A film enthusiastic attempts to piece together the life of an eccentric farmer-turned-amateur filmmaker in Oscar Harding's conventional but charming documentary.
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.
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Published 7 Sep 2023
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