Cinema Junkie Bonus Podcast: The Silent Film Universe
(please note this transcription is autogenerated and may contain errors)
JADE HINDMON You're listening to KPBS Midday Edition. I'm Jade Hindman. Musician Ben Model has made a career creating and performing live music for silent films. Well, now he's written a book defining what he calls the silent film universe. KPBS cinema Junkie Beth Acamando spoke with Model about what drives him to be such a fierce ambassador for silent movies. Take a listen, Sam.
BETH ACCOMANDO And that was a little of Ben Model playing his virtual theater organ for a Max Fleischer cartoon. So, Ben, I got introduced to you through your silent comedy Watch Party during the pandemic. And this is when you screen silent comedies on YouTube and accompanied them on your piano in your New York apartment. So this was a lifesaver for my friend and I and probably for a lot of people. So looking back, why do you feel it struck such a chord? Was it about more than just people needing an escape? Just. Do you think there was something particular about silent comedies that people connected to?
BEN MODEL I think that there's something about silent film where you kind of enter this dream state almost, and there's nothing that can take you out of reality, maybe except for video games and VR or maybe going to the circus where you just completely are immersed in the experience of it. I think people really just needed something during that time to take their mind completely off what was going on and also to make them laugh. That was the real. I think the big benefit for everybody is that we were laughing. And there's a. There's something about silent film comedy, I think, because you are literally getting the jokes. In a lot of cases, you are literally assembling them and you're not aware it's happening. This is part of the magic of silent film, is that we ourselves are. Are part of the film language. It was never planned that way. I don't think people thought of it consciously. It just naturally developed in the early 1910s. And these were live streams. So because we were aware that there are other people watching at the same time, which is something that I, myself and my friend who co hosted the show with me, Steve Mass, we talk about. We are all watching this. We're all a movie theater audience. It just. We're not sitting in the same building, that's all. And to this day, when I do shows any place, there's invariably people who will come up to me and say, the silent Comedy Watch party got me through the pandemic. Thank you so much. You know, I say, well, thank you. Doing the show for people got us through the pandemic. So we all had this Connection together, we all went through the same thing. It was something we all experienced together that for 90 minutes we got relief and respite from what was going on and we felt better.
BETH ACCOMANDO So, as I mentioned, I first got introduced to you as a musician, but you're also a scholar, a historian, a teacher, a film preservationist, and now author of a new book called the Silent Film Universe. So what inspired you to write this book?
BEN MODEL I don't think anyone has ever covered this particular aspect of silent film itself. There are many, many books about the history and there's film theory and people who've thought way, way too much about silent film and have come up with theories. But this is the practical reality which I have experienced over the last 40 plus years accompanying silent films. Between that and being asked on podcasts and by journalists for years, oh, why do you think people like silent film? And I never was happy with the answer. And I kept thinking, why? Why is it? Why can I show a silent movie to five year olds, to sixth graders in Norway, to an audience of 3,000 people in Jechen, South Korea? And everybody absolutely gets it, they enjoy it, they go on the ride. And so there is something at the core of this which is our own humanity, I think. So my idea in writing the book, which started out as a series of 65 books, blog posts that I wrote in the first half of 2021, was to lay out some kind of language that we can all latch onto or come up with some sort of terminology for silent film. So when we are discussing certain aspects of it, we know what to call it. And these are all things that I have developed through teaching a class at Wesleyan University. I had been hired to create and teach a course there by Janine Basinger and Scott Higgins. And Janine has retired a couple of years ago, but they both wanted to add silent film to the curriculum. It had been included in some of the other classes, but there had not been a silent film course. And because I was creating the course, I got to pick how I wanted to discuss silent film and its history. And I'm not an academic, but I know what I interpret visually as it comes into my head, in my hands, and comes out my hands when I'm playing. And I'm, as many accompanists will tell you, the experience. We're also aware of the audience out of the back of our head or whatever it is, but we're aware of what, what's working or not with the audience, and we're aware of the audience's experience. So the Music is there to just enhance the bond that the viewer or audience has with the screen and to not take away from it. So the idea behind turning all of this into a book was through teaching my course, where what we do is we chart the development of this language that gradually leaves more and more of the storytelling and story assembling to the audience. Filmmakers got more and more creative by ironically leaving things out. The idea of silent film, it's. On the surface, it sounds like, oh, gosh, this is gonna be a lot of work. But if you have a brain and have lived, what gets filled in is things from your own memories and emotions. And so the idea behind writing the book was to put all these ideas together. Because as far as I can tell, it's been hinted at in some books. People will mention it. There's a wonderful quote by Kevin Brownlow in his preface or forward to his book Hollywood the Pioneers, where he talks about the fact that with silent film, the audience is the final participant, the creative process of making a film. And again, you're not even aware of that, except that that that's why silent film still works. And so the silent film universe is the term I came up with for the fact that silent film isn't just movies with no sound. It has its own set of rules, which are a lot more elastic than reality is. And this is what, you know, when sound comes in, it isn't, oh, we're just adding talk. This entire language went out the window. And that was almost like visual poetry. And where we were involved and we were suddenly no longer involved because we were getting all or most of the information from sound.
BETH ACCOMANDO Well, and also when sound was added, there was the extra issue of the technology was so primitive that, like, the flexibility you had shooting a silent film of being able to move anywhere and shoot anywhere and not have to worry about the ambient sound or the noise coming from next door. Like, you also got bogged down by the technology to, like, limit sort of how you had to make a movie when sound first came in.
BEN MODEL Plus, you had all the actors memorizing lines that they had to get right and deliver correctly. To say nothing of worried about a fly buzzing around the set or something like that. So one of the fun things of watching a lot of early sound film is that there are some where they're just pointing cameras at actors who are moving around and making sure they're talking into the flower pot or whatever it is. And then there are some films where there is a good deal of moving camera. A film like Broadway, which Is a musical from 1929 where a huge crane was built that swoops around. And so there were, there was some creativity to it. But the real difference is that the expectation of reality was completely changed because you're hearing the actors and what they're saying instead of creating that for yourself. And the other big change for me, I believe, is the speed up is gone. The speed up of silent film is something very specific to that medium, which I believe is also part of the language. And it's not a mistake that the films are running faster. And from research I've. I've done and things I found that are in the book, people knew from around nineteen nine, nineteen ten, that the films were being shot at one speed and shown at another faster speed in the theaters and you couldn't control it. So this practice involves two things. One is the fact that films are shot at one speed and shown faster. Two, the awareness that everybody had that this was happening. And, and this is the big secret that I uncovered 10, 15 years ago, is that everybody was aware of this and moved slower to compensate. Not slow motion necessarily, but what we see in silent film, this is the paradox. That's if you take regular film or video and speed it up, it looks like film that's running too fast. Silent film is shown faster than normal, but it looks fine. Why is that? Well, that's because the actors are moving in a slightly different way. There's an actor who's a huge movie star in the 1920s named Milton Sills, who's almost completely forgotten today. But there's an article he wrote for the 1929 Encyclopedia Britannica. But he uses the word deliberate moving at a deliberate tempo. So by this combination, you can make what's being shown on screen not look like people running around too fast, Although the film is running faster than the speed it was taken at. And this was a. I think this was something that comes. That came from a movement style that people were used to because they come from the theater or circus or vaudeville, were used to doing so that their movements would read really well in the back of a 2,000 seat house. So it was something I think they had in their bones anyway. And once somebody discovered, oh, you know, if we just move a little slower, it won't look ridiculous anymore. And there's an actor named Maurice Costello who in an interview talks about realizing this in 1908, 1909. And all of a sudden he went from just being in movies to being one of the lead actors at the Vitagraph Company in Brooklyn because he realized, oh, if I move slower, my movements will read better and I won't look ridiculous. So when sound comes in, you have to shoot and project at the Exact same speed, 24 frames per second. And so the, the expectation of reality is different. And that's why when you see some of the comedians rework silent bits in sound film, they don't really work as well. There's a gag at the end of Keaton's film, one week that involves hearing a train that's coming and, and avoiding it. And then a second train comes out of nowhere and demolishes the house Buster is standing in front of. Well, he should have heard both trains. But in the silent film universe, it's if a tree falls in the woods and the lumberjack doesn't indicate he hears it, does it make a sound? No, it does not. So this is the thing that falls away once sound comes in is the dream state and the almost the poetry of the language of silent film.
BETH ACCOMANDO So what do you think is the biggest misconception people have about silent film that you really want to challenge?
BEN MODEL Until 1929, it was just movies. And then when sound came in, they had to call it something else. Well, there was no recorded sound, so they were referred to as silent film or silent movies. That is the first big problem that most people have who have never experienced this and is it sounds like you're going to have a bad time. It's like saying, we're going to go to a rave, but it's in a library. Unfortunately, the word silent means something else if you don't have the context. It does conjure up ideas of holding your breath and being really, really quiet and being shushed in church or in shoal or whatever it is. It's going to be harder to enjoy. Doesn't sound like it's entertaining. Even mime sounds a little bit more palatable because it doesn't have the word silent. It's not called silent acting and we don't call radio blind television, but silent film, unfortunately, because what was added was sound. I think the big stereotype that people have about silent film actually was created in the 1930s. When sound comes in any kind of new technology that comes in immediately. What preceded it is regarded as a corny old antique. And there are films that were made and released, little shorts in the 1930s that were, hey, let's make fun of the oldie time flickers when they would take, they take the sound. You know, there's no sound. It's run a little too Fast. And they would put corny narration and sound effects and use dialog and title cards that would use language that really comes from stage melodrama, you know, unhand me, you villain. And tying people to the train tracks and all that kind of stuff. And then awful flowery border around the title cards which you really don't see in silent films at all. But to this day, when you see somebody try to look like a silent film, in addition to putting dust and scratches and jitter and. And blur, they have that sort of thing. So I think that the idea that silent film is something that is distant and difficult and that there's this huge barrier that's going to be there for you. You know, you always have to drag people past that awful word silent because we're so used to getting information from things that we hear. And somebody actually said to me a few years ago when I told him what I do, he said, well, if there's no sound, how can you tell what's going on? There's actually something universal about the storytelling in silent film from any year during the silent era and any country, you know, you can watch Russian cinema or Japanese cinema, you know, with the titles translated into English and still follow the story and understand the emotion of what's going on. I think getting past the. The idea that silent film is corny and old fashioned because those spoofs from the 30s and 40s just kept getting repeated and repeated in television commercials and TV shows over and over. And I. So the idea is that by laying it all out, just the language of how this works and how silent film works in the book, I hope will give people a better appreciation of an understanding of what silent film really is. Especially for folks who are interested in making silent films today who again often will do the titles with the frilly borders and use story tropes and costuming from the 1920s, which was present in silent film because that's when it was made, that's how people dressed. But that's not really part of silent film itself. And I think it's a. It's a language that can still be spoken and used today as long as people really understand how to speak it.
BETH ACCOMANDO And another thing you bring up in your book is you discuss the fact that these films are universal not just because they issue a specific spoken language. But you say that while accompanying these films in different countries, you started to monitor the audience's reactions. And what did you find?
BEN MODEL Well, that it was the exact same thing. No matter where I went. I mentioned the shows that I did in South Korea. I played for a film called the Freshman with Harold Lloyd and. Which is. You can't get more roaring twenties USA culture than that film. But, you know, the titles were translated in Korean for the audience. But the reaction was exactly the same. All the gags worked the same way, the dramatic moments. And the other film I played at that festival was Steamboat Bill Jr. With Buster Keaton. And I had played for it four or five times already that year. And I was so familiar with the audience response that I noticed it was exactly the same. So if you gotten in trouble or aren't trying to impress your father or worried about rain, doesn't matter what year or what country you're in, it's all, it's all. It's all the same as that human equation that, that doesn't, that doesn't change. And if anything, it's easier to take in something like that with a silent film. So it's the universality of it. And again, it's. To the uninitiated, the first thing you think of is the exact opposite. I'm not going to understand this. It was a long time ago. I can't hear anything. And it's. That's the conundrum for any silent film fan trying to explain to a friend of theirs or somebody they're going on a date with and they're going to take them to see a Douglas Fairbanks film. No, no, you're really going to understand. It's not going to be like watching paint dry. But I can't. I won't be able to hear. No, no. You know, we're all just trying to get people in. And, and once you see a silent film, especially in a theater with live music, you get it. You may not come back every week. But people always say, this was way more fun than I thought it was going to be.
BETH ACCOMANDO And you alluded to this earlier, but silent is sort of a misnomer in many ways about silent film. And discuss a little bit more about what you mean by that. You mentioned the tree falling in the forest, but yeah.
BEN MODEL So the idea of if I'm using this word diegetic sound existing, but it's all based on what the people on screen are letting us know they hear. So somebody can be in a room and somebody can sneak in. And as long as the person in the room doesn't indicate that they've heard it, it doesn't happen. There's a beautiful, very sweet moment. It's part of one of the first meet cutes in Harold Lloyd's the freshman. And he's in a rooming house. And he goes over to the mirror, it's just completely covered in soot. And he starts polishing it and he clears a little space. And what it reveals is the young woman played by Jobina Ralston, who he has met on the train earlier in the film. And it's his very sweet moment. Now, he should have heard her coming up the stairs and walking over to the door, but he doesn't. So as long as Harold doesn't let us know, he hears Jobino coming up the stairs, down the hall and knocking on the door. That doesn't make a sound. So the reveal works for us. And this is something that you cannot do in a sound film. And that's just one, one example that you can really play with what sound exists or doesn't. And it's by visual cues. And sometimes, like the scene at the end of one week, the 1920s short with Buster Keaton that I mentioned, that first train, not only do we cut away from Buster and Cybil Seely to the train, there's a close up of the whistle blowing. Then we cut to Buster and Cybil who look up in shock, indicating to us that they've heard it. And they work like mad to push their house that has gotten stuck on train tracks off of the. You know, and then they think they're, you know, the train misses the house completely. And then we cut to a big old wide shot. And then the second train just enters the shot out of nowhere. Now, they should have heard it, you know, for 30 seconds at least. But as long as they let us know that they don't hear anything or don't let on that they've heard something, that train can in reality enter the shot about a second before it hits that house. And they are surprised just as we are. And that is one of the many ways that silent film language allows for this elastic storytelling where you have this freedom to create a different kind of reality. And that's why I think, again, I come up with this idea of a separate universe, a different kind of plane of existence, that things can happen suddenly, not as a surprise, but a character can be introduced in a title card that is six or seven words long and off we go. And we don't have to hear about their backstory and why this or why that. With a silent film that's left to us, it's like reading a picture book to children. You know, this is the analogy I used. We don't know that much about Red Riding Hood. Or some of the many characters we experience in books, but we could just be told some of it. And because we have our own human experience to draw on, we fill in the rest. And silent film can do that. And sound film does not have that kind of elasticity. So things have to be explained. They have to be justified a little bit more. And there's so much that can be dispensed with in a silent film.
BETH ACCOMANDO And another reason people may find these films so enjoyable, and maybe some surprisingly so, is there's no wasted time in a silent movie.
BEN MODEL There. There is no wasted screen time in a silent film. And even if you're watching a sequence of just shots of New York City as there is a. Toward the beginning of King Veterans the Crowd, we are being shown this for a specific purpose. It's not, oh, the way you might see in a television show, in a movie, just shots panning through the city. Just to let you know, now we're over here, we're always being given some kind of information. That's why you can't get up and go to the bathroom and come back. What did I miss? Oh. Oh, boy, where do I begin? It's a very specific style of storytelling, but again, because we are connected and fused with what's happening on screen and filling things in, it's this almost a collaboration that happens. And the fascinating thing for me is, is to then think back, what was it like on set and in creating these films for the performers, the directors and the scenarists to think, oh, well, a good way to convey this story element or this emotional moment is to cut to a shot of a tombstone and then a shot of this person carrying a suitcase, as opposed to explaining everything. But it must have been so freeing to be able to be that expressive. And then that, again, sound comes in and you can't really do that anymore.
BETH ACCOMANDO Would you say that one of the reasons you wrote the book and why you are so kind of driven to show and introduce people to silent films is that you want to say that silent film is not a dead language.
BEN MODEL Absolutely. I think silent film can work today. And like I said, and this is why there's a chapter at the end of the book about, so you want to make a silent movie. And I think it's like any kind of language. If you know how to speak it, you can communicate. And I think silent film can still work today if you follow the rules of. And the syntax visually of silent film and how it works. And this is, I think, the idea behind writing the book. Is for folks who are interested in silent film or who may have wondered why they like it so much, or who are interested in making silent film to explain the basics of the language and so that it can work today as long as you set your film ideally, like in contemporary society with contemporary story tropes or dramas or whatever, and take out the color and speed it up and move slower. And it's not easy to figure out. But I think that if you really know the language properly, you can make a proper silent film that will work on any. On any audience.
BETH ACCOMANDO And you also have created clips on your website to kind of enhance the book experience.
BEN MODEL Yes, the idea was that to have clips that are discussed in the book available for people to watch. So it just saves everybody who buys the book surfing around on YouTube and then trying to find the sequence I'm talking about. So the idea was to have supplemental material that way. And that way I'm also able to, as, let's say, new discoveries come up. I can update the page that somebody may find yet another smoking gun about under cranking and physical performance. Or if I've gotten something wrong, I can put something up there. But the idea is to have a video component that corresponds to what I've described. Because I can only do so much in trying to put some of these things into words and to watch them, you'll get to see what I'm talking about.
BETH ACCOMANDO All right. I want to thank you very much for talking about your new book, the Silent Film Universe.
BEN MODEL Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me on, Beth. I really appreciate the opportunity to share this.
JADE HINDMON That was musician and authority Ben Modell speaking with Beth Acamando about his new book, the Silent Film Universe. You can find the book at silentfilmmusic. Com.
