Ben Model’s blog
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On this episode, Ben Model talks with co-host Kerr Lockhart talk about a cancelled gig at the Metropolitan Museum of Art turning into an online one, Gage County Nebraska and Hollywood, accompanying Russian silent films, scoring a French film for an audience with live-translated intertitles. Plus: using leitmotifs, finding a…
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ep. 34: the Silent Comedy Watch Party, scoring Hitchcock, “Intrigue” and Nell Shipman, plus FAQ
On this episode of the podcast, Ben Model discusses the creation of the Silent Comedy Watch Party and the response so far; talks about teaching his silent film course at Wesleyan using Zoom; shares an excerpt from his score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Champagne for the Hitchcock British International Pictures Collection…
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Live Accompaniment and Air Conditioning
There are two things I often have to ask a theatre to adjust when I arrive at a new venue. One is that the piano be turned around so it’s not facing the audience, and the other is to turn down the amount of light on me and the piano.…
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Hey…Your Eyes Are Up Here
There’s a reason a lot of home movies or home videos are hard to watch and that so many photos look like “snapshots”. Most of the time the person taking these isn’t thinking of how this will look to whoever is looking at it. They’re thinking of what’s in the…
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Over-scans and Purple-Green Bands
Believe it or not, I have not been able to find answers to two basic questions about YouTube live-streaming. They’re issues I’ve been noticing for the last four weeks on the Silent Comedy Watch Party, and I can’t believe that one of them hasn’t been picked up on and hack-suggested.…
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Revisiting the Films of John Bunny
John Bunny enjoyed a popularity in his day that has evaporated with time. To some extent that process began right at the end of his screen career. The mid-‘teens saw the rise of slapstick in the manic Keystone comedies and those of Charlie Chaplin and others. The polite social, situational…
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Two Weddings and a Sandwich
Programming shorts to a theme is often useful if you need to draw a potential audience’s attention or if you have a hard time making choices from a long list. And sometimes it just happens without any planning at all. Case in point: this Sunday’s edition of The Silent Comedy…
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Adding a Page to Watch Party Menu
“Can I tell you about today’s specials?” Okay, it’s been a couple weeks since someone’s asked you that question. But in the case of The Silent Comedy Watch Party, it applies. With people hosting movie-viewing watch parties on social media left and right, the floodgates of copyright-ignoring seem to have…
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Opening the Gates and Letting the Laughs Out
Last week’s premiere episode of “The Silent Comedy Watch Party” was a success, so it seems I was right about going ahead with doing the stream. I was also wrong about something. Luckily that was easily correctable, and it was something I should’ve seen coming. I spend most of the…
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“The Silent Comedy Watch Party” – *premiere*
The premiere episode of “The Silent Comedy Watch Party” streamed live on Sunday March 22 at 3:30pm EDT (New York, east coast USA). Hosted by silent film accompanist Ben Model and film historian Steve Massa, the one-hour program will present three rare slapstick comedy shorts. The films are streamed live…