Ben Model Brings Golden Silents to Wesleyan

In today’s TikTok-dominant world, silent movies might seem a tad anachronistic. But over at Wesleyan University in Middletown, students are discovering and enjoying the cinematic output that captivated audiences in the first three decades of the 20th century.

The driving force behind this silent film appreciation is Ben Model, who is celebrating his tenth anniversary as a visiting professor in Wesleyan’s Department of Film Studies. Model stressed that silent films are not irrelevant to today’s pop culture, but instead represent its foundation.

“The entirety of cinema language was developed during the silent film era,” he explains. “Aside from anything done with a computer, it was all created during the silent film era.”

Model noted that his students quickly appreciate the distinctive visual and performance protocols of the pre-sound era in movies.

“Part of the class is about what the viewer experiences,” he continues. “We start the course with one-reel dramas from the early 1910s, and you’d think that would be a bad place to start with 20-year-olds. But absolutely everyone understands and follows the films, follows the dramatic action, and feels what they need to feel.”

Model observed how his students particularly love Douglas Fairbanks’ 1920s-era action/adventure heroics – “They absolutely respond to him,” he declares. By the end of the semester with his presentation of King Vidor’s 1928 masterpiece “The Crowd,” Model states his students have “a huge appreciation for the film language of silent film and for silent film as an entertainment medium.”

Model discovered silent movies when he was a child during the late 1960s in New York City, where a local television station broadcast Charlie Chaplin's from the 1910s. He started collecting silent films in the Super 8 format when he was a teenager, and as a student at New York University in the early 1980s he volunteered to play the piano during screenings of silent films.

The Sounds of Silents

Silent films were never truly silent – back in the day, live musical performances occurred at each screening. Model is an accomplished composer and performer of silent film scores, and he serves as a resident film accompanist at The Museum of Modern Art and the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus Theater while making appearances at silent film screenings across the country and overseas.

Model first came to the university in 2006 to accompany a silent production during the Wesleyan Film Series and was later invited to join the faculty, teaching his course each spring semester while providing input in his colleagues’ film courses in the fall. Model performs a piano accompaniment when he is screening films during his class.

For Scott Higgins, director of Wesleyan’s College of Film and the Moving Image, the live music helps to stir and secure the students’ emotions.

“He’s one of the hardest working people in the film department, because every day that he comes in, he plays an entire feature and gives a lecture and leads a discussion about it like there's no off-time for him,” he says. “He’s able to relate why these films work and get the students to think about their own experience of watching. He’s laying down lots of robust material, and he expects students to take it on board and learn – and they do well.”

“When Ben is there and playing, they are all engaged and really interested in listening to and loving silent film,” Higgins adds, noting that he felt fortunate for Model’s presence. “I didn't think that he'd be able to do it because he's got a big touring schedule.”

Geno Cuddy, a Middletown-based film historian who has shown silent Westerns on his YouTube series “Sunset Cuddy’s Six-Gun Theatre,” has attended Model’s presentations and found it exhilarating.

“I find it to be a far more immersive experience,” Cuddy says. “Not only are you in a darkened theatre where there is far less stimuli as compared to at home where you have your phone or other distractions to pull you out of the experience, but often, the accompanying score is far more appropriate than you would get on your standard issue DVD or YouTube upload. The music which reverberates throughout the theatre gives one the impression that they have been plunged into the action themselves.”

Beyond the Campus

Outside of Wesleyan, Model has been very busy with multiple projects. He authored the new book “The Silent Film Universe,” which he describes as a journey into the “dream-like experience of watching a silent film.”

He is also setting up new releases for his Undercrank Productions label, where he presents digitally restored versions of rare silent works on DVD and Blu-ray. He is particularly excited about his upcoming project “The Cardboard Lover,” a 1928 romantic comedy starring Marion Davies.

“She's absolutely a brilliant actor and gifted comedian,” he says. “We've been helping to restore and release Marion Davies silent films over the last several years. We've done six of them already, and she's one of those people who is surprisingly delightful if you don't know her – and especially if all you know about her were the negative things Kenneth Anger wrote about in ‘Hollywood Babylon’ or you’d think that she's Susan Alexander Kane,” a reference to the vicious parody of Davies in Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane.”

For more information on Ben Model, visit Undercrank Productions.