The notion of outsider art is a slippery one. There is too often a worry about losing the line between eccentric takes and manifestations of a troubled mind. Unless I missed it, there is no mention of the “outsider” tag in this largely responsible study of a semi-legendary film by the late Somerset farmer Charles Carson. But the subject seems to fit. As contributors here explain, the compilation of home videos, featuring some ingenious in-camera editing, begin in odd, but reasonably sane, fashion before drifting into unsettling territory. Carson loved to film horses plucking hats from visitors to Coombe End Farm. He shows us how he turned a regular mower into an intermittently successful sit-down version. He straps cardboard skeletons to the animals and has them act out ghostly gymkhanas. Who among us can say we have not done the same?
The documentary posits that things turn properly weird when Charles, in queasily jaunty fashion, introduces us to his recently dead cat. The film later addresses how Charles processed the death of his own family members. There is a tension between the sort of realism that those working the land have about death and a contrary mawkishness that sets the teeth on edge. Just wait for him to cut There’s No One Quite Like Grandma into his video. One is never quite sure if it’s right to look.
Such experiments are easier to find than was the case when Carson shot his videos, three decades ago. Contributors to this documentary note that he would have had a ball with YouTube. Maybe he was, to draw an inevitable cliche, ahead of his time. Oscar Harding’s film is an odd mix. At the sober end of talking-headery, he accepts fascinating contributions from the distinguished Irish psychiatrist Dr Ciaran Mulholland and from the singular writer and undertaker Thomas Lynch. Mulholland speaks calmly and intelligently. Lynch is excellent on how, in his recording of the dead, the amateur film-maker is reaching back to ancient traditions. This sits slightly awkwardly with some more larkish segments that risk placing the work in world’s-zaniest-video territory.
For the most part, however, A Life on the Farm is a warm-hearted celebration of an oddity for the ages. Where else would a film-maker boast he’s about to offer a “jolly good look at a placenta”? What other documentary will offer you a chance to catch up with the briefly famous Koo Stark? Who? Oh, ask your dad.
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A Life on the Farm is on limited release
