New score for Hollywood classic breaks the silence

It is being played live on stage today by the award-winning violinist Shona Mooney, who has composed a new score for the film's screening at the climax of the 2015 festival. The film is set in the build-up to the Glencoe Massacre and centres on Annie's love for a Campbell. Mooney has enhanced the story with a soundtrack for violin, accordion and guitar that is dramatic, romantic, nostalgic and tied in directly to her roots as a folk musician (she was a student of the inaugural folk music degree course at Newcastle University in 2001.)

Mooney, who is a former winner of the BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year award, was approached to write the score last year by Alison Strauss, the festival's director. Sitting in the stalls of the Hippodrome, Strauss, who has been with the festival since the start five years ago, tells me that she had had her eye on showing Annie Laurie for a while.

"I wanted to create a new commission for it because a new print was created for the BFI national archive but, inexplicably, it hadn't been screened a great deal and no score had ever been commissioned for it," says Strauss. "And it seemed the perfect choice because Lillian Gish is an A-lister and there was a Scottish theme."

Some of that Scottish theme is at the more idealised end of the scale, but it's a remarkably good film nonetheless. It begins with the MacDonalds discovering the body of one of their own and vowing revenge on the Campbells. Caught in the middle is Annie Laurie, played by Gish at the height of her fame in the 1920s, who is drawn to the wild Donald Campbell despite being wooed by a MacDonald.

When Mooney started her research and watched the film, one of the first things that struck her was that the name of the central character Annie Laurie is also the name of a 19th-century Scottish melody written by the composer Alicia Ann Spottiswoode, who grew up in the Borders as Mooney did. And it wasn't the only connection that seemed to be pointing Mooney to a new area of her career: the violin she has played on since she was a girl, and on which she will perform the new Annie Laurie soundtrack, belonged to her great grandfather Charlie, who played for silent films at the Sheffield Empire.

When composing the new soundtrack, Mooney partly used the Annie Laurie melody as a starting point but most of the work of creating the music for a silent film was entirely new territory for the 30-year-old violinist.

"Alison phoned me up out of the blue and just asked me whether I'd be interested in composing music for a silent film," she says. "I was a bit surprised to begin with and then took a deep breath and said, yes, I'd love to. The film The Artist has probably started to make it more popular, but silent films are a bit neglected and, for people my age, silent film is not on their radar."

To help Mooney get into the zone, she was mentored by the celebrated silent film pianist Stephen Horn, who works at the BFI. The two met a few times and Mooney watched Horn accompany films before starting to improvise some music on her own to Annie Laurie, coming up with different moods and tunes for characters and then melting them together.

"The score is written for accordion, fiddle, guitar," says Mooney. "The accordionist might use the piano as well so we're going for an acoustic sound. But we'll not necessarily be playing all the way through in a traditional manner, although I wanted to incorporate rhythms that are identifiable for Scottish traditional musicians. So there's march, strathspey, reel, these kind of themes especially when you see dancers on the screen. It makes sense to do that; the film is romantic Scotland." There are also distinctive motifs and themes for the two clans, which start to meld and interplay towards the end as the clans clash.

Mooney demonstrates what she means with a short excerpt from her soundtrack on the stage of the Hippodrome although, when I hear it, it is in still a work in progress and Mooney and her fellow performers - Alasdair Paul and Amy Thatcher - have still to go into rehearsals. However, the section she does play demonstrates the remarkable power of live music accompaniment to silent film. Sitting down to watch a modern movie with a regular soundtrack is an entirely passive experience; there's something about watching a silent film accompanied by a live musician that makes you feel involved and makes a very old film feel relevant.

Mooney feels it too. "It's happening live," she says, "right there and you're getting that interplay right in front of you between the film and the performer. It's playing with the past, but it's happening in the present."

Mooney also hopes the premiere of her new soundtrack on March 22 will encourage further the increasing interest in silent films. It certainly has for Mooney herself, who has recently seen The First Born, the stylish and inventive British film about upper class decadence in the 1920s, and The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, the 1928 French biopic.

"I also hope Annie Laurie will be shown more," she says. "It wasn't as successful as it was expected to be at the time, and I don't know of that many people who know of the film, so it would be nice for it to become a bit better known, because I think it's an extraordinary film."

Alison Strauss has the same ambition for the film and has already organised for it to be shown at the Barbican in London in April, with Mooney performing her soundtrack. Strauss also hopes the film will strengthen the Bo'ness festival, which has attracted more attention and funding in its five years despite there being some doubts about its potential in the early days.

"I remember there being a bit of scepticism in the first year," admits Strauss. "It was hard to get people to come and see foreign films with subtitles, let alone black-and-white silent films, and some people were saying: why are we doing this?

"But actually, the proof was the response. In the first year, there was a high proportion of the audience who had never seen silent film at all and they were packed in and I thought: there's nothing to worry about, it's still relevant. And people are quite hungry for discovery and like individual experiences. They like that sense of being somewhere unique and the fact it's not repeatable."

Strauss has also managed to create a festival that does two things: it attracts hardcore silent film geeks from all over the country but it has also proven popular with local people in Bo'ness who dip their toes in. "We know there are pockets of silent fans in the UK and beyond, there's that hardcore there, and some of them come to the festival," she says. "But for it to be a success, we need to make it relevant and interesting to a wider community."

Strauss has certainly achieved that - several of this year's events are already sell-outs - but she's also done something of a service in reviving interest in Annie Laurie and making sure it is seen again in all its plaid glory with a spanking new soundtrack from a talented young composer. And there's a twist as well. Right at the end of the film, when you might be thinking you know what silent film is about, suddenly, out of nowhere, this old 1927 black and white movie bursts into the most glorious colour. Combined with the new soundtrack, it is an unusual, exciting experience.

Annie Laurie is the Hippodrome, Bo'ness on Sunday March 22 at 8pm, and at the Barbican in London on Sunday April 26 at 3pm. For more information about it and other Festival of Silent Cinema events, visit www.hippfest.co.uk