The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #118109   Message #2550833
Posted By: BB
28-Jan-09 - 06:13 AM
Thread Name: Archive film & song show
Subject: ANN:Archive film & song show
Sorry there wasn't room in the thread title to give more info. If you're not near North Wiltshire, UK, this may well be of no interest to you!

The show is 'This Farming Life', which was commissioned by the North Devon rural touring scheme, Village Voice, and was specifically designed for rural touring schemes – the emphasis being on rural! The show integrates archive film from the South West Film & Television Archive and traditional song from Tom & Barbara Brown of Umber Music in an innovative way, the content of each medium illuminating the other. This Farming Life combines images and words about farming and rural life from as early as the 1920s through to the 1970s.

From heavy horses, through early traction, the drift from the land, rural industries, and much more, the shows includes interviews with farming people, documentary extracts, silent archive footage, tunes, songs and readings. Here are early television news features, extracts from commissioned films, silent film, folk songs, modern songs and text extracts all combining in an evening that produces everything from chuckles to belly laughs, stirs memories, educates incomers, highlights value systems and yet can send an old horseman into a reverie of nostalgia or stimulate discussion about 'then and now'.

But this is not a film evening with a live sound-track. Although some film items and song items stand on their own within the context of the show, at other times silent film, music and song are fully integrated, the song illustrating the film content and the film reciprocating for the song, leading to a complex audio-visual experience that is unusual and stimulating.

The show has been seen from Cornwall to Cumbria, Kent to Northumbria. If you haven't seen it yet, come and enjoy!

Saturday 21st February @ Village Hall, East Street, Lacock 7.30 p.m.
By ticket only - £6 from Mrs. Ruth Satchell 01249 730268
Refreshments & raffle

Hope to see some of you there.

Barbara