A LIFE ON THE FARM
Directed by Oscar Harding
Certificate: 12a
☆☆☆☆

WE see Charles Carson wheeling his dead mother around his farm so she can say goodbye to the cattle. It is not the first piece of eccentricity the subject of this marvellous, bizarre documentary exhibits – but it does raise a question that feels unintentional.

Charles, as we have already seen in his behaviour towards a much-loved pet cat that dies, has a straightforward relationship with mortality, life, grief and the passing of time.

In this film about a home video made by a Somerset cattle farmer in the 1970s and 1980s, we see how he is there as life begins – we watch him, nonplussed and unfussy, be midwife to a cow who has twin calves. He proudly holds up the placenta to camera.

And he has watched and helped his family nurture the land at Coombe End Farm for decades, watched the seasons go by, the births and deaths of the animals he looks after.

His relationship to mortality is also shown through the loving care he gives to his cattle, while at the same time delivering steaks to his neighbours each week.

Director Oscar Harding grew up in the Somerset hamlet of Huish Champflower. It’s a fairly isolated bit of the West Country and isn’t so much a village, rather a scattered collection of farms and cottages.

It was home to the Carson family, and farmer Charles Carson not only works the land but had a penchant for home video in the VHS era.

He made a feature-length documentary about life on the farm, and his family. The director’s granddad had a copy and when they were clearing out his home after his death, they found it.

This documentary shows Charles’s work with running commentaries from “found film” buffs (there is such a thing).

We learn how the film resurfaced, and then are treated to critiques of his directorial style: his use of the awful 1970s smash-hit Grandma We Love You over footage of his dead mother is likened to Martin Scorsese’s film Casino, a large stretch of the imagination.

But Carson was a clever filmmaker, working on a non-existent budget, an unintentional poet, inventor and, above all, someone who seems to have been given a huge dose of intellectual curiosity married to a philosophy that takes life and death in his stride.

It’s a true gem, utterly original, riddled with hilarity, and casting a fascinating light into life in rural England. It makes modern urban dwelling feel staid, clinical and emotionally immature about the facts of life and death.