Ben Model is a musician who accompanies silent movies as well as
a silent film historian. He's done some very interesting work
taking silent comedies and demonstrating the difference between
the speed at which they were originally projected and being
projected at a realistic speed. It was standard in the silent
era for films, and comedies in particular, to be undercranked.
What that means is that if the film was going to be projected at
16 frames per second, it would be shot at 12 frames per second
so that when projected, the images would be faster than life.
The term "undercranking" comes from the fact that cameras were
literally cranked by hand. There was no fixed projection speed
during the silent era. Projection ranged anywhere from 16 to
more than 24 frames per second. Initially, projectors were also
hand cranked, but even when they were motorized, they were
controlled by rheostats which could vary the speed within a
single film. What's interesting in Model's examples, is how the
actors adjusted their sp