silent movies

A silent movie failure

This entry was posted in Movies Music Personal and tagged music silent movies on by

I failed terribly last night when showing The General. I don’t know what I did wrong.

As I’ve said before and told the audience before the showing, The General is a complex movie. It’s a comedy, but it’s also a war movie. A train collapses into a gorge. Soldiers die on screen. I expect people to laugh at the funny parts. I don’t expect them to laugh at the deaths. I tried to underscore the mood of each scene, as I always do. It didn’t work.
(more…)

Coming to Plaistow July 22: The General

This entry was posted in Movies and tagged history music silent movies on by

It’s just two weeks till my next live silent movie show at the Plaistow Library: The General, made by and starring Buster Keaton. I know most of you aren’t local, but if you can spread the word among silent movie fans, it will help. This is the first time I’ll be presenting an evening show, and getting eight sign-ups so early is encouraging.
(more…)

Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon

This entry was posted in Movies and tagged music science fiction silent movies on by

The 1929 film, Frau im Mond or Woman in the Moon, was the first feature film to present space travel realistically. I’m amazed at how much it got right, considering Fritz Lang released it 40 years before the first human stepped on the Moon. Of course, it has some errors that are obvious today, but a lot of modern space movies don’t do as well.

The best part is the trip to the Moon, which occupies about 40 minutes of a film which is 2 3/4 hours long. Once the hatch opens and the travelers step out onto the Moon, the science goes bonkers. So I’ve created a video with my accompaniment of that sequence. It starts with the call to stations 50 minutes before launch and ends when the hatch is opened on the lunar surface. The video contains German intertitles with English translations below them.
(more…)

Accompanying Buster Keaton films 1

This entry was posted in Movies and tagged music silent movies on by

This post is for the Buster Keaton Blogathon run from the Silent-ology blog.

I accompany silent movies. Four times a year, I accompany one for a live audience at the Plaistow, NH Library. In addition, I post public domain silent films with my accompaniment on YouTube. In just a few days I’ll accompany One Week as part of the library’s 25th anniversary in its present building. In July I’ll be accompanying The General at the library. In 2023 I accompanied Steamboat Bill, Jr.
(more…)

Silent film: A Message from Mars

This entry was posted in Movies and tagged music science fiction silent movies on by

The silent film era had quite a few movies about Martians. It’s fun to look at how filmmakers of the early 20th century envisioned them. I’ve uploaded the 1913 film A Message from Mars to YouTube, with my improvised accompaniment.

The film, based on a stage play, concerns a man whom the Martians have dubbed “the most selfish of mortals.” He’s a middle-aged man named Horace who likes being left alone and is stingy with his money. One of the Martians, as penance for an unspecified crime, is sent to Earth to reform Horace. His technique consists of bullying him into having a sudden, inexplicable change of character. A 1903 short film with the same title may have been the earliest movie to feature Martians; it’s currently assumed lost.
(more…)

The Lost World can be found again

This entry was posted in Movies and tagged copyright music silent movies on by

My counterclaim against the takedown of the public domain film The Lost World, was successful. The video is back up on YouTube.

I’m inclined to let sleeping dogs lie, so I won’t say much more. I hope that someday a court ruling will clearly establish that restoring an out-of-copyright film to its original state doesn’t create a new copyright on it, but I’m not the person to pursue the fight.

Another silent movie I can’t show

This entry was posted in Movies Writing and tagged copyright silent movies YouTube on by

In the past few days, I’ve been working on accompaniment for the 1928 public domain silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc. I uploaded it to YouTube, but you won’t be able to see it. When the upload finished, YouTube informed me:

Copyrighted content has been detected in your video “The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) with new accompaniment”. As a result, your video can no longer be monetized and has been blocked in 243 territories. The copyright owner may be either monetizing it, or receiving analytics about it in other territories. This is not a copyright strike and does not affect your channel.

(more…)

Silent film restorations and copyright 3

This entry was posted in Commentary Movies and tagged copyright silent movies on by

In January, I posted the 1925 silent film The Lost World to my YouTube channel together with my original accompaniment. A hundred-year-old movie is supposed to be out of copyright. The video is downloaded from the Internet Archive, which I took as confirmation of its public-domain status. Last week YouTube took it down, citing a copyright complaint by Flicker Alley. The issue is that Flicker Alley claims to hold copyright on the restoration of the movie which I downloaded.

So far I’ve taken two steps. I contacted Flicker Alley disputing the copyright claim. They responded promptly, insisting their copyright is valid. I then submitted a counter-claim to YouTube. What happens next depends on Flicker Alley’s next response. If they persist, I’ll have no choice but to keep the movie permanently off the Internet. Accompanying silent movies is a hobby that I don’t make a cent from, and it isn’t worth it to me to pay a lawyer to dispute the matter in court.
(more…)