New Picture

Farrebique (Siritzky-International) is the record of one year on a French farm of that name. A great subject and a great creative medium, peculiarly well suited to each other, meet and are combined in this film into one of the better events in the history of pure cinema.

The movie camera is unique as a recorder of actual existence. The man who uses the camera correctly in this field resists the temptation to alter or improve on the actual. Rather, he perceives and communicates the poetic vitality of what is there for the camera to see.

Georges Rouquier, who "conceived and produced" this film, clearly has this understanding of his medium, combined with creative inspiration and boldness. The subject--the daily and lifelong effort of rural man as a part of nature and as a portion of eternity--is one of the grandest there is, and has inspired a long creative tradition. In that great line, Farrebique deals with its theme in terms which the theme cries out for--absolute realism.

Farrebique has no professional actors: only the farm family and their neighbors. Watching them, you realize the miserable incompetence of most artists (not to mention politicians) who try to deal with the so-called "common man." The people in this film are neither idealized nor looked down on. They are merely understood, observed and put on record.

Though there is no "character development" of the traditional kind, the Grandfather, the head of the house, gradually emerges as a monumental figure. The other characters are hardly less moving and memorable. There is so little story, and it is so simply and deeply germane to daily life, that it is hard to realize that most of it was re-enacted and that some of it was invented. The Grandfather is very anxious to repair and enlarge the house, which has begun to sag and crack along one corner; the women are fully as eager to bring in electric current. They can't afford both in the same year. Grandfather yields to the women; and when he dies, that fall, the house is still unmended. This little conflict between fundamental repair and labor-saving technology becomes a powerful, compassionate image of the plight of modern man.

Most of the picture is mere "minor" detail and incident: a summer storm, a Sunday Mass, an inarticulate courtship; baking, plowing, haying, threshing; the steady modulation of the days and nights and weathers and seasons across the land. And such images are the chief vocabulary in which the picture's grave eloquence is expressed.

This realism is as distinct from the stodgy realism of "documentaries" as the poetry which it breeds is distinct from the sickly prettiness of most "art" movies. The film treats nature as purely and honorably as it treats man. There is no elaborate composing, no fancy work with filters or soft focus, no picturesqueness: the camera merely accepts and sensitively records the more than sufficient beauty of the world it sees. For unadorned, undoctored beauty, immediacy and sensuous abundance, the film is unique.

Rouquier and his associates have made magnificent use of time-stop photography: a whole afternoon passes in the sliding of a shadow, darkness washes over the intricate landscape like fast water. In a sequence on spring, time-stop and photomicrography have been used to develop the writhing upward and explosive unfurling and blooming of plants, a boiling of sap, a paroxysmic pulsing and dancing of all creation.

There are other simple devices and metaphors which may disturb "sophisticated" audiences. A brief shot of a mating bull, almost as if flying, is followed by a closeup of a bee, its back arched almost to cracking as it rides a flower. A woman wrenches in childbed; in a marvelous speed-shot the hard white core of a flower, twisting like a bullet in a rifle barrel, brutally and desperately thrusting, splays wide its petals. As Grandfather sits alone by the fire, his life over with the end of his life's work, he quietly fades; there is only the chair he sat in. Beside his deathbed, the camera stoops in a motion as calm and royal as the scrutiny of God, and examines, in huge closeup, the pulsing fabric of the ancient wrist. As you watch, you hear an ax biting regularly, implacably into wood; then the tree's hesitation and its tremendous splintering fall: Grandfather's wrist goes quiet as rock.

Farrebique is at once more traditional and more original than most modern creative work; on both counts it will probably be slow in winning the immense audience to which it speaks. Those who come to it purely to be entertained will be merely bored. Those who go to the film in its own sober spirit, and with even a fraction of its own perceptiveness, will find it deeply absorbing, moving, satisfying, and chastening.

Georges Rouquier, 38, was raised on just such a French farm as Farrebique. He spent three years planning the film and a year shooting it. The farmers who "act" it are cousins of his. The picture won the International Prize at Cannes last year, and the French Documentary Prize. It also made money, for it was very popular in the big cities. Except in the Farrebique neighborhood, it flopped in rural France. Country people knew the life it portrayed only too well.

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