A Life On The Farm review – pays wor­thy trib­ute to its subject

The term ​“out­sider art” refers to a cat­e­go­ry of work which has been cre­at­ed out­side of the con­ven­tion­al art world. Out­sider artists are often self-taught, and so there is a cer­tain ama­teurism which the phrase denotes, though their work is con­sid­ered no less legit­i­mate. Charles Car­son, osten­si­bly the sub­ject of A Life on the Farm, was many things: a cheer­ful man don­ning a red ging­ham shirt and a straw hat, a farmer, a son, a hus­band, a father, a teacher, a musi­cian, and an out­sider artist who cre­at­ed a strange film which would take on a cult-like sta­tus after his death. How­ev­er, it is not sim­ply Charles Car­son nor the work he pro­duced which offers the film its emo­tion­al through­line; it is also the direc­tor, an out­sider to Carson’s life, who must grap­ple onscreen with the com­pli­cat­ed lega­cy of the work this enig­mat­ic man left behind.

Direc­tor Oscar Hard­ing recounts the sto­ry of how a mys­te­ri­ous VHS tape came into his pos­ses­sion; it was giv­en to his grand­fa­ther by their neigh­bor Charles Car­son, a farmer who at the time was dis­trib­ut­ing his own ama­teur film by offer­ing copies to friends around their rur­al vil­lage in Som­er­set, Eng­land. Hard­ing redis­cov­ers the tape years lat­er, hav­ing now become a bonafide cinephile, and he endeav­ors to find its cre­ator. If that sounds like a poten­tial hor­ror movie plot, then it seems Hard­ing would agree; he leans whole­heart­ed­ly into such genre trap­pings, with a dra­mat­ic score and stark, pur­pose­ful edit­ing. A dis­cern­ing audi­ence might be able to watch Carson’s orig­i­nal film, with scenes of cow birth in real time, cat funer­als and eulo­gies for dead par­ents, and rec­og­nize its dark and comedic irony with­out a sharp musi­cal stinger sig­ni­fy­ing that what we’re watch­ing is, in fact, strange.

A Life On the Farm, unlike its sub­ject, takes a rather con­ven­tion­al approach to the doc­u­men­tary form. A parade of talk­ing heads pop­u­late the major­i­ty of the film – we meet Charles’s friends and neigh­bors, we meet Harding’s own acquain­tances, and we also meet mag­a­zine edi­tors and fes­ti­val pro­gram­mers and a poet-slash-under­tak­er, who all offer bril­liant insights but are ulti­mate­ly just as much of an out­sider to Charles Carson’s life as Hard­ing him­self. The jux­ta­po­si­tion between raw VHS footage and this mod­ern analy­sis is impor­tant in bridg­ing a tem­po­ral gap between the nineties and the mod­ern day; how­ev­er, the ster­ile pro­duc­tion of this fram­ing is decid­ed­ly not ama­teur, and per­haps even errs too much on the side of pro­fes­sion­al in its attempt to con­trast Carson’s work.

From what we see of Charles Carson’s film, he depict­ed the life he lived on his farm with both a bru­tal hon­esty and a comedic edge, lack­ing any sense of self-con­scious­ness which might plague a more cyn­i­cal film­mak­er with a mar­ket in mind; rather, there is a puri­ty to a piece made for the sake of its cre­ation. For all its con­ven­tion, Oscar Harding’s A Life on the Farm remains an ele­gy for ama­teur film­mak­ing, while also allow­ing for the sur­vival of Carson’s work, which though bril­liant, remained undis­cov­ered and unrec­og­nized until now.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

By becom­ing a mem­ber you can sup­port our inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism and receive exclu­sive essays, prints, week­ly film rec­om­men­da­tions and more.