Author: Ben Model

There have been a handful of silent movies made over the past several decades that were released commercially. These pictures received good reviews and did well at the box office. Reviewers and fans wondered, each time, if this mightn’t be signaling a resurgence of interest in silent movies and the making of silents. It didn’t.…

It came from France. Ironically similar to the way Sennett was influenced by the physical comedy shorts released by Gaumont and Eclipse, and by Ambrosio in Italy, a sea change in long-form comedy film made its way to American shores in the 1950s. Perhaps because the history and tradition of physical comedy performance ran deeper…

The top starring comedians of silent movies were the last to give up the ghost when talking pictures brought the Silent Film universe back down to Earth. I can’t say I blame them. Physical and visual comedy was what they were known for, and they weren’t joke comics really. Stars of dramatic films pivoted right…

Filmmakers’ love for silent cinema has held on throughout the post-Vitaphone decades, and the form has popped up from time to time. I say “form” and not “medium” as the definitions of Silent Film I’ve been discussing are not always followed. Sometimes this is deliberate, sometimes through inadvertent following of a conflated (mis)understanding of the…

What makes Silent Film its own medium, and not merely a genre of film, is its unique and specific messing with our expectations of reality. This was never planned or intended, but from the early 1910s onward the silence, the monochrome photography, and the speed-up we now refer to as “undercranking” were the backbone of…

A brief coda about Silent Film projection speed(s) before I move on to the next overall topic. And that is the notion of “natural motion”. This is a phrase I have heard invoked when a projection speed has been selected that is slower than a film was originally shown at. It’s occasionally followed by or…

I have a two-sentence slide about a third of the way in to my “Undercranking: the Magic Behind the Slapstick” lecture/demo. I show the first sentence and read it — “What is the correct speed for silent film?” — and then reveal the second sentence: “Please…no fistfights.” It gets a knowing laugh every time. It’s…

The unique form of Silent Film allowed the performers, directors, scenarists, gag writers and stunt performers to unleash their imaginations. The medium became for them a jumping off point into what turned out to be the universe of Silent Film, and not a end point or culmination of their days, weeks and years of performing…

Buster Keaton said in interviews that one of the challenges of moving into feature-length was that you couldn’t do “impossible gags”. Everyone had to give this up when sound came in. Keaton was referring to gags that didn’t have to be grounded in the story’s reality. The surreal, bizarro gags that we associate with silent…

I’m not sure exactly how this happens, but the pauses the performers insert so that “one thing and one thing only must be done at a time”, as Sills describes…disappear. A magician will practice a move or moves over and over until certain tiny bits of them disappear and give the illusion of a single…