Silent film with live orchestra - A Cottage on Dartmoor

21st July, 7.00pm

Church House Widecombe - book your tickets here

All tickets are £5.00

A little-known gem, A Cottage on Dartmoor is being screened by Wordquest Devon accompanied by a live sound score by Seat of The Pants Orchestra (SOTP). One of the very last silent films to be made in Britain before the talkies revolutionised cinema, A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929) is a virtuoso piece of filmmaking, a final passionate cry in defence of an art form soon to be obsolete. It has been restored from film materials preserved in the BFI National Archive.

The SOTP Orchestra players straddle and stretch across many different musical landscapes -- its singers and instrumentalists are plucked from contemporary classical, new folk, old & modern jazz, urban pop, world roots, song writing, community music, experimental improvisation and West End musical theatre. Directed by Anthony Asquith (better known for The Browning Version and The Way to the Stars) A Cottage on Dartmoor is an embroiled melodrama, a tale of love and revenge, set on the bleak landscape of Dartmoor. Overlooked by critics more eager to heap praise upon his contemporary, Hitchcock, (who made Blackmail during the same year), Asquith's films display the same skill in inventive story-telling and technical artistry. Steeped in the work of the Soviet avant-garde and German expressionism, Asquith adopts these styles whilst instilling the film with a particularly British sensibility.

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