Feature | FILM
OUT OF THE SILENCE The Hippodrome Festival of Silent Cinema is breathing life into forgotten fi lms. Malcolm Jack speaks to sound artist Jason Singh about his live soundtrack to early documentary Drifters
‘I t’s almost like a sci-i with water,’ muses Jason Singh of John Grierson’s landmark 1929 picture Drifters, for which the Manchester-based beatboxer and sound artist will perform an improvised live score at this year’s Hippodrome Festival of Silent Cinema. ‘For me it’s like the 2001: A Space Odyssey of the sea,’ he continues. ‘It’s that thing of isolation, that disconnection from everything else, these people in this vessel, travelling to a destination. These i shermen board this boat, and they’re on this massive expanse of water and they don’t know what’s going to happen.’
Beatboxing meets a 1920s black-and-white silent proto-documentary about Scottish North Sea herring i shermen – on paper, it seems a bit unlikely. But that’s what attracted Singh to the project, and it works exceptionally well in practice, as proven by the digitally remastered DVD and Blu-ray version presented by the BFI in 2012, as complemented by Singh’s specially commissioned atmospheric score, full of ghostly drones and rumbles. Singh’s relationship with the BFI began via a PRS creative development programme which saw him expand an already diverse career – from DJing to recording with the likes of Nitin
Sawhney and Seb Rochford and creating scores for theatre – into experimenting with soundtracks for moving image. When the BFI planned a re- release for Drifters – packaged together with Sergei Eisenstein’s hugely inl uential Battleship Potemkin, the i lm with which Drifters premiered as a London Film Society double-bill in 1929 – it was Singh whom they asked to bring a fresh new aural element to the historic picture. Singh was blown away on i rst watch, and immediately recognised contemporary relevance in the nearly century-old i lm. ‘Even though it was made in the 1920s, it’s still so poignant,’ he comments. ‘To communities and to industries, to wildlife, to nature, to eco-systems. It feels “now”.’ Born in Deanston near Stirling, Grierson is widely considered to be the godfather of British documentary i lmmaking. It’s actually thought that, as a i lm critic in 1926, it was he who i rst coined the term ‘documentary’. Drifters was Grierson’s i rst attempt at making such a picture of his own and it proved a huge success. Bringing Drifters to the historic Bo’ness Hippodrome, not far from where Grierson was raised, in a way returns the i lm to its natural environment, with cinema and i lm both dating from much the same era. It’s a standout in a fascinating programme
that elsewhere includes such eye-catching event screenings as Yasujirö Ozu’s Japanese gangster noir Dragnet Girl, also with a newly commissioned soundtrack, and Oscar-winning i lmmaker and silent cinema historian Kevin Brownlow introducing his documentary about legendary star Lon Chaney, A Thousand Faces. Where the recorded version of the soundtrack to Drifters is quite subtle and restrained, live Singh lets his creative muse rip. ‘That’s when I bring in the additional dubstep, drum and bass, techno and live beatboxing thing. Because I’m in a room with a massive PA system.’ With the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra also set to add another unique in-the-moment dimension to the Hippodrome performance, expect the unexpected. ‘Whenever I do it, it’s always different,’ says Singh. ‘It’s almost like the i shermen – it’s another journey, it’s another day’s work, and you don’t know what’s going to happen.’
Drifters, soundtracked by Jason Singh, is part of a double-bill called Before Grierson Met Cavalcanti, The Hippodrome, Bo’ness, Sun 16 Mar. The Hippodrome Festival of Silent Cinema runs from Wed 12–Sun 16 Mar.
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