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.…

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…

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,…

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…

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 “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…

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…

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…

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”…

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…