Making Music for Silent Films
(09/29/2009) “Kids absolutely love silent films, especially the comedies — there is no barrier for them. Kids use their imagination all the
Ben Model, a silent film accompanist for the Museum of Modern Art, will perform during the Bay Street Theatre’s Silent Film Weekend.
|
time, more so than adults, and this is a major element in the silent film experience,” said Ben Model, who has been the silent film musical accompanist for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for over 25 years.
Mr. Model will return to the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor this weekend to play the organ in the theater’s Silent Film Weekend beginning with two short films on Saturday in the KidStreet film series, and on Saturday night Mr. Model will accompany “The Mark of Zorro,” adding to that performance “a virtual theater organ,” which will bring “the sound of the movie palace Wurlitzer” to the experience.
“I found silent movies on TV when I was a kid, back in the late 1960s,” Mr. Model said. “I continued watching them on PBS in the 1970s, and also had the rare fortune of getting to see silent films at the home of Walter Kerr in my teen years.” Mr. Kerr, most known for his vivid reportage and reviews of Broadway theater, “lived in Larchmont, as did I, and responded to a letter I wrote him.”
Mr. Model composes and improvises all of his own scores, and he performs in a style that evokes the silent era but with a contemporary twist. In the spring of 2006, he co-organized the Modern’s two-month retrospective of the films of Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle, and in May of 2009 he co-curated the museum’s “Cruel and Unusual Comedy: Social Commentary in the American Slapstick Film.”
Tomorrow night’s feature, “The General,” which Mr. Model will not be playing along to, is considered by many critics to be the greatest of all silent comedies. Starring Buster Keaton, the movie is a Civil War adventure-epic rife with chase scenes, slapstick, and perfectly timed stunt work.
On Saturday at 3 p.m., Keaton’s antics will be featured in “One Week,” filmed in 1920, about a husband and his new bride building their own house, followed by “Number, Please,” in which Harold Lloyd runs amuck in an amusement park. That evening’s film, “The Mark of Zorro,” stars the swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks Sr., who performed his own stunts and plays two roles — Don Diego, an effeminate fop, and Zorro, the masked swordsman and hero of the oppressed poor.
“I think Keaton and Chaplin are my two favorite” silent film actors, Mr. Model said. “I connect directly with both of their onscreen personas, as do audiences today, plus Chaplin was such an innovator in storytelling when it comes to slapstick comedy, and Keaton had such an amazing mechanical and surreal sensibility.”
Mr. Model, however, does not have a favorite silent film to play to — “It’s who the audience is and where the film is being shown that’s the really fun part,” he said. “The thing I hear most from people who come to a silent film show for the first time is ‘I had way more fun than I thought I would!’ ”
Tickets for the evening films cost $15 and Saturday’s KidStreet screening costs $10 for children and adults.