3 - Depth of Field: Farmland and Farm Life in Contemporary French Documentary

Summary

About 15 minutes before the end of Raymond Depardon's 2008 documentary La vie moderne/Modern Life, the film-maker frames Marcel Privat in a low-angle long shot as the elderly herdsman strides up a sunny hillside after his sheep. Two intersecting diagonals bisect the shot horizontally: a horizon line that separates hill from cloud, and the top edge of white clouds that give way to the deep blue of a summer sky (Fig. 3.1). On the soundtrack, wind rustles the tall grasses. Ewes’ bells clink as the animals move and graze. The next shot is also diagonal in composition, this time more subtly so as the focus is on Marcel, seated on the slope and framed from the waist up. ‘Vous avez combien de brebis là?’ (‘How many ewes do you have?) asks the film-maker, off-camera. Privat responds, ‘Une cinquantaine’ (‘About 50’). And then, after a pause, he adds, ‘C’est la fin’ (‘It's the end’). Depardon replies, ‘C’est la fin? Pourquoi vous dites c’est la fin?’ (‘The end? Why do you say it's the end?’). ‘Parce que moi je peux plus garder’ (‘Because I can’t tend any more’), explains the ageing herdsman. ‘Il n’y a plus personne pour garder. On va les vendre’ (‘There's nobody anymore to mind them. We’re going to sell them’). His younger brother, 83-year-old Raymond, declares in the next scene that ‘dans notre métier d’agriculteur dans les régions accidentées, il faut pas aimer son métier, il faut être passionné’ (‘In our job as farmers of the steep areas, liking your job isn't enough, it takes passion!’). Because of the rugged terrain, he continues, ‘on peut pas planter de la vigne ni semer du blé pour le vendre. Il faut bien que ce soit les animaux’ (‘we can't plant vines or sow wheat. We just have our herds’). After a pause, he too admits that he is ‘au bout du rouleau’ (‘at the end of his tether’).

The ‘elegiac’ tone that characterises Depardon's portrait of the Privat brothers permeates Modern Life, the final film in the Profils paysans trilogy, which opens with Gabriel Fauré's ‘Élégie Opus 24’ (Cooper 2010: 64). The three films include a series of portraits of family farmers in mountainous regions of central France, farmers who are ageing, dying, selling, or failing to start up new operations.