Ben Model’s blog
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[This was originally posted on May 15, 2019, and was revised on May 18 to correct some factual errors brought to my attention by a colleague.] The pool game in Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. is one of the film’s many memorable sequences. For many years, one of the trick shots…
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Audience Preservation: Silent Movies as Family Programming
One of my favorite sounds at a silent film show is that of kids’ laughter over the laughs of the adults in the theater. People bring their children or grandchildren to silent film shows from time to time, and it’s a wonderful thing. These are general audience shows that are…
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Speedy Has Quite The Hold On An Audience
A number of personal, “tone-poem” slice-of-life films were made at the tail end of the silent era. The ones often mentioned are titles like Sunrise (1927), The Crowd (1928) and Lonesome (1928). Even von Stroheim’s The Wedding March (1928) has a very thin plot, and is almost a meditation on…
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Silent Filmmaking Then and Now
Is Silent Movie “Cosplay” Necessary? I don’t spend a lot of time watching silent films made recently or any time after sound came in. Maybe I should. In pondering the idea of making one myself, I’ve often wondered how important it is that the film look like it was made…
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Just You And Ernie Kovacs…And a Theatre Full of Fellow Fans
Ernie Kovacs hated working with a live audience for his TV shows. His TV shows feel like you’re having a visit with him. Having spent 8 years in radio before starting in TV, in its own nascent years, Ernie carried over the practice of performing to an audience of one…
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Don’t Blink Or You’ll Miss It
The Persistence of Vision in Projected Film vs. Projected Video With all the advances and advantages there are in digital video, there is one element of cinema it has yet to replicate. It’s a subtle, literally invisible one, and I have been looking for scientific documentation on it that conclusively…
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I’m so sorry about the multiple podcast emails…
Hi! Earlier today I imported my podcast from another site to my main one, and now you are getting emails about each episode. It’s a bug with my site, and I’m sorry this is happening. Feel free to delete these. Thanks! — Ben
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When a 1932 Film Score Isn’t A Film Score
I’m very interested in how music was and wasn’t used in sound films made 1929-36. The TCM Classic Film Festival’s screening of Merrily We Go To Hell that I attended provided a fascinating example of a sort of scoring that was done in the early ’30s without the use of…
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Where is the Hollywood Series?
On April 13, 2019 at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, Kevin Brownlow was presented with the 2nd Robert Osborne Award. Last year’s recipient was Martin Scorcese. The ceremony was held on the Saturday night of the 10th annual TCM Classic Film Series, before a screening of a new digital restoration…
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Bringing the Movie Palace Sound To A Theater Near You
Some shows I do are B.Y.O.O. — Bring Your Own Organ. Perhaps I should say “bring my own organ”, as it’s usually my idea to bring a portable Wurlitzer to your theater. Who thinks of that? Usually, the request is “can you bring a keyboard?”. But thanks to virtual instrument…