Farrebique, or the Four Seasons

Georges Rouquier turned his camera on a single farmhouse in the Aveyron, Farrebique, and followed the family living there across four seasons. The house belonged to his own uncle and the people in it were his relatives and their neighbours; there are no professional actors. Rouquier spent three years planning the film and a year shooting it. What came out is neither fiction nor documentary in the ordinary sense: a year in which the field, the animals, birth and death all turn on the same calendar. The spring passage at the end was made with time-lapse photography and became the most cited part of the film. It won the international critics’ grand prize at Cannes in 1946. Rouquier came back to the same place almost forty years later, in 1983, and filmed what had become of the same family in Biquefarre.