Ben Model’s blog
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The “cue sheet” was the most common type of film score during the silent era. These were road maps for the conductors and musicians in movie houses. They were rarely if ever made in collaboration with a film’s director, and there was no requirement that they be adhered to. Most…
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Let’s get “The Bat” on the National Film Registry!
Every year in December, 25 films are added to the National Film Registry for their being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”, and are selected by the Librarian of Congress and the National Film Preservation Board. Given the connection to Batman that Roland West’s THE BAT (1926) has, I’d say it deserves…
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40 Years At MoMA
Had it not been for the fact that I was on vacation for about two weeks in June and my seeing a slew of LinkedIn messages congratulating me when I got home, a big anniversary of mine would not have occurred to me. It has been 40 years since my…
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An award for the Raymond Griffith Blu/DVD!
The Il Cinema Ritrovato is held every year in Bologna, Italy and is a prestigious international festival of classic and silent film. The festival has an awards competition for Blu-rays and DVDs that were released the previous year. 5 awards are given out for different categories, and also each of the competition’s…
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Projection Speed-up Cited in 1915 Article
It’s always fun finding another nugget of evidence as to how far back the practice of silent era sped-up film projection went. During the pandemic, I made a reading project of going through issues of the Moving Picture World from 1916, and then on to 1917. I’d stopped this a…
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You Can Help Bring 2 Tom Tyler Silent Westerns Back to Fans
Not all of my home video projects are initiated by me. I’ve co-produced and released Blu-rays and DVDs for projects who were the brainchild of fellow film accompanists Jon C. Mirsalis and Andrew Earle Simpson, historian-educator-author Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, and my friends at the Library of Congress. I’m pleased to let…
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Interview with Ben Model about his “Laughter Restored” presentation
On Saturday May 18th I will be giving a presentation entitled “Laughter Restored: Discovering Rare Gems of Silent Film” at the Jacob Burns Film Center’s Restored and Rediscovered Festival. This will be a first for me, as I’ve not given this presentation before. I’ll be talking about how I became…
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A (Wednes)day in the Life, in 60 Seconds
I’m posting this in May 2024, and I realize that it’s entirely possible that if you’ve found this post later in the year or some time in 2025, most of the embedded videos may be blank. For now, a brief story about how some TikTok videos I made after teaching…
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Episode 63 show notes: The Silent Film Music Podcast
Episode 63 Show Notes: Scoring Decisions and Transitions Ben continues exploring the various techniques and shadings of the matter of scoring the action going on inside a character’s head in silent film. Ben discusses his busy schedule this spring, which kept him away from some of the long-term schedules (Accidentally…
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ep. 63: Scoring Decisions and Transitions
In this episode: Ben recaps his month’s activities in March 2024, talks about the subtleties of underscoring dramatic moments when a main character thinks through an important decision, a creative way to invent main themes for a program of 7 animated shorts, accompanying a 1914 “Italian Diva” melodrama, and picking…