A Cottage on Dartmoor

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Movie
Original title A Cottage on Dartmoor
Country of production United Kingdom of
Sweden
original language English
Publishing year 1929
length 8 files, 2294.5 m (original length), 2194 m (archive copy in the National Film & Television Archive London ), 88 minutes
Rod
Director Anthony Asquith
script Anthony Asquith based on a story by Herbert Price
production Harry Bruce Woolfe
music William Hodgson (1929)
Peter Reiter-Schaub (2016)
camera Stanley Rodwell
Axel Lindblom
occupation

A Cottage on Dartmoor (in German: A country house in Dartmoor ) is a silent crime drama that Anthony Asquith realized for British Instructional Films (BIF) from a screenplay in 1929, which on a story by Herbert Price was based. The German actor Hans Adalbert Schlettow and the Swede Uno Henning played the leading male roles. A Cottage on Dartmoor was the last of four silent films by Asquith. It emerged on the threshold from the silent film era to the sound film era, which is reflected in the film itself.

action

The story is told in flashbacks:

Barber assistant Joe is in love with Sally, a manicure who works with him in the same hair salon. But she is not particularly interested in him and therefore resists his advances. When the farmer Harry from Dartmoor comes to the shop to have himself manicured, she finds the time to spend longer with him. Joe is jealous and follows the two of them as they visit a movie theater. But when Sally comes to work one day with an engagement ring on her finger, Joe can't stand it anymore. Unfortunately, Harry comes into the store just then and asks Joe to shave him. He threateningly puts the bare razor on his throat, whereupon he is arrested and put in prison for attempted murder.

While Joe is serving his sentence in the lonely high-security detention center Dartmoor, Sally and Harry live in his hut and have a young son. When Joe manages to get free, he suddenly shows up after having struggled through the gloomy Dartmoor countryside. Sally feels something like regret about her role in Joe's conviction and offers to hide him. A complicated, but honestly meant reconciliation comes about with Harry, too, which culminates in Harry offering to help him escape. But when the time comes, Joe gives up the plan and draws the police's attention to himself through his behavior, who then open fire on him. Mortally wounded, he dies in Sally's arms.

background

Exterior shots were filmed in Dartmoor , interior scenes at Welwyn Studios in London. The photograph was in the hands of Stanley Rodwell, assisted by Axel Lindblom. The set was created by Ian Campbell-Gray and Arthur B. Woods . Ralph Smart took care of the continuity , A. Frank Bundy assisted the direction. The illustration music was put together by William Hodgson.

The Swedish actor Uno Henning, who gave the barber's assistants, had recently succeeded in Berlin as Bolshevik agent Andrej in GW Pabst's Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (1927). The popular English actress Norah Baring , who played Sally, got the lead role in Alfred Hitchcock 's early 1930s detective sound film Murder - Sir John Intervenes! (Original title Murder! ).

A Cottage on Dartmoor , a co-production of the British Instructional with the Swedish Biograph Society, was filmed silently, but later re-recorded with gramophone records. The silent version was released in cinemas from October 1929, the sound version on August 17, 1930. The latter must be considered lost . The film also ran in France and Belgium, Bulgaria, Poland and Russia, overseas in Brazil and the United States, where it premiered on April 11, 1930 under the title Escape from Dartmoor . In Sweden it was shown under the title FÄNG 53 in a reworked version that dispensed with the flashbacks of the British original.

reception

During the transition period in which A Cottage on Dartmoor is set, silent films and talkies were shown alternately in many cinemas . In the film, a scene takes place in a cinema, the program of which announces a silent and a sounding film. During the silent film, which is accompanied by the musicians of a cinema band, you can see the audience taking a lively interest and laughing, but when the sound film begins, it lapses into silence and emotionless passivity. This has been interpreted as Asquith's reaction to the near end of the silent film.

“More Hitchcock than Hitchcock himself ( a film who out-hitchcocks Hitchcock , as one critic wrote) is Anthony Asquith's atmospheric silent film A Cottage on Dartmoor (UK / Sweden 1929), which tells the story of a shy apprentice hairdresser and his unhappy love for a woman . Similar to Hitchcock in ' The Lodger ', Asquith worked here with a modernist montage that fits in well with the expressionist furnishings of this unjustly neglected masterpiece. ”(Arsenal, Berlin, March 2007)

Director Asquith was “very well versed in style” and “played through various narrative techniques with ease. The landscape shots with their dramatic cloud images are reminiscent of Scandinavian cinema. Some interior scenes are staged with a light hand, like in a French comedy; others have the uncanny touch of expressionist cinema . "(arte.tv)

"Asquith's romantic staging of nature vividly evokes the dramatic paintings of Caspar David Friedrich ." (Anna Siemiaczko) Unmistakably, he had learned to draw from the rich European silent film tradition.

Re-performances:

In America the film was released on DVD in 2007, in Great Britain only a year later, released by the British Film Institute (BFI).

The municipal cinema Filmhaus in Nuremberg showed Ein Landhaus in Dartmoor on Sunday, November 29, 2009 at 6.15 p.m., accompanied live on the piano by D. Meyer.

The Filmarchiv Austria presented the film as part of its retrospective "The Last Silents - Last Masterpieces of Silent Film" in Austrian premiere on Thursday, December 22nd, 2016 at 9 pm in the Metro Kino Kulturhaus with live music from Gerhard Gruber .

The jazz pianist Peter Reiter-Schaub , who was born in Rastatt in Baden in 1959, wrote “coherent ensemble music that follows the film's diverse stylistics very closely.” The Arte cultural channel broadcast the film on Monday, November 14, 2016 at 23 : 30 p.m. on German television in a restored version with the new music by Peter Reiter-Schaub.

literature

  • Kenneth Coffelt: A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929). Kennelco Film Diary , November 15, 2014 In: Fandor, Silent Film. United Kingdom.
  • Jörg Helbig: History of British Film. Verlag JB Metzler, 1999, ISBN 3-476-01510-6 , pp. 54f.
  • Gabriele Jatho, Klaus Hoeppner: City Girls. Images of women in silent films. Verlag Bertz + Fischer, 2007, ISBN 978-3-86505-177-6 , p. 3 and 19th
  • Fritzi Kramer: A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929) A Silent Film Review . August 3, 2014 In: moviessilently.com .
  • Tom Ryall: Anthony Asquith (= British Film Makers MUP ). Oxford University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-1-84779-434-5 , pp. 4, 22, 38-44, 102 and so on. 193.
  • Benjamin Schrom: Essay on 'A Cottage On Dartmoor'. In: silentfilm.org
  • Anna Siemiaczko: Musings on Film ('A Cottage On Dartmoor', 1929). In: Miwsig.co.uk , 2012 at siemiaczko.wordpress.com .
  • Murray Smith: Technological Determination, Aesthetic Resistance. or: A Cottage on Dartmoor - Goat Gland Talkie or Masterpiece? In: Wide Angle. 12.3, July 1990, pp. 80-97.
  • André Stratmann: A Cottage on Dartmoor (A country house in Dartmoor, GB 1929). at stummfilm-fan.beepworld.de , December 21, 2006.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. Ryall S. 4: “ a sound-on-disc musical component was provided together with some dialogue sequences. "
  2. ↑ a b c "A Cottage on Dartmoor" by Anthony Asquith. In: arte.tv. Accessed on March 28, 2017 : “'Cottage on Dartmoor' was also released as a sound version in the cinema and in individual scenes already looks like a sound film; however, the audio version is lost. "
  3. ↑ cf. IMDb / release info
  4. ↑ 'straightened out' version called it Geoff Brown in Monthly Film Bulletin 1976, p. 14, cf. Ryall p. 38.
  5. ↑ It is a comedy with Harold Lloyd , as Ryall notes on p. 43; the sound film is My Woman (according to Ryall p. 42), the title can be read on the sheet music of the cinema band; even before, when Joe is in Sally's apartment, she plays this song for him on the piano.
  6. ↑ The critic David Kehr wrote in 2007 in the New York Times : "Many filmmakers, Asquith apparently included, believed that silent storytelling had reached such a high level of refinement that mere chatter would never be enough to extinguish it."
  7. ↑ arsenal-berlin.de : The Open Road - Treasures from the British Film Institute
  8. ↑ cf. "... the romantic mise-en-scene, impeccably composed by Asquith, which vividly evokes the dramatic paintings of Caspar David Friedrich ..."
  9. ↑ cf. Benjamin Schrom: “When Asquith made 'A Cottage on Dartmoor' two years later, he would confidently employ many of the techniques he absorbed from the rich tradition of European silent film - just as it was buckling under the strain of the new sound technology. "
  10. ↑ Simon McCallum: BFI Screenonline: Cottage on Dartmoor, A (1929). In: screenonline.org.uk. Retrieved March 28, 2017 (English, review).
  11. ↑ Filmarchiv Austria: Metro Kinokulturhaus Wien: Film program December 2016 - January 2017. (PDF; 5.2 MB) In: filmarchiv.at. 2016, archived from the original on March 5, 2017 ; accessed on March 28, 2017 .
  12. ↑ A Cottage on Dartmoor. Program notice. In: ard.de. November 14, 2016. Retrieved March 28, 2017 .
  13. ^ Ansgar Schlichter: goat gland film. In: Lexicon of film terms. October 13, 2012, accessed March 28, 2017 .