Hippfest Opening Night, Bo’ness review: 'intriguing'

Hippfest Opening Night, Hippodrome Cinema, Bo’ness ★★★★

Guitar and drums accompany storm-bound seaweed harvesters on a rugged stretch of Breton coast; traditional fiddle music meets electronics as boy meets girl in 1920s rural Norway. Both marked the opening day of Hippfest, Bo’ness’s ever-inventive festival of silent film and freshly commissioned scores, under the pre-art-deco firmament of the Hippodrome, Scotland’s oldest purpose-built cinema.

For Finis Terrae, a monochrome masterpiece from 1929 directed by Jean Epstein, Edinburgh guitarist and score composer Dan Abrahams and French drummer Philippe Boudot echoed the flaring human drama and pounding elements as four seaweed harvesters are assailed by weather and a careless injury that turns nasty.

Abrahams’s sparely eloquent guitar could work up a clamour while Boudot’s drums invoked crashing waves and whispering brushes enhanced a mist-bound sequence which had the two musicians hollering at each other from across the stage, in potent response to the desperate hailing of two on-screen boats.

READ MORE: SCO, Ben Glassberg & Jess Gillam, Edinburgh review: 'remarkable'

Rasmus Breistein’s 1920 Fante-Anne – “Gypsy Anne” – was the first wholly indigenous Norwegian feature film. A pastoral romance with a surprise twist, set among fjord braes and venerable farmhouses, it was accompanied here by an intriguing partnership between traditional Norwegian fiddler Jo Einar Jansen and the electronica of musician and DJ Dina Konradsen.

If such a prospect seemed alarming, in the event they sensitively regulated their playing to the twists and turns of a romance running far from smoothly. Brooding electronic rumbles heralded disillusionment for Anne, an orphan whose mysterious origins render her vulnerable to the kind of “othering” all too recognisable today, while Jansen’s fiddle ranged from urgent shrilling to delicate solo interludes.

Director Breistein was apparently a keen fiddle player himself, known to accompany screenings of his films. As a village green dance saw his bucolic merrymakers propelled by a distinctly urban techno pulse, he just might have been intrigued.

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