in silent movies from the ‘teens and ‘twenties in a handful of posts earlier on in this series. I’d like to go over a few points about intertitles again to clarify which aspects of what we’ve all seen are of the silent era and which are not.…
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So, You Want To Make a Silent Movie…
Making a silent movie sounds like a fun idea, no? Lots of people with movie cameras — 16mm, 8mm, super 8, and probably also 9.5mm — have done it. Either as a novelty, or as die-hard fans in tribute to the medium they love. As home movie enthusiasts or as film students or professionals, and…