The canon, defined loosely as the set of movies that people in the know discuss reverently, depends greatly on availability, and there are many outstanding works, especially of world cinema, that hardly get discussed because of their general unavailability. Two such works, Georges Rouquier’s “Farrebique,” from 1946, and “Biquefarre,” from 1983—classic hybrids of fiction and nonfiction, classic works of dramatic sociology—have long been off the screens (and still aren’t on home video). But Anthology Film Archives’ revival of both (and “Farrebique” remains there through Thursday) should do much to restore the earlier film and promote the later one to their rightful places as cornerstones of moviegoing experience and filmmaking ideas.

 

Rouquier, born in 1909, was the grandson of farmers from the Rouergue, in the southwest of France. His career path was proto-New-Wave-ish: he was, simply, a movie buff who left school as a teen-ager, moved to Paris, got a job as a printer, watched movies, and became an independent filmmaker. (As Dominique Auzel reports in his excellent book about Rouquier, there was a circle of them in Paris in the late nineteen-twenties, centered in Montparnasse; among them was Jean Vigo.) Rouquier recognized that the arrival of talking pictures made independent filmmaking too expensive, and continued to work as a printer; a fortuitous connection with a producer in 1941—during the German occupation—allowed him to start making short documentaries professionally. In 1943, he started working on his first feature; to do so, he returned to his family’s farm, called Farrebique, for a docu-fiction. He wrote a script about life on the farm and cast his relatives and neighbors to play characters very similar to (but not identical to) their real-life personae.

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“Farrebique, or the Four Seasons,” was shot at and near the farm in the course of a year, in 1944 and 1945. Its over-all subject is the conflict between law and tradition, the impingement of modernity on the isolated lives of farmers. The nineteenth-century farm house was literally showing cracks, and the elderly patriarch’s two sons, Henri and Roch, had different ideas about how to respond. Henri wanted to rebuild the house (at significant expense) and improve the farm; Roch, the eldest son, wanted to patch it up cheaply and continue to farm for subsistence as before. The farm has no electricity (the house is lighted with flickering gas lamps); Roch’s wife, Berthe, and Henri want to install it—but Roch also refuses to invest in it. The difference between the brothers is that, because of the custom of primogeniture, Roch was anticipating inheriting the entire farm, and because, by law, inheritances were to be distributed equally among the children, he wanted to keep the assessed value of the farm low in order to avoid owing his siblings money at the time of his father’s death.

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The patriarch nonetheless resents Roch’s inaction and reproaches him sharply for it, fearing that the farm will deteriorate because of his son’s conservatism. In the course of the action, Henri (who in real life was already married) courts a neighbor, Fabrette, the grandfather dies, and the division of the estate takes place. Roch becomes the proprietor of the farm; he has to pay his siblings (not just Henri but his three sisters, two of whom are nuns) off, and he will continue to run it. The legal action is significant—“Farrebique” is in large part a juridical drama in which the virtual background grid of law and custom are thrust into the foreground. But it’s integrated with a meticulous, passionate documentation of the rounds of daily work on the farm—sowing seeds, plowing fields, hauling crops with the aid of oxen, harvesting vegetables by hand, grinding wheat with a gasoline-powered machine, kneading dough and packing it under blankets to rise, baking bread in the farmhouse’s brick oven. (One minor detail that I find particularly striking is the patriarch’s use of a knife that would have to be razor-sharp to cut fine, thin slices off a boulder-like loaf of bread.)

 

Rouquier records the social rites and practices of the farm and its neighborhood—church services, childbirth at home, courtship, the patriarch’s funeral, singing and dancing in a café—as well as the family’s linguistic habits: the patriarch speaks not French but Occitan (in the original release, his dialogue was subtitled in French), which his children and grandchildren understand (but they respond in French). The cinematography, by André A. Dantan, is intimate yet monumental; he and Rouquier compose images of a stark and pure graphic severity that renders daily action and familiar routine dynamic, energetic, heroic.

Rouquier’s film is only superficially a documentary. He punctuates the film with time-lapse sequences that show crops growing and flowers blooming, macrophotographic sequences that show blood pumping in arteries and cellular reproduction. He blends the drama of social life in and around the farm—and the cycle of seasons that governs it—with biological analysis. The movie’s central sequence—a visual reconstruction of a century of Farrebique’s history from the family’s perspective, as narrated by the grandfather to his grandson Raymondou—is a virtual evolutionary account of the growth of a farm. A masterly editor, Rouquier brings the long, cyclical rhythms—domestic, seasonal, generational, historical—of farm life with varied and perceptible cinematic rhythms. With its grand cinematography, its built-in social science, and its sense of montage, “Farrebique” most closely resembles a film by Eisenstein; it’s almost like a work of Soviet silent cinema without the ideological obligations and overlays, in which actual social science takes the place of political dogma.

 

After making “Farrebique,” Rouquier directed a series of short films, documentaries, and features before finding a sideline as an actor. His last film, “Biquefarre,” from 1983, is a return to the land and the people of “Farrebique”; it, too, is the name of a farm. Rouquier opens the film with a look at the characters of the earlier film and their present-day appearance and life situation. The elderly Roch still runs Farrebique, and his son Raymond (the earlier film’s young Raymondou) works it with him. Henri became a shopkeeper in Toulouse. The proprietor of the nearby farm of Biquefarre, Raoul Pradal (played by Roger Malet), plans to sell it and move to the city. Raymond wants to buy the property and expand Farrebique but can’t afford to. Roch, paralyzed and rendered aphasic by a stroke, is unable to help, but Henri takes dramatic measures to bring about a happy ending.

 

In “Biquefarre,” Rouquier trades the microscopic science of the earlier film for a wider perspective, a political one. Here, his subject is globalization. He films farmers discussing the new scope of farming, the economic centrality of exporting crops and meat, the legal obstacles to doing so, the administrative difficulties that the new scale of farming imposes on small farmers. A scene at a meeting of a farmers’ syndicate suggests the extreme transformations—social, political, economic—that industrial farming imposes on farmers. Rouquier films a world of agriculture—and a social life of farmers—that hardly resembles the one that he had filmed in the mid-nineteen-forties. Yet, despite the movie's broad purview, Rouquier maintains a documentary-based interest in the details of farm life (one notable subplot involves the harmful effects of modern pesticides on humans and wildlife) and in family relations. The film’s ingenious conclusion, bringing Roch and Henri together at the end of a hard journey—and weaving the new film and the old one together as well—offers one of the most moving endings, and one of the greatest last shots, in the history of cinema.