Ben Model’s blog
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How I Learned Why It’s Called a “Step-And-Repeat” by Stepping And Repeating I have posed for photos at events for press before, standing with people way better-known than I am in front of a large hanging sheet of paper or vinyl with festival/event logos on it, referred to as the…
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Hitchcock’s “Blackmail”: underscoring MacGuffins and Spoilers
Or…What to Expect When You’re Expecting Something from a Hitchcock Movie I accompanied Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929) on piano a couple days ago at MoMA, and I recalled and repeated the way I usually try to handle the murder scene. I know…I probably should have yelled “spoiler alert” there for you,…
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Hooray for Hollywood and the 2018 TCM Classic Film Festival
Three Songs You Won’t Hear During My Accompaniment to “Show People” — and Why One of the bugaboos in film accompaniment that my mentor Lee Erwin (1908-2000) had, and one I share, is the use of “song title puns”. In fact, anything that make an audience member’s brain say “Hey!…
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A Mysterious Woman in Buster Keaton’s “The Cameraman”
Honoring the Gag Work in a Silent Comedy Sometimes Involves a Doing a Little Homework and Then Sharing Your Findings With An Audience The gag title seen above from Keaton’s The Scarecrow (1920) got a huge belly-laugh at one of my shows this weekend. Usually it gets a tepid response…
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What’s a Nice Car Like You Doing in a Comedy Short Like This?
Putting Humpty Together Again, Thanks to the Museum of Modern Art and the Library of Congress It isn’t often that a two-reel comedy can be reassembled by accessing a reel from one archive and a reel from another, but we were fortunate in the case of this film. Oh! What…
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Charlie Chaplin, Marcel Perez, and a Pair of Drowning Ladies
There was a lot of borrowing and sharing of material in the days of silent comedy shorts, a tradition that grew out of vaudeville and circus. In the milieu of live comedy performance, there were certain routines that were a particular comedian’s property, to be sure, but there were many…
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Buster Keaton’s Leap to ‘One Week’, and Marcel Perez’s Jump from “Split-reelers” to 2-reelers
Stretching to Two Reel Length was no Stretch For Marcel Perez What has always struck me as remarkable about Buster Keaton (well, one of several things) is his maturity as a filmmaker at the ripe old age of 25. His first solo release, One Week (1920), looks nothing like any of…
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Marcel Perez…or “Marvel” Perez?
Buster Keaton’s Idea of “Impossible Gags” Take on ‘Popeye’ Proportions In the Tweedledum/Twede Comedy Shorts Stylistically, there are two things about the American films of Marcel Perez that make them stand apart from the work of all the other slapstick comedians of the silent era. One of them I can’t…
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Marion Davies Marches On…!
Happy Birthday to Victor Herbert, Composer of “Babes In Toyland”, “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life” and the elusive “Marion Davies March” Victor Herbert’s March of the Toys wafted over my WFMT app this morning, in honor of the composer’s birthday, and I immediately thought of Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy –…
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The Humor of “Jackass” and AFV In the Early 1900s, as Performed by Marcel Perez and Others
The injury humor of Johnny Knoxville, the Farrelly Brothers, and thousands of anonymous klutzes is nothing new — French and Italian comedians were doing it during movies’ first decade. Last September, a lot of people sent me a link to an article in the New York Times that articulated something…