Author: Ben Model

The “deliberate tempo” Milton Sills writes of was one of two things I picked up on when I began watching silent comedy film sequences at cranking speed. The other performance facet was one that reminded me of something I learned from taking a semester of mime on college. The slightly slower movement style is the…

Milton Sills was a huge star of the silent era. His name and face may be unfamiliar today but he would have been an ideal “get” for Encyclopedia Brittanica to write about screen acting techniques for its 14th edition, published in 1929. And not a moment too soon – talking pictures were about to change…

I’d been waving a “smoking gun” I’d been alerted to verifying the concept and technique of acting for an undercranked camera for some time when I was alerted to another one. A much earlier one. The one I’d been jumping up and down about was Milton Sills’ article on screen acting for Encyclopedia Britannica, written…

Once I discovered or realized this notion that people making silent comedies, and Silent Film in general, were aware of the difference between “taking” and projection speeds, I became fascinated with pulling back the curtain to see what this looked like. This is what became the basis for the “undercranking” videos I began making and…

I’d always been fascinated with and puzzled by the way silent movies are shown faster than they were filmed at and yet does not look like film that’s sped up. Pulling apart this gag in Chaplin’s “A Dog’s Life” pulled back the curtain, and revealed to me what that secret was. Why it hadn’t occurred…

There was something slightly unsettling about the employment office sequence I saw in the “The Chaplin Revue” (1959) of “A Dog’s Life”. It wasn’t just that it felt like it was running too slow. An easy call to make but difficult to explain. I wanted to know what the explanation was. Years after seeing this…