Yorkshire Silent Film Festival

It’s time to make a full confession. The title of this blog is a terrible deflection from the truth. I am, indeed, a northerner. Please forgive the vagueness. I am from Merseyside, but my family have lived in various places upwards from the middle of England, going back generations. So our accents may wander, but our vowels are consistently flatter than a Yorkshireman’s cap.

All of which means that Echoes of the North: Four Chapters in Time, a new archival film from the Yorkshire Silent Film Festival, is sweeter to me than a barm cake stuffed with hot chips and a mug of strong tea. The film is a stirring collage of silent film footage of northern England, bolstered with a charismatic brass-band score composed by Neil Brand (a southerner, but don’t hold it against him). The score is played expertly by the legendary Brighouse and Rastrick Band, conducted by Ben Palmer. Echoes of the North is produced by YSFF’s Jonny Best and edited by Andy Burns from more than 100 pieces of film. Best of all, it is free to watch on YouTube.

Continue reading →

This is a guest post for Silent London by Sheldon Hall, senior lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, who writes and lectures on film and television

Of the nine silent features made by Alfred Hitchcock, it was his third, The Lodger, that most clearly set the pattern for the director’s future career. As it’s about the hunt for a serial killer, it’s also the one that most anticipates future trends in popular culture. The BFI Archive’s beautiful restoration, undertaken as part of its ‘Hitchcock Nine’ project, was first presented five years ago with musical accompaniment that remains a subject of debate. But in the year marking the ninetieth anniversary since the original release (produced in 1926, it sat on the shelf for six months after trade previews), the film has finally been given the presentation it deserves with the world premiere of Neil Brand’s new score.

This screening, in a pristine amber-and-blue-tinted 35mm print, launched the second annual Yorkshire Silent Film Festival on 5 May 2017 at the Grade II-listed Abbeydale Picture House in Sheffield. The cinema was built as a suburban picture palace in 1920 and officially closed in 1975; but it has been rescued from the threat of development and is now in the charge of a trust. The Abbeydale is the venue for a three-day weekend of screenings at the start of the month-long YSFF and attracted a healthy opening-night audience of over 200 to the re-seated stalls area, packing the house.

The Lodger (1927)

My own take on the film itself is somewhat perverse: I think the hero did it. (He did in the book by Marie Belloc Lowndes, based on Jack the Ripper.) Ivor Novello plays the mysterious lodger, who takes upstairs rooms in a family home during a wave of killings of blonde women. The murderer always leaves a note, signed “The Avenger” and marked by a triangle. In his lodgings, Novello keeps a map of the triangular area in which the bodies have been found and falls for his landlady’s blonde daughter, Daisy (June Tripp), whose suitor is a dullard police detective (Malcolm Keen) on the killer’s trail.