Hippodrome Silent Cinema Fest shares 2017 lineup

HippFest returns next month (22-26 Mar) with another tantalising lineup of silent cinema classics, unearth gems and new musical commissions and live performances to help bring these old movies alive for a new generation.

“At HippFest we are all about making cinema special,” says festival director Alison Strauss. HippFest achieves this, says Strauss, by “engaging the best musicians to accompany rarely screened titles, presenting those films in beautiful and atmospheric settings, seeking out the best restorations from the world’s archives, and generating an atmosphere of inclusion and fun with our audience.”

If your idea of silent film is the kind portrayed in Mel Brooks' 1976 farce Silent Movie, then think again. “Since we established the festival in 2011, more and more people are finding out that early cinema is not clunky and outdated, but rather fresh and relevant, sometimes even colourful and never actually ‘silent’,” notes Strauss. “Within our programme people will find unparalleled comedians, experimental work and revelatory new scores.”

New music at HippFest

Eduardo Paolozzi in Together (1956)

One of those “revelatory new scores” will come courtesy of Skinny-fave RM Hubbert. The Scottish Album of the Year award-winner has written a mint fresh score to be played with 1926 Soviet film By the Law. Other new commissions include scores by Raymond MacDonald and Christian Ferlaino for the 1956 film Together, and Jane Gardner & Friends, who’re scoring festival opener The Grub Stake, from 1923. 

All films in the programme feature live scores, including performances by HippFest regulars like Neil Brand, Stephen Horne and John Sweeney. In addition to these familiar faces, HippFest have rounded up an eclectic lineup of international artists too. Dutch film orchestra The Sprockets, who’ll be making their UK debut with a vivacious score for Cinderella comedy The Patsy, and Günter Buchwald and Frank Bockius will travel from Germany to provide a chilling soundtrack to 1928 psychological horror The Hands of Orlac.

Classics and oddities from the silent era

Chicago (1927)

We’re intrigued to see the original screen version of Chicago (from 1927), which famously became a brilliant musical in 1975, and a terrible film musical in 2002. The Informer, a film set in revolution-torn Dublin in 1922, also looks interesting, but perhaps the most eye-catching title in the programme is What’s the World Coming To?, a gender-swapping 1926 film that takes place “100 years from now when men have become more like women and women more like men”. If that’s not enough to grab you, the film was written by slapstick genius Stan Laurel. Colour us intrigued.

Fans of War Horse will also want to seek out A Couple of Down and Outs, described as “the poignant 1923 tale of a soldier’s friendship with a war horse”, which was made six decades before Michael Morpurgo’s best-selling novel, which went on to be a stage phenomenon.

Pioneering women filmmakers

Nell Shipman in The Grub Stake

During the silent era you’d find – very much in contrast to today’s cinema landscape – more women working at every level of the film industry. These pioneers have been largely ignored by the history books and this year HippFest’s programme rights this wrong by celebrating some of these unjustly forgotten female filmmakers and actors.

Take opening film The Grub Stake, for example, a 1923 adventure created by the remarkable Nell Shipman. HippFest's description of Shipman is fascinating: "She's a silent movie star who turned down a studio career to work entirely outside of the Hollywood system, instead running her own production company, directing, writing and starring in her own films, and doing all her own stunts (assisted by a menagerie of around 80 animal co-stars)."

There’s also The Goddess, described as “a masterpiece of social realism”, which features Chinese superstar Ruan Lingyu, who tragically died aged just 24 – her funeral procession was reportedly three miles long and described by the New York Times as “the most spectacular funeral of the century.” Another remarkable woman featued in 2017’s HippFest is Lorenza Mazzetti, specifically her 1956 film Together, which stars legendary Scottish sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, who's clearly channelling Brando. 

It’s a busy and eclectic programme. As Ian Scott, Chair of Falkirk Community Trust, says, “Once again this year the Hippodrome team have created a feast of silent cinema which will satisfy the tastes and interests of film fans of all ages.”

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HippFest runs 22-26 Mar. For the full programme and tickets, go to hippfest.co.uk