This article was originally published on Starring NYC (now sadly defunct) and has been dusted off and spruced up for its Retro Movie Buff debut.
Ben Model believes silent cinema is the worst name for a film genre. Not only is it patently misleading, it’s also a little dull. “It sounds like you’re going to have a bad time,” he says. “People think about going to the library and having to hold their breath.”
They really shouldn’t. Model has been composing scores and playing live music for silent movies for 30 years—and he finds them anything but boring.
An avid film fan, he started early, discovering Chaplin on television when he was two or three. Model grew up in Larchmont, in Westchester County, N.Y., before the advent of cable—when public television was still broadcasting classic movies as afterschool programming and children could watch silent films alongside Laurel and Hardy comedies and the Our Gang series. “The only way to see more of these was to find a showing, which was rare, or to find a collector,” he says.
Model was lucky enough to find the latter. When he was 12 years old, he received a copy of Walter Kerr’s Silent Clowns, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic’s book about silent film comedy. “I wrote him a letter, and a few days later he called me back.” Kerr also lived in the same small town and was more than happy to share his film collection with a fellow fan. “For the next 15 years I would go to his house and he would show me anything [from his collection],” Model says.
Later, while Model was studying film at New York University, he met Lee Erwin, who played the Wurlitzer organ at Carnegie Hall Cinema. A veteran accompanist, Erwin was an organist in movie theaters in the 1920s and composed scores for the films of Buster Keaton and D.W. Griffith. He soon became Model’s mentor and introduced him to Bruce Lawton, a film preservationist whose grandfather and great-grandfather had both been cameramen during the silent era. Lawton and Model quickly became friends.
Before The Jazz Singer changed the face of cinema with Al Jolson’s famous ad-lib (“Wait a minute, wait a minute, I tell yer, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet”), silent films were all the rage. Audiences didn’t mind the lack of sound; it made silent films truly universal: no dialogue meant no language barriers. Charlie Chaplin became the first international film star, while the fame of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks puts modern day ‘power couples’ to shame. But after audiences heard Jolson speak and sing, films would never be the same again.
Although Erwin helped spur a revival of interest in silent cinema in the 1970s, by the late ’90s, silent film screenings were few and far between. Despite being the birthplace of the American film industry, not a single venue in New York City screened silent movies year-round. Worse, the generation of collectors and preservationists who had introduced Lawton and Model to silent film were dying. So, in 1997 the two of them founded the Silent Clowns Film Series as their way of keeping the art form alive.
Silent Clowns is now the longest-running silent-film series in New York, screening movies once a month at the Library for the Performing Arts, in midtown Manhattan. Model is proud of the series’ resilience. “Without holding big fundraisers, we’re able to survive,” he says. “The series just seems to want [to keep] going on because, regardless of the economic climate, people just keep supporting us.” The Library benefits too, since the screenings also showcase its film collection. And the Steinway concert grand Model gets to play doesn’t hurt either. “It’s unbelievable,” he says, rolling his head back in admiration. “It’s one of the best pianos you can play for silent film in New York City.”
Yet the best thing about showing films at the Library is the crowd. “It’s great for us, because we’re reaching an audience we never could before,” Model says. Raymond Griffith, Johnny Hines and Laurel and Hardy have all graced the Silent Clowns screen, but Buster Keaton is the biggest draw, especially for families. Parents regularly bring their children to see Keaton, and some of them have followed the series from first grade through to college. “I think a lot of the joy for us is the fact that we’re a vessel for the people who made these films. We’re helping [them] entertain people today.”
Like Kerr, Model believes showing silent movies “is like missionary work”: It’s all about getting audiences converted. “There are some forms of entertainment—you can’t explain it to people. With silent film, you just have to get someone into a theater once and they’ll get it,” he says. Model speaks quickly, eagerly; his enthusiasm is infectious. In an era saturated with computer-generated imagery, these films encourage viewers to watch actively: “Because of the lack of sound and color, you’re filling in those gaps [with your imagination],” he explains. The communal experience of silent films is also unique. Take Harold Lloyd, whose films Silent Clowns is featuring to mark the 120th anniversary of his birth. “If you’re watching a Harold Lloyd film by yourself [for the first time], it just doesn’t play the same way. But if you’re watching with an audience, it just takes off,” Model says. Lloyd was one of the first American filmmakers to run previews for his movies, altering sequences according to audience reactions. If you’ve ever watched a Lloyd film alone and been puzzled by the long pauses between gags, it’s because he was intentionally giving a roomful of laughing viewers a breather between skits. Lloyd is simply funnier with a crowd.
And of course, there’s the live music. Model plays live accompaniment for every Silent Clowns screening and improvises almost everything. “I no longer know how I do it. It just sort of happens,” he says. “There’s just no way to write down and rehearse and synchronize the amount of music that [I] play. I always start as soon as the applause for the film starts at the beginning. I play people into the show,” he says, and doesn’t stop playing until it’s over. “I don’t think about it, and my hands don’t get tired.” But “if I have three shows in the same day, maybe then,” he admits. Model plays not only the piano, but the theater organ (a pipe organ designed to sound like a full orchestra) as well. “People think silent film accompaniment was solely on a piano. And that’s all there is in this city. But that’s not how it was at all.” Theater organs were ubiquitous in the 1920s; now, the closest you can come to hearing one accompany a silent film in New York is a virtual version Model plays at the Museum of Modern Art.
“Improvising a score for a silent film is a constant game of anticipation,” he says. If it’s a film Model doesn’t know, he will watch it once and make notes. But he just as often ends up accompanying films he is watching for the first time, an experience he describes as “like driving somewhere you’ve never been before: you’re not just looking at the yellow line.” Model has to anticipate if a character is going to walk through a door, or drop a vase on someone’s head. He never tells audiences if he is sight-reading a film during a performance, and most are astonished when they find out. “You have to create music that is pretty enough to listen [to], but not interesting enough to pay attention to,” he says. “The device of using a piece that everybody knows means a signal not to take anything seriously.” (Case in point: listen to this and try not to think of women tied to railway tracks and fistfights on top of moving trains.) “The chord structure, the time signature and tempo are controlled by the dramatic action of the film,” he says, and if a scene shifts, so does his music. “Film music has to be comfortable to the audience. It has to be like that old sweater that you have.” So comfortable that you forget you’re wearing it.
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A crowd of film lovers packed into the Library for the Performing Arts on Saturday for a Silent Clowns screening of Harold Lloyd’s The Kid Brother. Although the film is available on DVD, there wasn’t a seat left in the house: Latecomers stood in the aisles or sat on the floor. A slideshow of “coming attractions,” including a smoldering Rudolph Valentino as The Young Rajah, help set the mood. After sight-reading a Lloyd short, Why Pick on Me?, Model played for a solid 80 minutes as the audience laughed its way through The Kid Brother. Lloyd plays Harold Hickory, the shy, nervous black sheep in a family of tough frontiersmen. When a travelling medicine show arrives in town, Harold falls in love with lead dancer Mary (Jobyna Ralston) but soon realizes that her fellow performers are up to no good. Introducing the film, Bruce Lawton called it “glowing” and “bucolic.” “It really is, photographically, the sunrise of silent comedy films,” he said. “While Safety Last! is the classic crowd pleaser that we all return to,” he added, “this is a more mature work.” Safety Last! boasts the iconic man-dangling-off-a-clock-face sequence, but Lloyd was particularly proud of The Kid Brother, and it’s not hard to see why. There are sight gags aplenty: from Harold Hickory’s idiosyncratic way of doing the dishes to his hulking brothers trying to sneak into a house and the antics of a supremely well-trained monkey. Model’s music blended seamlessly with everything on-screen—at times you forgot he was there.
Silent film aficionado Tammy Rose, 37, thoroughly enjoyed the show. “Harold Lloyd is a personal favorite of mine,” she said cheerfully. “I feel like the laughs are harder and longer, and you enjoy it more,” when you watch his movies with a crowd. While she was at college, Rose once bought a VHS tape of a silent film without music and was astonished by the difference absolute silence made. “It just seemed so dry and so dull.” Sitting close to the stage at the Silent Clowns screening, she switched between watching the screen and watching Model play. “I feel like that’s one of the most unique talents that must have been popular 75 years ago” but is now only practiced by a handful of people, she said.
Barbara Ramsay, 70, brought her 7-year-old granddaughter to the screening. “It’s an art form that I think has been neglected,” Ramsay said. “There’s a new audience for them now,” she added, as her granddaughter chattered excitedly about Buster Keaton and Danny Kaye nearby. “She watched The Circus two times in a row yesterday because she got it on Netflix!”
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Model is equally optimistic. Silent cinema leapt back into prominence with The Artist, the first silent film to win a Best Picture Oscar since 1927’s Wings. “It was the best commercial for silent film that we’ve had in decades,” he says. Blancanieves, a silent version of Snow White, shot in Spain, was also recently released. People are posting homemade silent movies on YouTube and Model himself helped develop Vintagio, an iPhone app for making silent films: users can make footage monochrome, create intertitles in authentic fonts and add music. Asked about the revival of interest in his passion, he says, “I think that aesthetically, it comes back to the fact that you’re engaged and filling in the details. I just wish someone would make a silent film using the language [and style], but [set] today.”
Still not convinced you would enjoy a silent film? “The one thing I hear most often from people who’ve come to a silent film for the first time is, “This was way more fun than I thought it was going to be.” So give it a shot.”
Ben Model is also working on Accidentally Preserved, a project to transfer, score and release rare silent films on DVD. Find out more here.
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