Ben Model’s blog
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There was something slightly unsettling about the employment office sequence I saw in the “The Chaplin Revue” (1959) of “A Dog’s Life”. It wasn’t just that it felt like it was running too slow. An easy call to make but difficult to explain. I wanted to know what the explanation…
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Marketing Lesson: Tending the Garden
When you work in a niche-market end of the arts – and a niche-within-a-niche-within-a-niche market, at that – you dream of building a huge audience for what you do. It’s easy to think it may be easier to do now, with new social media wunderkinds appearing and posts going viral…
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Cows? What cows…?
The silence in Silent Film can be selective. It’s not just the fact that there were no microphones during filming. The characters onscreen could be selective about the absence of sound or a particular sound. And as the audience, we are too, cued by the reality the person in the…
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Keaton’s “Go West” live-streamed
I thoroughly enjoyed presenting and live-scoring Keaton’s Go West (1925) for the Cinema Arts Centre via live-stream last night! Our monthly series will continue online for the remainder of 2021, and possibly longer even after the CAC resumes in-person screenings. We do a live Q&A with viewers after the movie…
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“The Story of the Star Spangled Banner” (1921)
I’m trotting out this rare silent short for the holiday weekend. It’s “The Story of the Star Spangled Banner” (1921). Best I have been able to figure out is that it was released by Pathé Exchange and was made available for the non-theatrical and education markets in 16mm not long…
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When Charlie Chaplin Isn’t Quite Charlie Chaplin
What struck me and stayed with me for years was the scene in A Dog’s Life (1918) where Charlie is in an employment office. As presented in The Chaplin Revue (1959), the film was step-printed so that it would be appear to be running at 16 frames per second even…
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Charlie Chaplin, Step By Step
At some point when I was in college or somewhere in my 20s, I saw “The Chaplin Revue” at the Carnegie Hall Cinema, also known as the Little Carnegie. Lee Erwin accompanied the film on the theater’s Wurlitzer organ, and that was the main reason I’d attended the show. Something…
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Herky-Jerky Movements, Un-herked and Un-jerked
In the same way that silent film can be over-sped, with variable speed projection as an option there’s also the possibility of a film being run a bit slower than it ought to be. This can be pretty subjective. But — as with over-speeding — if there’s some knowledge about…
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Over-Speeding and Keystone Cops
Yes, sometimes silent films are run too fast, faster than they ought to be. Some of them, anyway. For a long time, there weren’t any options about this, and this either became something fans got accustomed to or became a stereotype about silent movies that could be off-putting. The projection…
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Exploring Silent Film, I Feel The Need…The Need For Speed
This fall will mark 40 years since I began accompanying silent films. I’ve played to hundreds and hundreds of them, in a wide variety of venues and in a number of formats. One thing I’ve noticed and that my colleagues have as well is that when a silent movie is…