The Hardest Way to Watch a Movie, and Why Brookings Keeps Choosing It
On October 10, Buster Keaton will die again, in the sense that he'll be run off a bridge, nearly flattened by a locomotive, and subjected to the general comic violence of a man trying to recover a stolen train during the Civil War. He will do this exactly as he did it in 1926: silently. And in Doner Auditorium, Ben Model, a silent-film historian who has spent more than four decades improvising and composing live scores for exactly this kind of film, will sit at a pipe organ and make the whole thing make sense, in real time, with no safety net, no edit, no second take.
This is the sixth year SDSU has staged a Silent Film with Pipe Organ event, and the choice of film, “The General,” is almost too fitting to need comment: a story about a man's obsessive devotion to a piece of outdated technology (a steam engine) in a country trying to figure out what holds it together. But the more interesting story isn't on the screen. It's in the room. Why does an audience in a university town in eastern South Dakota keep showing up, year after year, for a format that modern entertainment has spent a century trying to make obsolete?
Everything about streaming culture argues against this event existing. We have trained ourselves to expect content that is infinite, skippable, pausable, and endlessly repeatable. If you miss a scene, you rewind it. If you don't like the score, you mute it. Model's performance offers none of that. It happens once. If a gag lands wrong, if the pacing is off by half a beat, there's no retake. The organist is not accompanying a fixed soundtrack; he's building one, live, in response to timing that was locked in place ninety-nine years ago by a man who is, of course, no longer present to adjust for the room. That asymmetry, a frozen performance from 1926 meeting a living, improvising performance in 2026, is the entire tension of the evening, and it's exactly the kind of tension that disappears the moment you watch anything on a phone.
There's a reason silent film historians talk about organ accompaniment as closer to jazz than to film scoring. The organist watches the print, reads the room, and decides in the moment how hard to lean into a chase or a punchline. It is, structurally, the opposite of what a Spotify playlist or a Netflix queue offers. It cannot be optimized. It cannot be personalized to your preferences. It happens to everyone in the auditorium at the same time, in the same way, and then it's gone, which used to be the default condition of almost all art and has become, within a single generation, a kind of curiosity.
It would be easy to wave this off as nostalgia, a heritage performance for people who like old things because they're old. But that reading undersells what's actually being rewarded here: patience, and the willingness to let an experience be unrepeatable. Keaton's comedy depends on audiences doing real interpretive work, since there's no dialogue to explain the joke and no laugh track to cue the response. You have to watch the timing of a man's body to understand what's funny, which is a different cognitive mode than scrolling. Pairing that with a live organist removes the last layer of passivity. Nothing about the evening is set up to be consumed without attention.
That SDSU has sustained this for six consecutive years, in a town whose cultural calendar otherwise runs heavily toward craft shows, networking breakfasts, and commission meetings (all perfectly good civic furniture, but not exactly built for unrepeatable aesthetic experience) suggests there's a real appetite here for exactly this kind of friction. Brookings is not a city starved for content. It's reachable by the same apps and platforms as anywhere else. What it doesn't have in abundance is scheduled, communal, non-skippable experience, the kind that asks you to be somewhere at 7 p.m. on a specific Thursday or simply miss it forever.
Keaton spends “The General” trying to hold onto a machine that the modern world is actively trying to make irrelevant. Model, in his own way, is doing something similar: keeping alive a performance tradition, live organ accompaniment, that commercial cinema killed off almost a century ago, and doing it not out of pure preservationism but because it still produces something sound design software can't replicate: contingency. The sense that a human being, not an algorithm, is responsible for what happens next.
Brookings doesn't need this event. There's no shortage of ways to watch “The General” tonight, on a laptop, with no organ, no auditorium, no strangers laughing in the dark next to you. That the city keeps choosing the harder, slower, less convenient version anyway is worth noticing. It suggests an audience that hasn't fully outsourced its attention, and isn't ready to.