5 Questions With: Silent Film Composer and Accompanist Ben Model
5 Questions With is a recurring feature where we sit down with a member of the film community to get their unique perspective. We sat down with Ben Model, one of the nation’s leading silent film accompanists to discuss his craft in anticipation of his performance for our screening of Our Dancing Daughters (1928). This film was the first to play at the Ambler Theater and will be shown in celebration of the 90th anniversary of the theater’s opening.
Many people erroneously assume that silent films were originally presented in perfect silence. Would you tell us a little bit about the tradition of live film accompaniment?
It’s that word: silent! Before sound came in these were just called movies, no one thought of them as “silent movies.” The term only really refers to how they were filmed, because there was no really effective way to record synchronized sound at the time. There was always musical accompaniment for films, anything from a solo piano to a 70-piece symphony. From the early ‘teens there was a big push for proper music to go with the films, and for a classier and more symphonic presentation. That’s where the theatre organ helped out — you could get that big orchestral sound, but only had to pay one person to play it.
For the most part, scoring happened in the theaters. Oh, the big super-productions might have a dedicated and fully-composed score, especially if there was a road-show edition, but pretty much it was up to the local soloists — piano or organ — and conductors or music directors in the cinemas to compile and create scores for every film. There was no way to keep up with writing enough music for the amount of film that was being released every week, which was exponentially more than today. Your theater had a new show twice a week, and it included a comedy short, newsreel, maybe a cartoon, plus the feature. Theaters built up libraries of classical music and mood cues composed for film accompaniment for their musicians to work from. The organists, who were soloists and also came from a stronger tradition of improvisation, would work that way.
What do you feel live music adds to the theatrical experience?
The live accompaniment is precisely what makes silent film a theatrical experience. There’s something about the “happening” of what occurs in a movie house during a silent film show that makes it so much fun and so satisfying. As an audience, you’re participating in a group experience of taking in the images onscreen and synthesizing them with the music that is present in the theater with you. Your right-brain sits up in its seat a little more so-to-speak, and what happens is that you enter that escapist, quasi dream-state. That is what movie-going is all about.
Anyone who’s come to a silent film show for the first time will tell you afterwards, “This was way more fun than I thought it was going to be!” The word “silent” is off-putting, for starters, as is the expectation that you’re going to have to work harder to get what’s going on. I don’t think I’ve made it sound any easier, but the ironic thing is that it’s precisely the things are are missing and that your imagination is filling in that makes a silent film show so enjoyable.
The job of the musical score is to optimize what’s onscreen. It shouldn’t distract or overpower it, nor should it comment on or poke fun at it. A good silent film score, like any silent film score, should be seamless with the film. The audience should forget you’re there. To me, when the lights go off, I’m working for Buster Keaton or Douglas Fairbanks or King Vidor, and I want the film to entertain and resonate with an audience of today with the same intent its filmmakers had 95 years ago.
What do you find to be the most challenging parts of scoring and performing to a silent film like this?
Part of making a silent film score seamless is matching the onscreen action in a way that doesn’t call attention to itself. One thing I try to be careful about is scene and mood transitions. I watch a film ahead of time at least once, and write up story notes and visual cues that help me know when a fade-out is coming, something important is about to happen, etc. so that, musically, I can stay just a little bit ahead of the shift. If you’re late, the audience will know it, because it’s what we all expect from a film score. I don’t always nail it, but I try to. For a picture like Our Dancing Daughters, there are a number of sequences where we’re watching flapper Joan Crawford dance up a storm, so I’ve got to have some music that sounds like 1920s popular music in my back pocket.
In addition to scoring and performing, you also curate film series, most notably for The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. What have been the most exciting programs you’ve put together, and what do you look for when selecting films?
When it comes to an individual venue, as far as I’m concerned, I’ll play for anything. So when I got the call to accompany Our Dancing Daughters at the Ambler, it wasn’t a matter of “Oh, I don’t have a score for that.” As time has gone by I’ve become more of a film programmer who also accompanies films, because I’ve learned so much about the nuts and bolts of making a show happen. I look at what I do as “Audience Preservation.” You can preserve all the film you want and put out spiffed-up Blu-rays till the cows come home, but the audience for it has to be maintained and expanded.
The series I’ve done over the last dozen years or so at MoMA, where I’ve been co-programmer, were programs where I was interested in showing people films that have been overlooked or not paid attention to, but are actually very entertaining and that deserve to be shown to the folks who are into classic film. The Arbuckle retrospective I did at MoMA in 2006 is a great example of this, and that one led to the Cruel and Unusual Comedy series we’ve done at MoMA numerous times over the last seven years. I’ll screen rare film in archives of MoMA or the Library of Congress, and then work out a way to craft a series to show them in, or get them booked for a show I’m doing somewhere. My DVD label Undercrank Productions is an extension of that. I’ve released 20 DVDs of rare silent films that are lots of fun, but which practically no one has seen in about ninety to a hundred years; most of these are films preserved by the Library of Congress.
Where do you draw your inspiration from, and what are some works that helped lead you to this pursuit?
When I started playing for silent films while I was at film school at NYU, I met Lee Erwin (1908–2000). I didn’t know what the heck I was doing and made a point of meeting the people in New York City who were accompanying silents. I met and talked with William Perry, who was MoMA’s accompanist, and a few other people like Stuart Oderman and Donald Sosin. Lee and I really hit it off. At the time, he was playing the organ at a revival house around the corner from Carnegie Hall and was in his seventies. Lee had played for films in the 1920s! I hung out with him, asked him lots and lots of questions, and got as much music advice as I could from him. His scoring philosophy resonated with me and I still listen to LPs he made, as well as scores that he recorded for silent films that are available on DVD and Blu-ray.
Chaplin’s scores for his silent films have also been an influence. A few years ago I got to play the piano/celeste part in an orchestra in Norway for City Lights (1931), and some of his scoring techniques and choices have really become ingrained in my comedy playing.
Our Dancing Daughters was the very first film shown at the Ambler Theater on our opening day, December 31st, 1928. In celebration of our 90th anniversary, this classic returns to the Ambler for one night only, Tuesday, October 23rd at 7:00pm. This film will be presented on 35mm film, with live theatre organ accompaniment by Ben Model. In addition to the film, we’ll have other birthday surprises and present our annual report.
