The 9th Hippodrome Silent Film Festival, otherwise known affectionately as HippFest will run over five days next month in Bo’ness.
Tickets will go on sale today 5 February 2019 at 9.00am for the festival held at Scotland’s oldest purpose-built cinema.
HippFest the annual event produced by Falkirk Community Trust will run from 20 to 24 March 2019 and is the only festival dedicated to silent film in Scotland.
One of the main highlights this year is the UK premiere of the restored 90 year-old feature ‘Hound of the Baskervilles’ – the final Sherlock Holmes silent ever made. Until only 10 years ago, the film was missing and believed lost. It has an international cast with six leads from six different countries.
Found in the basement of a Polish priest, this feature was the holy grail of the silent film world and this surviving print had only Czech intertitles. After a full restoration by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and Poland’s National Film Archive last year, new English intertitles and minor missing scenes were bridged with a series of stills.
Alison Strauss, Festival Director, said: “We’re so excited to be launching the 9th Hippodrome Silent Film Festival. We’ve come a long way and now we’re just heading towards these five days of fantastic premieres of restorations, musicians coming from all over the world and audiences coming from all over Scotland.”
Alison Strauss
“The music for many people is the highlight. When you add the live music element to the silent films everything’s lifted.”
“Accompanying all our films, including the Sherlock Holmes film, will be musicians many of whom are improvising or using semi notated scores or new commissions. The music for many people is the highlight. When you add the live music element to the silent films everything’s lifted, and it’s extraordinary to witness musicians unrolling this other level of story.”
“The opening screening which is going to be ‘Rob Roy’ was filmed in 1922, on location not far from here and with hundreds of soldiers from the Argyll Regiment. It’s just wonderful to see a Scottish story and Scottish intertitles upon the screen in Scotland’s oldest cinema.”
“This wasn’t the first film version of the subject but it is certainly the most epic, and it hasn’t been screened since it took Scottish picture houses by storm in 1922. Now, and with the added wow-factor of David Allison’s new score, we are sure people will experience all the thrill and excitement of seeing this significant Scottish production on the big screen, just like the audiences one hundred years ago.”
Musician David Allison said: “I’m really looking forward to coming back to this wonderful festival at the Hippodrome which is truly an extraordinary venue. ‘Rob Roy’ is an ambitiously staged tale of romance and nationalist pride and it’s an honour to get to write and perform music to one of Scotland’s most iconic figures.”
In Scotland I attended Dunfermline High School from 2010 to 2016 and Edinburgh Napier University from 2016 to 2020, emerging with two Advanced Higher and five Higher qualifications from the former and graduating with an undergraduate bachelor of arts honours degree in journalism from the latter. After two years away from further education due to the coronavirus pandemic, I'm going to be studying the MFA Photography course at York St John University in England from 2022 to 2024. I've achieved The Duke of Edinburgh’s (Bronze) Award and received grade five level certification for electronic keyboard from Trinity College London. In my spare time, I enjoy reading, writing, watching television series, listening to music and going to the cinema as well as catching up with friends, travelling by railway and hostelling overnight and overindulging in food and drinks in a pub or restaurant then having to go to the gym to burn it all off again.
By studying journalism and photography, my aim of practicing photojournalism professionally will hopefully be once step closer. Both are partial artforms requiring the rest of the work to be undertaken by the audience, the specialism of photojournalism, however, providing each of its two parts with greater context. Exploring photographic techniques (aerial, timelapse, editing) through a variety of journalistic styles (features, poetry, songwriting) will allow me to develop my portfolio, hone my camera skillset and narrow my focus further in anticipation of working life. Without a global pandemic to deal with this time. Fingers crossed.
