Thursday, May 27, 2010

Pierre Etaix's short film "Happy Anniversary"

[post 100]

Don't quote me, but it's a small world after all.

One day after posting my In Search of Pierre Etaix piece, I was at Jeff Seal's "Dead Herring" Williamsburgh loft, attending a fundraiser (image, right) for Jeff's own quite exciting silent film comedy project, A Day's Messing. The star attraction was Ben Model, the deservedly celebrated silent film accompanist, playing live piano to a nifty 1912 short, new to me, Robinet Cycliste, and to Chaplin's The Rink (1916) and Keaton's Neighbors (1920). (In my next life, I want to play piano like Ben does.)

While we waited for the sun to go down over the Williamsburgh Bridge, I had a chance to chat with Ben, and I was of course telling him the latest news on Etaix. It turns out that Ben had seen a 16mm copy of Etaix's short Happy Anniversary for sale and snatched it up. He has since digitized it and generously uploaded it to YouTube. Here it is, in two parts:






You can visit Ben's web site here and his blog here.

Postscript (pun intended):
So....... congratulations to me (he said modestly) on reaching post 100 on this blog. If nothing else, it justifies labeling my posts 023, 024, etc.; in fact, that served as inspiration to reach 100. Along the way, I sometimes wondered what post 100 would be, hoping it would somehow prove brilliant and marvelously repersentative of the blog. Forget the brilliant part, but I very much like that this one spans work from 1912, 1916, 1920, 1965, and 2010 — all linked by Ben's piano chops. Good enough!

3 comments:

dianagarcia said...

This looks freaking awesome!That’s great to hear! Please let us know what you think of it. I am greatly enjoying it, myself.Thanks for the update.

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Sarah said...

Awesome! Also thank you, diana for sharing the link to that hilarious site!

Jelena said...

Looking forward for more such stuff. Loved your style of providing the information and the nature of the content.


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