The opening title card of Farrebique
City Lights Film Series curator Ahmed Tahsin Shams observes the rewarding stillness of Georges Rouquier’s Farrebique (1946).
Rejected by Cannes, revered by history, Georges Rouquier’s Farrebique (English: The Four Seasons, France) is a cinematic slow burn, capturing a world on the cusp of change through the eyes of those who must decide: resist or adapt? When Farrebique was submitted to the first Cannes Film Festival in 1946, it was rejected outright. One jury member infamously dismissed it with these words: “I don’t consider cow dung to be photogenic material” (Travers 2015). Perhaps they were looking for grandeur, for cinematic gestures bold enough to define a nation in flux. What they failed to see was that Farrebique was the grandest gesture of all — a film that refused to be reduced to spectacle, that did not chase narrative but rather allowed time to unfold at its own deliberate, organic pace. In my opinion, this film not only anticipated the French New Wave but also pioneered today’s “Science New Wave” by exploring the limits of scientific storytelling and the intricate interplay between time, space, humans, and nonhuman entities.
The film went on to win the first-ever FIPRESCI Prize (International Federation of Film Critics), later finding its way into the hearts of filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola, who recognized its quiet, tectonic power (Khaldi 2016). Decades later, Rouquier would return to the same farm for Biquefarre (1983), a companion film that answers the questions Farrebique only dared to ask. The land remains, but the world has changed. Tractors now plow the soil where oxen once tread. The Occitan language is fading. The rhythms of life, once dictated by the sun and seasons, now move at the speed of markets, machines, and modernity.
Some films move like timepieces, ticking toward resolution. Others breathe — slow, cyclical, inhaling life and exhaling history. Farrebique does neither. Instead, it listens to the land, to the whispers of generations, to the creak of wooden carts, and to the silence before the storm. It does not record time; it absorbs it, holds it in its grainy hands, and then lets it slip like soil through fingers.
Rouquier’s film, shot across a full year in the Aveyron countryside, stands on the fault line between tradition and modernity, a quiet negotiation between an ancient way of life and the creeping inevitability of progress. Unlike the grandiose postwar narratives that sought to redefine France in the wake of destruction, Farrebique lingers in the spaces where time itself hesitates — between old and new, between plow and machine, between a candle’s flicker and the switch of electric light.
The term documentary fails to contain Farrebique. It is neither vérité nor propaganda, neither romantic pastoral nor strict ethnography. It is a recreated truth, sculpted from lived reality but framed with intent (Weiss 1981, 56). The farming family featured in this film consists of the director’s relatives, who spent a year documenting their lives in the agricultural community of Aveyron, a region in South-Central France. So they are not actors, but neither are they entirely unaware of the frame. Like American filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty, Rouquier curates reality. Time-lapse sequences transform nature’s rhythms into visual music: seeds split, stems push through the soil, and ferns uncurl like time itself, rewinding and unspooling. The cycles of life — birth, labor, and death — are mirrored in the land, a cinematic language written not in words but in weather and seasons.
“It was already called Farrebique.”
At the core of Farrebique is an argument disguised as a conversation: should the family farm install electricity? It is a deceptively simple question, but within it lies a country’s postwar reckoning with progress, a people standing at the crossroads of past and future. It is a film that demands patience, rewards stillness, and teaches us how to see, how to wait, and how to listen. In an era where cinema often rushes to fill silence, to cut away before a moment lingers too long, Farrebique reminds us that meaning is not found in speed but in duration.
So we invite you to sit, to breathe, to enter the rhythm of this world, not just to watch, but to witness.
Khaldi, Tarik. “Farrebique: A Homage to the First Film to Win an International Press Prize.” Festival de Cannes, May 13, 2016.
Neufeld, Jonathan A. “Aesthetic Disobedience.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73, no. 2 (2015): 115–25.
Travers, James. “Farrebique ou Les Quatre Saisons (1946).” French Films, 2015.
Weiss, John H. “An Innocent Eye? The Career and Documentary Vision of Georges Rouquler up to 1945.” Cinema Journal 20, no. 2 (1981): 38–62.
Farrebique will be screened at IU Cinema on March 8 at 4pm as part of the City Lights Film Series.
Ahmed Tahsin Shams is a Ph.D. student (2023-2028) in Media Arts and Sciences at the Media School of Indiana University Bloomington, USA. His areas of research interest include eco-cinema aesthetics, experimental cinematic practices, and visual arts in the Age of the Anthropocene.