Author: Ben Model

One of the ways Silent Film economizes on storytelling information is by the dropping of non-essential bits of information in a scene. Sometimes these are at the beginning of a scene. But the general idea is to keep moving, and to keep the important dramatic beats — or comic ones — flowing. If someone travels…

Let’s start with what we are presented with, what we are literally looking at, when we view a Silent Film. Because it is a purely visual medium, although aided and abetted as needed by the music, it’s the visual cues that are the way that we’re getting any information. This is a question I pose…

I don’t know why Walter Kerr’s discussion of Silent Film projection speeds in chapter five hadn’t sparked my fascination with them earlier. But, I don’t think anyone was as fascinated as I was with what made that speed-up work — that the film was running faster than taking speed but did not look like it…

The silence of Silent Film is also its most misunderstood or misinterpreted aesthetic. Many people assume that Silent Film is movies with no sound, hampered by its mute form. True, the word “silent” is incredibly off-putting, and its being the label for films made before the advent of synch-sound or the industry’s switching over to…

Chapters 4 and 5 of The Silent Clowns’ “Part One” illuminate the two most important elements of what makes silent film Silent Film, a specific entertainment medium of its own. As opposed to seeing it as regular film or video as we know it, with one arm tied behind its back, its shoelaces knotted together…

Chapter 3, “The Fact in the Fantasy”, reminds us that Silent Film – although silent, monochromatic and slightly faster – is still a capturing of reality on celluloid. Regardless of the aspects of the medium that are either what make it a unique expression or are seen as handicaps, it’s still film. Unlike painting or…

A friend of mine once enlikened watching a silent film, especially in a theater, to being in a sort of trance state. An apt distillation of what Walter Kerr discusses in chapter two of The Silent Clowns’ Part One, “The Unique Experience”. The experience he writes of is a mix of one that only exists…

Walter Kerr opens his book The Silent Clowns with five chapters on the core aesthetics of Silent Film itself. Perhaps not an obvious choice for a tome on comedy films from the ‘teens and ‘twenties, but I believe that understanding these basic concepts is important — essential, even — to grasping why silent film comedy…

We’ve all heard of or referred to Silent Film as a universal language. It’s not just because the films are wordless, although that certainly levels the playing field. But it’s true. But it’s because of that same leaving-out that is at the core of the medium’s communication and storytelling. There is something about Silent Film…

We use our imagination to fill in the elements left out, with Silent Film. As obvious as this may be to adults who’ve seen silent film, it’s ironic that there’s an assumption that kids won’t go for silents. Ironic, because children are in way better touch and access of their imagination. Parents and educators are…