Ben Model’s blog
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Rene Clair’s Last Silent Completes the Boomerang Arc of French Comedies To America and Back (image above sourced from SFSFF press/downloads page, whose image credit reads “Poster courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française”) There are a few occasions I can recall from many years ago when, after playing for a film…
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Looking for Squibs
Two main elements in film programming, I’ve found, are knowing the films and knowing where prints of them are. The rest, to a certain degree, is setting the table or parking cars in a lot. Sometimes the prints turn up in unlikely places, and one film we scheduled for Silent…
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A Classic Horror Film Without a Monster to Sell It
Rotating bookcases, a Creeping Hands, Disappearing Bodies, a Madman on the Loose, Suspicious Family Members After the Family Jewels — All in a Spooky Old Mansion There’s no iconic monster in the title of Paul Leni’s The Cat and the Canary (1927, Universal) or in the film itself. Maybe that’s why…
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Before There Was Parkour, There Was…Douglas Fairbanks
There is no deeply dramatic reason for Douglas Fairbanks to leap over the benches and fences or climb the trees or anything else of extreme athleticism he does to get from point A to point B in American Aristocracy (1916), except that he is Douglas Fairbanks. What else would you…
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Found at “Mostly Lost”: volume 2 – new DVD
My DVD label Undercrank Productions has a new release, the second in a series that showcases the identification fun we have every year at the “Mostly Lost” workshop at the Library of Congress at it’s Packard Preservation Campus in Culpeper, VA. Attendees each year receive a “swag bag” when they…
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Alternate Scores for Silent Films on Home Video
A couple weeks ago TCM aired The Love Light with Mary Pickford, and there was some Twitter chatter I picked up on about it referencing the score on it. This made me think about my now-defunct “altscore” site. It was a service loads of people thought was a great idea…
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ep. 30: How To Play the Piano or Organ for a Halloween Silent Movie
On this mini-episode, Ben Model gives you some tips and some do’s & don’t’s on how to accompany a silent movie if you’re doing one this Halloween…or any time of the year. Plus, there’s news about Ben’s upcoming silent film shows and DVD projects. Be sure you’re on Ben’s email…
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How to Play the Piano or Organ for a Halloween Silent Movie
As a fan and proponent of silent films, I’ve enjoyed seeing that every year at Halloween time, more and more shows of silent films are happening. It’s occurred to me that this means there are a lot of musicians accompanying a silent film for the first time and may be…
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On the air with Jenna Flanagan on “Midday NYC”
I was a guest on WNYC’s radio program “Midday NYC” on September 5th, talking about (what else?) silent film accompaniment and my Undercrank Productions DVDs. I’ve gotten to be on this show several times over the past 10-12 years, when Lopate was its host, and the repeat visits have helped…
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ep. 29: playing for scene breaks & film breaks, Lee Erwin’s Tootsie Oodles, how’d you get that gig? and more
On this episode, Ben Model recaps his summer silent film shows, discusses musically wrapping up a scene to match the film, talks about what to do musically when the film breaks, traces a 14-year trajectory in a “how’d you get that gig?” story, shares some info on Lee Erwin’s synthesizer-based…