Ben Model’s blog
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I’ve just been down a bit of a rabbit hole, thinking about the trajectory of the feature-length comedy in the early 1920s. (Yeah, I know…” — said no one, ever”). I’ve been revisiting the effect that Chaplin’s The Kid had on slapstick comedies, putting it into the context what was…
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Buster Keaton Meets Jimmy Johns
I almost fell off the couch today, just like when I saw the Spongebob cartoon whose punchline was “Nosferatu!” several years ago. There’s a new TV spot airing now that recreates or repurposes the Buster Keaton house-fall gag, and it’s done quite well. You always hope or assume that people…
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Silent Film Sleuthing and Inspector Clouseau
You don’t see a lot of detective stories in silent cinema. Almost as remarkable as the rediscoveries of silent Sherlock Holmes films is the fact that very few were made at all. The Language of Silent Film doesn’t lend itself to detective stories all that well, which is why you…
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A Book of Silent Movie Music
A lot of people ask me at shows if the original music played for silent movies still exists. During an intermission at a double-feature I was playing at Bard about a dozen years ago, someone who said they were involved with music publisher G. Schirmers asked me about this. I…
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New Sounds For Silents
It took me at least a few years to find a way to re-tune my thoughts about what you might call non-traditional scoring for silent films. Attending and performing at the “Silent Film Days” festival in Tromsø, Norway for many years, hearing bands and music artists from Scandinavia do live…
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Before When Harry Met Charlie
Like many people who are into classic film, I only knew Harry Myers as the drunk millionaire in Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (1931). I knew he didn’t just appear out of nowhere, hand-picked form obscurity the way Virginia Cherrill had been. So, when I spotted him as one of the…
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Billy Franey and Grover Jones, Dynamic Duo
I knew the name Billy Franey because Blackhawk Films sold prints of The Bath Dub (1921). I’d seen this listed in their monthly bulletins over and over growing up. I’d never seen the film, so The Water Plug (1920) was my first Franey short. I was impressed. It was one…
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Rare Cartoons in a Queens NY Basement
Prints of rare and lost films turn up in odd places. A distant cousin in Queens, removed a few times and older than my folks, had a large collection of 16mm silents that I wound up with after he passed away. Mostly old 3rd- or 4th gen dupes of Chaplin…
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Helping an Audience Enter the Pool at a Silent Film Show
In the mid-’teens of last century, the short subject grew legs and walked on dry land, becoming the feature length attraction. Shorts continued to be a standard part of the movie program, either in live-action or animated form. While the practice is long gone, it has a practical application today,…
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Turning The Lights Off and On In a Silent Film
The Raymond Griffith comedy You’d Be Surprised (1926) is not as well-known as his other starring features. That’s not saying much, given that most classic film fans don’t know Raymond Griffith and that most of his films are lost.This one deserves a better reputation, but I get why it’s not…