The Hippodrome Silent Film Festival (18-22 March) celebrates the new Roaring Twenties – in 2020!

Falkirk Community Trust announced details of its 10th Silent Film Festival, held at Scotland’s oldest purpose-built cinema in Bo’ness. Affectionately known as ‘HippFest’ this annual event is Scotland’s only festival dedicated to silent film – recently scooping two accolades in the international Silent London Poll – winning ‘Best Venue for Silent Film’ and an honourable mention as ‘Best Festival 2019’.

This year’s programme is packed with silent films featuring masked crusaders, real-life martyrs and mysterious femme fatales; world-class live music accompaniment, talks, workshops, tours and – in true Keystone fashion – a massive custard pie fight to kick off the Festival.

Dodge Brothers

All films at HippFest are accompanied by live music and for our 10th year we see the return of skiffle and blues band the Dodge Brothers (Mike Hammond, film critic Mark Kermode, Aly Hirji, and Alex Hammond) and broadcaster, pianist and HippFest favourite Neil Brand performing the Scottish premiere of their new live score for FW Murnau’s City Girl (1930).

We also welcome acclaimed screen actor Paul McGann for the first time to provide live narration of the beautifully stylised, poetic intertitles that accompany our Closing Night screening L’Homme du Large (1920): a powerful tale of a fisherman and his family living on the remote Breton coast and torn apart by their idle and degenerate son.

Other new performers this year include Irine Røsnes who will join Yorkshire Silent Film Festival’s Jonny Best with a new musical collaboration to accompany Marlene Dietrich’s The Woman Men Yearn For (1929); and UK-based Australian musician Meg Morley who will accompany The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia’s new, 100th anniversary restoration of The Sentimental Bloke (1919), which we will be screening at HippFest just after its World Premiere in Sydney in February.

The Loves of Mary, Queen of Scots

This year we also see the return of Andy Cannon one of Scotland’s leading storytellers and founder of Wee Stories Theatre collaborating with musicians Wendy Weatherby, Frank McLaughlin and David Trouton on a new music and storytelling piece written for the World Premiere of a new restoration of The Loves of Mary, Queen of Scots (1923) – an extremely rare British feature film full of intrigue, betrayal and scandal.

Our Friday Gala for the 10th Festival is The Mark of Zorro (1920) with swashbuckling screen-idol Douglas Fairbanks as Don Diego Vega aka ‘Zorro’ – the original caped crusader. Audiences are encouraged to dress ‘Zorro-esque or HippFest glamour’ and to enjoy the pre-screening birthday celebrations at a reception featuring Scotland’s own mariachi band, ‘Rapido Mariachi’.

Other screen highlights include the premiere of Laurel and Hardy’s recently restored Duck Soup (1927) (later remade with sound as Another Fine Mess), screening with two other comedy classics Two Tars (1928) and Liberty (1929); and Danish superstar Asta Nielsen taking the lead role in Shakespeare’s best-known tragedy Hamlet (1921). In this version there is a controversial twist as Nielsen plays a cross-dressing Hamlet whose true sex is kept secret to secure the future of the throne. This screening is complemented by a talk on Silent Shakespeare from Pamela Hutchinson (writer, critic and founder of silentlondon.co.uk) illustrating why audiences loved to watch Shakespeare without dialogue and how filmmakers learned to ‘suit the action to the word’ when adapting his plays for the big screen.

Dawn (1928)

Also highlighted in our talks programme this year is Wartime Propaganda and Peacetime Diplomacy with Dr Lawrence Napper from King’s College, London, to complement our Opening Night screening of Dawn (1928). This is one of the most controversial films of the 1920s and tells the story of British nurse Edith Cavell who was shot at dawn by the Germans in 1915 for helping hundreds of Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium.

Other international highlights include Julien Duvivier’s Poil de Carotte (1925) based on Jules Renard’s famous novel about an unloved, redheaded farm boy; Ernst Lubitsch’s Lady Windermere’s Fan based on Oscar Wilde’s hit play; Chinese silent A String of Pearls (Yichuan Zhenzhu) (1926) based on Guy de Maupassant’s short story The Necklace, about a social-climbing middle-class housewife who cajoles her husband into borrowing an expensive necklace to wear at a party which is then stolen; and our community screening Filibus: The Mysterious Air Pirate (1915) an exciting, witty, feminist, steampunk, cross-dressing aviatrix thriller about a Baroness come jewel-thief and master of disguise, who uses an airship as her means of getaway.

Honouring one of the oldest cinema traditions of the 1920s is our Saturday morning Jeely Jar screening, which offers audiences 2for1 admission if they bring a jam jar to our double bill of Behind the Screen (1916) starring Charlie Chaplin, and Sherlock Jr. (1924) with Buster Keaton as a ‘crime-crushing’ detective.

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Other events in our programme include:

  • Neil Brand and Mike Hammond in conversation about writing music for silent film;
  • Our New Found Sound event with students from Grangemouth High School conducting the Falkirk Schools Orchestra, and Falkirk Schools Traditional Bands, who will premiere their new scores written for a selection of films from the National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive;
  • A Steampunk Jewellery making workshop inspired by our screening of Filibus;
  • Youth and school workshops
  • The National Libraries of Scotland’s touring exhibition Going to the Pictures (7 February to 27 March) which explores the story of cinema in Scotland over the past 120 years;
  • Tours of the Hippodrome and Bo’ness celebrating the life and work of prominent Bo’ness architect Matthew Steele;
  • A day trip to the new National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive;
  • A discussion hosted by Film Archives UK exploring the exhibition of archive film.

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