Midcentury rural modern

In October 1953, a French delegation travelled to Rome to attend the Festival Internazionale del Film Agricolo – one of the first of what would become a regular series of agricultural and industrial film festivals held across Europe.1 In a promotional festival booklet, the French sought to highlight their films’ artistic value by placing agricultural cinema within a long history of art inspired by the land, a history dating to the fifteenth century and represented by a colour frontispiece reproduction of a harvest scene from the illuminated manuscript Da Grandes Heures de Rohan (1430–35). In this belle tradition, the accompanying text explained, ‘cinema appears as both a mirror of and a guide to rural life’.2 But agricultural cinema, the French insisted, had much more to offer than simply another expression of the ‘vitality and faith’ of the farm. In an entry on the following page, Jean-Marie Gatheron, Inspector General of French Agriculture, gave these films credit for nothing less than the complete revitalization of postwar film culture. ‘Rural cinema’, he asserted, ‘can – and only it, no doubt, can – definitively renew the poetic vain of cinema as a whole’.3

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