Mary, Mungo and Neil… Hippfest at Home, Hippfest 2025

As online presentations go, Hippfest at Home is perhaps the most successful in capturing the atmosphere and the feeling of actually being there. You have establishing shots of the live introductions shot from the back of the stalls showing the lovely old stage of the oldest cinema in Scotland, the Hippodrome (1912) and then the option of seeing the film and the musicians accompanying. As always, Alison Strauss leads from the front with such relaxed expertise and enthusiasm – this kind of impassioned poise is reflected across the whole team who love the films but also the audience and the combination is what makes this impossible festival work so well it is now in it’s 15^th edition.

The hottest ticket for this year was as Alison said, Mr Neil Brand who gave the most entertaining talk about his singular career from his first professional accompaniment – Buster’s Sherlock Jnr (1924) – to his most recent – in the most “meta” moment he had to improvise to a mystery film selected by Alison. Neil, always so eloquent and, damn it, charming, had my entire family rapt as Dad’s choice suddenly engaged them all – “ah Georges Méliès!” said the son lured away from his PS5 – “I really must see Nosferatu…” said the daughter and “so that’s my friend Netti’s old landlady!” said my wife watching Cecil Hepworth’s eldest Elizabeth aged two who we met in Camden in the 1990s in her 80s. Even Mungo the dog was of course transfixed by Rover, the Hepworth’s dog, who outwits a kidnapper by driving his getaway vehicle back home… something to aspire to young pup but not in my car!

Neil had updated a show and tell he’d previously performed at the Edinburgh Fringe and it was a story not just of his career and method but also silent film and its revival over the last few decades. He talked of his audition with the BFI and how his acting training had helped inform his response to Sherlock Jnr, a quite intimidating work from an actual genius who gave signals not just to his audience but also the players he knew would accompany his film. Neil recalls the exact moment when the audience’s reaction inspired him to follow Buster’s promptings in ways he hadn’t anticipated.

Neil Brand

Dullard that I am, I’ve mostly focused on the silent film live experience from the perspective of accompaniment and film without really understanding the impact the audience reaction to both has on the player and vice versa. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction and this is a Mobius Strip of emotion and anticipation. Neil showed Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer and Billy Wilder’s People on Sunday (1930) and got the audience to score the mood by a show of hands during key moments. Not only were our anticipations split on the direction of Wilder’s smart scripting, but Neil was able to flavour the narrative in ways that reinforced the second-guessing. It was a virtuosic performance all round from a consummate communicator.

We had the wonders of  Méliès’ hand-coloured Impossible Voyage (1906), the dark-heart of the definitive vampire film, Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and finished off with a clever home movie called Early Birds which was a colour film from the fifties (? nowt on IMDN but it was Alison’s Mystery Film after all!) in which a baby escapes from his cot, totters along the hall, shuffles down the stairs and makes a mess in the kitchen. It was delightful and Neil talked us through his musical reaction to this most unpredictable of delights.

It was genuine family entertainment and all on Catherine’s birthday too – the best thing on telly!

Mr Brand and the Baby

The Pride of the Clan (1917), with Stephen Horne and Elizabeth Jane Baldry

 

There was also drama on a grander scale from one of the great originators of the art of film performance, Mary Pickford in Maurice Tourneur’s The Pride of the Clan (1917). This was a recording of the Friday night gala introduced by Alison and the doyen of silent filmography, Pamela Hutchinson both of whom looked like they’d just stepped off the Oscar’s red carpet. This film was also accompanied by the dreamy team of Stephen Horne and Elizabeth Jane Baldry who had previously accompanied the fabulous The Swallow and the Titmouse (1924) a film that really suits their combination of piano and harp.

Mary plays Marget MacTavish who takes over as Chieftain of the clan after her father drowns at sea. She’s about to marry Jamie Campbell (Matt Moore) and there’s some silliness with couples in the clan biting sixpence in half so they can hang it around each other’s necks – HG Wells should have sued! But it’s all in fun even when Jamie is revealed to be of noble blood and his birth mother tries to sweep him away to polite society. Yeah, good luck with that lady, this is Mary P you’re contending with…

Tourneur’s locations are well chosen to create a genuinely Caledonian feel and the FOMO was real as Elizabeth-Jane’s harp Oberon added further Celtic magic along with Stephen’ expert innovations as the silent film equation gained an extra element with the two telepathically in tune with audience and each other following Mary’s lead on screen. I saw this film in Pordenone but it was presented here in the way that only Hippfest can: the fifth element!

 

The Near Shore: A Scottish and Irish Cine-Concert, with Patrick Smyth

 

As someone who is more Irish and Scottish than English – what do you expect from Liverpool la’? – I was especially impressed with the selection of the five films that made up this Cine-Concert. These shorts were all from the IFI Irish Film Archive and National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive and introduced by Sunniva O’Flynn from the IFI – you cannot understate how international Hippfest is, with collaborators from Norway and Sweden, over to the Americas and beyond.

It began with the earliest known film made by an Irishman, Royal Clyde Yacht Club (1899), which featured a race in the Firth of Clyde and then Ireland by Air – featuring Scottish aviatrix Winnie Drinkwater (1933) which also returned via the Firth with stunning views of my favourite Isle of Arran and a mist-covered Goatfell. Before that we saw shots of Galway – historical family location of The Joyces – and an Ireland still between the centuries with ducks and donkeys in the streets mixed with grand municipal buildings.

As a former Butlins employee – a Hi-de-hi-d for two summer seasons in my youth – I was impressed with Butlins camp photographer John Tomkins’ tow films – Butlins Holiday Camp and Rush Hour (1950s). Tomkins filmed the inmates, sorry holiday-makers, and then screened the films so they could see themselves at the end of the week. This is so much in the spirit of Butlin’s and I especially loved the one in which the children take over, robbing the redcoats blazers as they are frozen by some child’s magic… it was all, literally a dream.

Galway, 1933.

Finally, there was The Farm below the Mountain (1958), Scottish filmmaker Ernest Tiernan’s record of his travels with his young bride Kathleen to meet her family in rural Ireland… so familiar and in beautiful home-movie colour. We have something like this at home… maybe not so well shot!

The films were accompanied by renowned Irish avant-garde pianist, Paul G. Smyth who overlayed some lush textures on these films just out of memory and so full of human commonality. In the Hippodrome there’s no separation by time, we’re all connected as elements of the live cinematic mix, even from home we’re at the Hippfest home.

Until next year then and a visit in person, I think the family are convinced now! Thank you all for the wonder and the show.

 

History, man... Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 43, Day Four

In my part of the media when we’re not slapping you in the face with a paywall or clogging your smart phone with “behaviourally targeted” advertising, we aim for engaging and valuable content. Today at the Giornate was a high-value one with so many films, long and so short you could call them photographs. In short, Peak Pordenone with surprise after surprise and a sense of incredulity about what we had just seen, that it even exists let alone a century down the line. Blessed are the archivists and the programmers, the projectionists and the people who help you down the stairs in the Teatro Verdi.

 

 

Moxov Qiz [The Leper] (1928) with Abror Zufarov and Sobirjon Tuyokov

 

I’m starting again in Uzbekistan with an outstanding film – the best of the strand so far – and a powerful tale about the treatment of women in parts of the Muslim community in the early days of the last century – thereby also highlighting the corruption of the Tsarist regime. This would not be the first touch with issues that remain of modern concerns on today’s programme.

 

Directed by Oleg Frelikh this was based on a treatment by Lolakhan Saifullina (who co-wrote The Second Wife) of a novel by French author Ferdinand Duchêne, a magistrate in Algeria, where he observed the struggle between traditional life and modernity. A young woman, Tyllia-Oi (Ra Messerer, who was also in The Second Wife) marries a wealthy merchant Said-Vali (Grigol Chechelashvili) and soon falls foul of his temper by wearing the Russian style of clothes he favours rather than traditional dress – “don’t forget you’re a Muslim…”.

 

The local Russian authorities are all in the deep pockets of her husband but he still has reason to fear officer Igor Karonin (Andrei Fait who was also in Battleship Potemkin (1925) and much more) who intercepts a message for help from Tyllia-Oi and uses it to blackmail her into sexual favours. He provides some measure of protection for her but after he is sent to a new station in Moscow, she shows too much emotion to her husband when he breaks the news and he uncovers her affair.

 

Ra Messerer

His retaliation is savage and, branded am adulteress and, even though her father makes a complaint about her abuse, the Russians are easily bought off and won’t go against the wishes of the religious court which finds her guilty under Sharia law. She must return to her father who must give Said-Vali a full refund on her dowry… but the highest price is paid in the disgrace and the woman must bear full responsibility.

 

Frelikh directs with subtlety and grace even with this most disheartening story and there are plenty of compositions showing the location and nature as well as the way of life. The transitions between shots are immaculate and the cinematography of Vladimir Dobrzhanskii is outstanding. There was certainly a propogandist agenda to this film but given the source material – based on experience of North Africa – this kind of story is entirely possible in the culture of the time. . Forgetting religion, how many women live like this still?

 

Any country would be proud to have this film as part of their cultural history and the accompaniment from Abror Zufarov and Sobirjon Tuyokov was at once so evocative of their country as well as in perfect tune with this sad and sobering film, one that deserves wider exposure and I hope it gets a screening in the UK soon.

 

The Land of Promise (1924) with José María Serralde Ruiz

 

Directed by Ya’acov Ben Dov, this was another film with propagandist purpose and a “straight” documentary covering the “repopulation” (words can’t be careful enough…) of the land of Palestine by Jewish settlers in the years up to 1924. The initial screening in the UK was followed by a lecture by Leonard Stein of the World Zionist Organization, who claimed that prior to the Balfour Declaration, “Palestine had become a desolate country... a miserable swamp.” (Daily Telegraph, 22^nd December 1924) and it’s one repeated in the film.

 

The arguments against and for this are there for all to research. The screening is a call to make ourselves better informed without rushing to judgement – this is what a trained historian is supposed to say. As a film it is very well made and not dissimilar to Russian works of the period in presenting the results of collaboration for the cause.

 

The accompaniment from José María Serralde Ruiz was well played by conveyed a level of anger that, for me, distracted from the viewing experience. It’s up to the viewers to be historical in their interpretation of this source material and the rights and wrongs of the document, the aims of Zionism and rights to land. If any film encapsulated the significance of cinema as a means of historical record then it’s this one.

 

And yes, Balfour has a lot to answer for but his government were shooting my great grandfather’s comrades in the streets of Liverpool a little over a decade before this during the Transport Strike.

 

Le Hugenot (1909) with Donald Sosin and Elizabeth-Jane Baldry

 

This short film will have been programmed to illustrate another key factor about the movement of people as Louis Feuillade’s short feature showed the religious persecution of the Huguenots in the 16^th Century including The St Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572 with modern estimates of the numbers killed ranging from 5-30,000. Whilst the film finishes in a call for peace before God, tens of thousands fled France for protestant countries such as England and via boat.

 

The Pride of the Clan (1917) with Donald Sosin and Elizabeth-Jane Baldry

 

It was time for some fun and to marvel again at the epic skillset of Mary the 1st here directed by the genius Maurice Tourneur. Mary is Marget MacTavish who takes over as Chieftain after her father drowns at sea. She’s about to marry Jamie Campbell (Matt Moore) and there’s some silliness with couples in the clan biting sixpence in half so they can hang it around each other’s necks – HG Wells should have sued! But it’s all in fun even when Jamie is revealed to be of noble birth and his birth mother tries to sweep him away to polite society.

 

Well, you know Mary, d’yea think she’ll allow that the noo?

 

Excellent locations from Tourneur create a genuinely Caledonian feel and Elizabeth-Jane’s harp added further Celtic magic along with Donald Sosin’s lines crashing like so many waves against the granite cliffs of this hitherto unknown southern Hebridean island. Great fun!

 

Folly of Vanity (1924), with Philip Carli

 

Once again we were left on a high with this inventive film about the early married life of Alice and Robert Farnsworth as played by the mighty Billie Dove and Jack Mulhall in the style of a proto-screwball comedy. They’ve never had an argument in, oh, six months or so of marriage until Alice buys some fake pearls and wants to go to a party hosted by Mr (John St. Polis) and Mrs Ridgeway (Betty Blythe with the vamp-ometer set to kill!). Mr R has a famous pearl collection and these parties have a reputation for being, louche…

 

They go, they row as Mrs R tries to tempt Robert as her Mr drops temptation round Alice’s neck with a pearl necklace so she can rekindle its lost lustre… There’s a floor show at the party that wouldn’t be out of place at the Moulin Rouge and the charm continues when the guests are invited to the Ridgeways yacht/ocean liner with the couple intent of achieving both their targets.

 

So far so pre-code and boy, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet as Alice falls overboard and into the wildest party in the undersea empire of Poseidon. Henry Otto directed this green-tinted gratuity and he directed the steamy heck out of it with more mermaids than there are stars in MGM and an eye-poppin’ amount of flesh on view. The fact that England’s finest, Maurice Elvey directed the other parts of the film makes this all the more shocking, mind you, he’d be filming in Blackpool a few years later for Hindle Wakes and, well, there’s stuff goes on there that also blows the mind!

 

Lulu McGrath

Also seen:

 

Pre-Cousteau underwater adventures including J. Ernest Williamson’s Wonders of the Sea (1922) which seemed to be mostly Lulu McGrath in a swimming costume floating past the coral and angel fish. Neil Brand accompanied in fine style, resolve of steel not to musically quote Yellow Submarine.

 

Columbian films including Garras de Oro (1927) which was essentially an astonishing attack on Teddy Roosevelt’s failed attempt to enable Panamanian separatists to put the canal in more controllable hands. Columbia wins and Uncle Sam takes a bloody nose. How often does this happen. More history and suitably learned accompaniment for this spy thriller from Stephen Horne.

 

Then we had Feminist Fragments 2. Queer Eyes, Loose Lips and Detachable Limbs which was another superb collection of rare Nasty Women grooves including pro-wrestling, Alice Guy’s Les Fredaines de Pierrette (1900) and films that generally showed a surprising amount of feminist feeling or nuanced non-hetero-normative expression. There was also Queen Lyda Borelli the 1^st as St Barbara the patron saint of explosives and she does exactly what it says on the pack of dynamite! Also, watch out for roller skates, they’re dangerous!

 

 

What's in the box Lyda?

 

PS I skipped Dreyer’s Leaves from Satan’s Book (DK 1920) and am of course sorry for that but I had a crisis in Croydon to deal with remotely. And no, that’s not code for something else…