Author: Ben Model
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Silent Film Is Something That Happens
There are three key elements that make up what Silent Film truly is. It’s the overlapping presence of these live factors, at a show, that make the full experience. It’s the reason I refer to Silent Film as a medium and not a genre. It’s a medium that’s a close relation to sound film, but…
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The Nairobi Trio: Behind the Masks
The best-known and most-seen version of Ernie Kovacs’ famous “Nairobi Trio” sketch is one shot on videotape. It was used in an episode of the 1977 series “The Best of Ernie Kovacs”, and it’s on YouTube. I’d always thought the trio members were Ernie, Jolene Brand (keys) and Bobby Lauher (mallets) on that ABC special.…
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Missing the Shot in Sherlock, Jr.’s Pool Game
[This was originally posted on May 15, 2019, and was revised on May 18 to correct some factual errors brought to my attention by a colleague.] The pool game in Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. is one of the film’s many memorable sequences. For many years, one of the trick shots in the game was only…
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Audience Preservation: Silent Movies as Family Programming
One of my favorite sounds at a silent film show is that of kids’ laughter over the laughs of the adults in the theater. People bring their children or grandchildren to silent film shows from time to time, and it’s a wonderful thing. These are general audience shows that are part of a venue’s film…
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Speedy Has Quite The Hold On An Audience
A number of personal, “tone-poem” slice-of-life films were made at the tail end of the silent era. The ones often mentioned are titles like Sunrise (1927), The Crowd (1928) and Lonesome (1928). Even von Stroheim’s The Wedding March (1928) has a very thin plot, and is almost a meditation on the courtship of his and…
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Silent Filmmaking Then and Now
Is Silent Movie “Cosplay” Necessary? I don’t spend a lot of time watching silent films made recently or any time after sound came in. Maybe I should. In pondering the idea of making one myself, I’ve often wondered how important it is that the film look like it was made during the “silent era”. Silent…
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Just You And Ernie Kovacs…And a Theatre Full of Fellow Fans
Ernie Kovacs hated working with a live audience for his TV shows. His TV shows feel like you’re having a visit with him. Having spent 8 years in radio before starting in TV, in its own nascent years, Ernie carried over the practice of performing to an audience of one to his TV work. He…
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Don’t Blink Or You’ll Miss It
The Persistence of Vision in Projected Film vs. Projected Video With all the advances and advantages there are in digital video, there is one element of cinema it has yet to replicate. It’s a subtle, literally invisible one, and I have been looking for scientific documentation on it that conclusively proves my theory. When you…
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I’m so sorry about the multiple podcast emails…
Hi! Earlier today I imported my podcast from another site to my main one, and now you are getting emails about each episode. It’s a bug with my site, and I’m sorry this is happening. Feel free to delete these. Thanks! — Ben
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When a 1932 Film Score Isn’t A Film Score
I’m very interested in how music was and wasn’t used in sound films made 1929-36. The TCM Classic Film Festival’s screening of Merrily We Go To Hell that I attended provided a fascinating example of a sort of scoring that was done in the early ’30s without the use of a composer. There is an…