Ben Model’s blog

  • We ran a really nice, tinted 35mm print of Nosferatu at the Cinema Arts Centre for this show, and it looked great at 21 fps. What was nice was that the projector technician who’d engineered our ability to have 21 fps as an alternate speed was in the audience to…

  • Last April, Charles Silver, Steve Massa and I screened MoMA’s holdings of Thanhouser Films to select the titles for this program. As it turned out some of these wound up being on the latest Thanhouser DVD set, which I also scored for Ned Thanhouser. With the exception of one title,…

  • Dr. Jack, along with Keaton’s The Haunted House, was our Halloween offering at the Silent Clowns series. I dressed for the occasion, donning my saddle shoes and straw boater. (BTW, best place to get your own saddle shoes is muffys.com — they make saddle shoes for all the Broadway shows…

  • Last Friday, I got an email from a reporter from the Epoch Times, asking me for an interview on silent films and silent film music. She had a short deadline and found my website online, and could she interview me on Skype because she was in Bulgaria. Sure. I have…

  • Oct 21 and 22 found me back at MoMA’s Bartos theater accompanying a pair of films from my one of my favorite corners of the planet, Scandinavia. Afgrunden and Ingeborg Holm were screened, both in 35mm prints. MoMA’s print of The Abyss is okay; there’s a bit of decomp, but…

  • Oct 16 – Traveled to Essex, NY for a show (on 10/17) of “The General” (DVD projection of the new Kino disc). Could’ve flown to Burlington VT on JetBlue and taken a ferry across Lake Champlain but, let me tell ya folks, Amtrak is the only way to fly. Both…

  • October 13 and 14 found me at MoMA playing for a program of Griffith Biograph shorts, as part of Charles Silver’s series. The Weds show was in Bartos, on the Modus digital, and the Thurs show was in Titus 2, on the Steinway. (The T2 instrument, BTW, was Blanchette Rockefeller’s…

  • Sunday Oct 11 was our maiden voyage at the Arclight Theatre. Our audience really loved the new, more intimate space and the films looked great in there. Piano is an old Somebody & Someone upright, which I’d tuned a week or two before and seems to have held. The action…

  • Over the weekend, someone bought and downloaded my piano score MP3 that synchs with the Kino DVD/VHS of Sherlock Jr. with Buster Keaton. I opened my virtual mailbag this morning to find this kind note: I just wanted to tell you how much I appreciate your making the “Sherlock Jr.”…

  • There’s an article in the Oct 14 issue of the Queens Gazette about last week’s show of Metropolis that I spotted online. Click here to read the article. The writer did a nice job, and quoted me on a couple of things and mentioned the Silent Clowns series as well.