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Farrebique, or the Four Seasons (1947)

Farrebique, or the Four Seasons (1947)

Documentary
Release Date: 1947, February 11
Directors: Georges Rouquier
Countries: France
Production: Écran Français, Écran Français, Les Films Etienne Lallier, Les Films Etienne Lallier

Overview:

Farrebique, the first feature-length effort of French documentary filmmaker Georges Rouqier, is widely regarded as his finest film. Rouqier concentrates on a single French farm family, following them through the four seasons. As in the works of Robert Flaherty, the human characters and the land surrounding them are "one", and Rouqier never misses an opportunity to parallel their lives with the eons-old phases of nature. The final symbolic images of Spring, achieved through time-lapse photography, are almost unbearably beautiful. The winner of several festival awards, Farrebique nonetheless did not immediately result in an outpouring of financing for Rouqier's follow-up films (this was a common problem in the financially strapped French film industry of the 1940s). Perhaps as a result, Rouqier did not make his sequel, Biquefarre (filmed in the same region, with some of the same "actors"), until 1983.

Keywords:

farm house isolated farmhouse social documentary farm life farm worker simple life farmer family observational documentary pyrenees mountain ridge local farmers labor documentary