Tag: buster keaton
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ep. 38: scoring for scenes that suggest or specify a piece of music, and scoring a film from 1948
On this episode Ben talks about meeting an audience’s expectations of a score when a certain piece of music or style is indicated onscreen, and in a rare case of a non-narrative film made after the silent era. Also covered are silent era mood cues and cue sheets, Marion Davies in “When Knighthood Was in…
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The Sounds of the Silents — Theatre Organ on DVD
One of the reasons a majority of people associate the piano with silent film, as opposed to theatre organ or orchestra, is that it had been the type of accompaniment utilized the most on a majority of home video editions of silent films. I’d like to address a question that came in from my recent series…
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Eugene: The Movie!
Ernie Kovacs played one version of “Captain Buzzkill” or another in most of the movies he made for Columbia. He was being cast for what he looked like, his “type”. Kovacs made two attempts to upend this: one we know about and one that may be more conjecture on my part, but I think the…
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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 part of a venue’s film…
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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 the courtship of his and…
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Alternate Scores for Silent Films on Home Video
A couple weeks ago TCM aired The Love Light with Mary Pickford, and there was some Twitter chatter I picked up on about it referencing the score on it. This made me think about my now-defunct “altscore” site. It was a service loads of people thought was a great idea but which didn’t catch on.…
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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 (if any). The difference? At…
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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 the 14 two-reel Arbuckle comedies…
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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 yet put my finger on.…
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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 I’d been thinking for some…