Festival review: Hippfest, Hippodrome Cinema, Bo'ness

Hippfest, Hippodrome Cinema, Bo’ness *****

Scheduled originally for March 2020, Bo’ness’s Hippodrome Silent Film Festival – HippFest to its friends – was one of the earliest casualties of the pandemic, which made its live return this year at Bo’ness’s petite, wonderfully characterful, more-than-century-old Hippodrome Cinema (following an online incarnation in 2021) all the more welcome.

First up on Saturday night was one of Hippfest’s highest-profile events, with rockabilly/blues band the Dodge Brothers (featuring one Mark Kermode on bass) joining famed silent movie pianist Neil Brand bringing foot-tapping tunes and expansive soundscapes of wide-eyed Americana to City Girl from 1930.

Director FW Murnau – of Nosferatu fame – perhaps unsurprisingly brings quite a dark, expressionist slant to this tale of Chicago waitress Kate (Mary Duncan) making the best of her new life in rural Minnesota with new husband Lem (Charles Farrell). And likewise, the Dodges and Brand brought a sense of real threat, violence and pathos to their improvised, five-man score, transforming what might have been rather a soppy melodrama into something truly gripping and very moving. They ended up ignoring their lead sheets and making up most of the music afresh on the spot, Kermode said afterwards – which explained a lot of its raw, unfiltered authenticity.

By way of complete contrast, but with no less musical richness, Stephen Horne and Elizabeth-Jane Baldry produced a exquisitely delicate but wonderfully grotesque live soundtrack for Jean Epstein’s 1928 The Fall Of The House of Usher in a late-night screening, across a miniature orchestra of piano, flute, accordion, harp, drums, bells, voices and plenty more. It was a beautifully fluid, ever-changing soundscape that matched Epstein’s strange, dream-like proto-horror brilliantly, as well as mirroring its weird mix of captivating beauty and repellent decay.

Two very different films, and two very different musical realisations, but both summed up HippFest’s superb, pioneering contributions to Scotland’s festival scene, perfect for movie buffs and music lovers alike.

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