Ben Model’s blog
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For a clown, a real honest-to-goodness Clown, the core of what they are doing is rooted in the honest, raw, vulnerable connection they create and have with the audience members. This is the source of where the laughs come from. The costuming and make-up are an extension or exaggeration of…
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Arbuckle-Spotting, or: What Emma Clifton and I Saw Last Night
The things you see during a silent film show when you’re the one who’s closest to the screen! As a film accompanist, I’m constantly scanning the frame for information while I’m playing. Impending story developments can be introduced in different areas of a shot while other action is happening in…
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The Lighthouse and the Sidecar Get it Right
“The Lighthouse and the Sidecar” is a nickname that is probably more catchy in its original language, Danish. Evoking two things that are pretty much extinct doesn’t help either. But this was how many people in Scandinavia and maybe Europe referred to Fy & By (pron. FEE eh BEE), who…
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“Jimmy Aubrey Comedy” is Not Always an Oxymoron
Worries and Wobbles (1917) has what might appear to be three strikes against it on the surface: “Jimmy Aubrey comedy”, “directed by Larry Semon” and that it’s a rather blatant knock-off of Chaplin’s One A.M.. The first of these is also usually an oxymoron. I can tell you that, like…
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Charles Puffy’s Film Career Sandwich
You may know that face. No, it’s not Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. Nor is it Oliver Hardy, sans mustache, nor is it Otto Fries, or any of the other lesser-known plus-size comedians of the silent era. This performer was in over 130 films from 1913 to 1939 — Destiny, Dr. Mabuse:…
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Leo McCarey, Charley Chase and René Clair Walk Into a Bar…
Rene Clair’s Last Silent Completes the Boomerang Arc of French Comedies To America and Back (image above sourced from SFSFF press/downloads page, whose image credit reads “Poster courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française”) There are a few occasions I can recall from many years ago when, after playing for a film…
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Looking for Squibs
Two main elements in film programming, I’ve found, are knowing the films and knowing where prints of them are. The rest, to a certain degree, is setting the table or parking cars in a lot. Sometimes the prints turn up in unlikely places, and one film we scheduled for Silent…
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A Classic Horror Film Without a Monster to Sell It
Rotating bookcases, a Creeping Hands, Disappearing Bodies, a Madman on the Loose, Suspicious Family Members After the Family Jewels — All in a Spooky Old Mansion There’s no iconic monster in the title of Paul Leni’s The Cat and the Canary (1927, Universal) or in the film itself. Maybe that’s why…
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Before There Was Parkour, There Was…Douglas Fairbanks
There is no deeply dramatic reason for Douglas Fairbanks to leap over the benches and fences or climb the trees or anything else of extreme athleticism he does to get from point A to point B in American Aristocracy (1916), except that he is Douglas Fairbanks. What else would you…
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Found at “Mostly Lost”: volume 2 – new DVD
My DVD label Undercrank Productions has a new release, the second in a series that showcases the identification fun we have every year at the “Mostly Lost” workshop at the Library of Congress at it’s Packard Preservation Campus in Culpeper, VA. Attendees each year receive a “swag bag” when they…