Silent film wasn't silent: a theater keyboardist would play along to the on-screen action. Ben Model is a professional film accompanist for MoMA and numerous historic theaters. WMRA's Martha Woodroof meets Ben and learns about the process of making DVD music for long-lost silents which are now being digitized and seen for the first time in almost a century. Ben's website has pages of detail. His YouTube channel is called SilentFilmMusic. Ben also brings rare or "lost" vintage films back into public view through his enterprise, Accidentally Preserved.
The black-and-white images in our slideshow, above, are from the 97 year old slapstick farce, "The Mishaps of Musty Suffer," which is among Ben's DVD offerings.
On Thursday, May 29, 2014, at 7:30 pm, Ben Model will perform live musical accompaniment to a free screening of “The Mishaps of Musty Suffer” in Culpeper at the Library of Congress Packard Campus Theater.
(webtext: tw)
