Yorkshire Silent Film Festival 2017: programme announced

The UK’s largest celebration of silent film serves up classics from Buster Keaton, Cecil B. DeMille, Alfred Hitchcock and Georges Méliès

Feature by The Skinny | 19 Apr 2017

Silent movie fans rejoice! We may be creeping into superhero movie season, but Yorkshire film nuts can always escape into the black and white worlds populated by Buster Keaton, Greta Garbo and Ivor Novello for respite throughout May as The Yorkshire Silent Film Festival returns. And as usual, there's a whole gaggle of musicians in tow.

The Yorkshire Silent Film Festival likes to present silent film with live music. At many screenings you’ll find a traditional silent film pianists at the front of the auditorium, but there are also screenings planned with a harpist, percussion and woodwind players, an electronic musician, two orchestras and a community jazz band. A total of 40 screenings with live music will take place across Yorkshire from 5 to 31 May.

Proceedings kick off at Abbeydale Picture House, Sheffield, with Alfred Hitchcock thriller The Lodger (5 May). The screening will be accompanied by the world premiere performance of a new score by leading composer, pianist and broadcaster Neil Brand, played live by Orchestra of St Paul’s and conducted by Ben Palmer.

For the hardcore silent film fans, there’s a twelve hour all-dayer on 6 May featuring a programme of cartoons, Buster Keaton in The Cameraman, fantasy films by Georges Méliès and Segundo de Chomon, Ivor Novello in Man Without Desire, Soviet comedy The Girl with a Hat Box, and the great Greta Garbo in MGM’s lavish drama of sex and betrayal Flesh and the Devil. The epic silent film marathon is rounded off by a late-night screening of 1919’s Behind the Door, described by YSFF as “one of cinema’s most shocking films.”

Other highlights look to be the screening of the first Hollywood take on Ben Hur, from 1925; the zesty and subversive 1927 version of Chicago, made well before it was a Broadway musical; a pair of visually striking Soviet comedies directed by Boris Barnet, The House on Trubnaya Street and the aforementioned ...Hat Box; more Hitchcock with the sinister and chilling Blackmail; rarely-seen Danish classic The Golden Clown; cool Japanese gangster flick Dragnet Girl; and some of the earliest cartoons, including Dinky Doodle, Krazy Kat, Felix the Cat and Walt Disney’s Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

The festival comes to an end at St Paul’s Hall, University of Huddersfield, on 31 May with the great Marlene Dietrich in the sultry, erotic drama The Woman Men Desire, with Neil Brand again on piano.


Yorkshire Silent Film Festival, 5-31 May, various venues across Yorkshire, including in Halifax, Hebden Bridge, Holmfirth, Huddersfield, Hull, Leeds, Leyburn, Ossett, Saltburn by the Sea, Scarborough, Sheffield, Settle, Thirsk and York.

See yorkshiresilentfilm.com for full programme details 

http://theskinny.co.uk/film