The Sound of Silents

The Bo’ness Hippodrome was originally opened in 1912 and would have spent much of its first 20 years showing silent movies. To commemorate this they have an annual festival of silent cinema. This consists of a selection of early film classics but with the added bonus of live musical accompaniment. I’ve fancied giving this a go for a while and, as Jake rather likes slapstick comedy such as Mr Bean, I thought he might enjoy a double bill of comedy shorts billed as a “Jeely Jar” showing, where one can get 2 tickets for the price of one by bringing an empty jam jar along. Back in the days of early cinema, jam jars were regarded as hard currency.

I do occasionally watch silent films, particularly some of the early German cinema but I have only ever once been to one with live musical accompaniment which was a showing of FW Murnau’s eerie 1921 horror film Nosferatu which, on that occasion, had the soundtrack performed by German  avant-garde rock musicians Faust. The experience of that one was quite immersive and also a little disturbing as we were warned before the performance not to stray too close to the stage as the anvil-grinder solo was likely to produce a large number of sparks. The film is an utter creep-fest as well.

For the Hippodrome’s silent films the musical accompaniment was a more traditional piano which was ably performed by Neil Brand who has composed for cinema and presented BBC Four’s “Sound of Cinema” series. He was very entertaining in himself and I think Jake was quite impressed that he could play along to the film without interruption for so long. The odd thing is, that it really does make a difference having live music played alongside a silent film rather than the soundtrack having been added on later. There have been a few attempts to do this on a grand scale with entire symphony orchestras acting as accompaniment – the logistics of this make it an expensive practice but it is an element of performance art that we have rather lost in the modern age.

The films themselves were entertaining enough. The first film, What's the World Coming To?, was billed as a Stan Laurel feature (he featured for about 2 seconds but did co-write it) although I was actually more impressed that it featured Jimmy Finlayson who came from Larbert (about 10 miles from Bo’Ness) and would go on to be a regular in the Laurel and Hardy movies. The second film was The High Sign an early Buster Keaton film and probably more typical of the slapstick genre. The interesting thing with seeing these films is that they have more in common with mime artists than conventional stage actors. It’s not a genre that is often visited these days which makes events like the HippFest all that more important and the Hippodrome must be the ideal place to see them as they were originally intended.