Author: Ben Model
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Cliff Bowes Made Lots of Cameos
Every once in a while, a Cliff Bowes comedy turns up. Their rarity and scarcity explains why you probably don’t know who Cliff Bowes is. His one-reel comedies are undeservedly forgotten, but luckily some were accidentally preserved. Cliff Bowes starred in a series of comedies for Educational Pictures, part of their one-reel “Cameo” series supervised…
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Charlie Chaplin, “The Eel”
In going through Chaplin’s The Adventurer for a project I’m working on, I wound up staring at a shot that usually goes by in a couple of seconds. It appears onscreen three times, and only one element is really supposed to register with our eyes and brains. What caught my eye this time was everything…
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Live Music at Silent Film Courses
When I started accompanying films it was still common practice to show silent films, well…silent. They were only available in 16mm prints that had no music tracks. That’s changed thanks to DVDs and Blu-rays and video projection, but having live accompaniment in a film class is still important. I play at a silent film class…
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Reeducating Myself About Thomas Ince
I knew of Thomas Ince as part of the triumvirate that was the short-lived Triangle Film Company. I’d played for an Ince series at MoMA about ten years ago. Until my current Douglas MacLean project brought his name and work to the fore in my consciousness, that had been pretty much it. The DVD of…
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Silents for Seniors
I don’t remember how or when I came up with the idea of doing silent film shows at senior living facilities. On the surface, this may not sound all that exciting in terms of the sheen of Show Business or resume-building, but something a senior said to me at one of these is what keeps…
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Ben Model’s Podcast
Every once in a while, after one of my shows, someone will come up to me and ask me if I’m writing a book about silent film accompaniment. My answer is that I’m not, although this blog is pretty close to doing just that. But it wasn’t always…and that’s why I started doing a podcast,…
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A Cup Of Coffee, A Sandwich and You
I know that song from Bugs Bunny cartoons. There’s no other way I’d had have heard of it, except that composer Carl Stalling stuck it in scenes where Bugs or someone else was eating. Carl Stalling had played the organ in movie houses in the 1920s, and this practice of using “song title puns” has…
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ep. 33: two takes on The Rink, organ as orchestra for a horse, melodies underscore Marion Davies
On this episode of the podcast — I use a song-title-pun during Mostly Lost, play for the same Chaplin shorts three days in a row to work on an orchestral score, play a Möller in Rome like it’s an orchestra, bring silent comedies to the Adirondacks, score two Marion Davies films in a recording session…
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The Silent Comedy Landscape 1921-1922
I’ve just been down a bit of a rabbit hole, thinking about the trajectory of the feature-length comedy in the early 1920s. (Yeah, I know…” — said no one, ever”). I’ve been revisiting the effect that Chaplin’s The Kid had on slapstick comedies, putting it into the context what was happening for the non-slapstick features.…
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Buster Keaton Meets Jimmy Johns
I almost fell off the couch today, just like when I saw the Spongebob cartoon whose punchline was “Nosferatu!” several years ago. There’s a new TV spot airing now that recreates or repurposes the Buster Keaton house-fall gag, and it’s done quite well. You always hope or assume that people in their 20s and 30s…