PAUL McGann may be best known for playing The Monocled Mutineer, and appearing in Withnail and I and Doctor Who, but yesterday in Bo’ness he took on another role – that of silent film narrator.
The 62-year-old actor, last seen on ITV’s Hillsborough drama Anne in January, was in town to provide narration for L’Homme du large, a 1920 French drama directed by Marcel L’Herbier, which was the closing gala film of this year’s Hippodrome Silent Film Festival.
McGann is a huge fan of silent cinema. “It’s young cinema,” he told The Herald. “All the machinery was being invented; geniuses were already at work. All the grammar and language that we now take as read was invented in a few short years. How could you not be excited to see that? I’m still amazed by it.”
McGann’s presence was one of the highlights of this year’s festival. Hippfest, as it is known, returned to the town’s Hippodrome cinema, the oldest purpose-built movie theatre in Scotland for its 12th year.
“This is the first in-person Hippfest in two years because of the pandemic,” the festival’s director Alison Strauss pointed out. “The opening night of the 10th edition [in 2020] was the day of the national lockdown.”
“Hippfest and the Glasgow Short Film Festival were the first two casualties.”
Support from Screen Scotland and the Cinema Recovery fund ensured that the festival could keep going. Last year Straus and her team managed to mount an online festival last year, but there has been a renewed appetite these last few days for the film festival, she said.
“People are still nervous. There are high rates of Covid. But people have come back,” Strauss said of this year’s festival. “The vibe in the auditorium is that people are up for it. They like being out and in company, sharing that communal experience that people have been missing so much, I think.”
Film critic and musician Mark Kermode, with his band The Dodge Brothers, and composer and musician Neil Brand returned to perform at this year’s festival, renewing a long association with the festival, but McGann was the cherry on the cake. How did Strauss convince him to come to Bo’ness?
“I met him. I went to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and saw him or rather heard him narrate the intertitles for this incredible film L’Homme du large. I was a bit starstruck, but somebody gave me a boot up the backside to go and talk to him and so I did. I told him about Bo’ness and the Hippodrome, and he agreed to come.”
The actor has been involved in working with silent films for more than a decade now and his love of silent cinema goes back to his childhood and watching early films on television.
“I remember even as a kid being hugely impressed by them and I still am. I’ve never lost my love and admiration for them.
“This is pure cinema.”
As a student he saw Louise Brooks in the remastered version of the 1929 silent film Pandora’s Box and was hooked. “That’s why I’m talking to you today,” he said.
“And some of the actors were the equal of any who ever lived. I know. I’ve tried silent movies.”
In 2003 McGann made a short silent film with Frances Barber called Listening, he explained. It was written and directed by Kenneth Branagh and shot in Branagh’s own home.
“No dialogue. And we struggled,” McGann admitted. “How do you do it? At the end of it, the three of us sat there and thought, ‘If we didn’t know before we know now. Some of the best actors who ever worked were working before 1928.’
“That kind of skill is lost. So, I can say I tried it for three days and I was lousy at it.”
McGann has himself just recovered from Covid. “I only just got out of my bedroom on Friday,” he said. “It floored me actually.”
But he’s been keen to return to narrating at live events such as Hippfest. “I like working with musicians. Audiences like seeing live stuff. The restorations themselves are masterpieces.
“Everybody’s missed it. A lot of live events went to the wall businesses didn’t survive. Now these things are back on. This is cultural life blood. It’s so important. Musicians want to play. People like me want to yack over it.
“But we all want to be in the same room. We want to be doing it live. It’s great. And long may it continue.”
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