[Frameworks] Films on Farming

[Linda Fenstermaker]

Thank you all for the inspiring links and title suggestions. Dave, I agree
that this is a relatively unexplored subject for experimental makers, which
is why I put out a call to see if others knew of more films that dealt with
farming than I did. I am also a filmmaker that works on a small scale
vegetable farm in the Northwest and am constantly inspired by the work and
surroundings. I am interested in where films inspired by farming falls
between landscape film, documentary and experimental works. Thanks again
for all the leads!

Linda Fenstermaker

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dave Tetzlaff <djtet53 at gmail.com>
To: Experimental Film Discussion List <frameworks at jonasmekasfilms.com>
Cc:
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2016 19:44:30 -0800
Subject: Re: [Frameworks] Films on Farming
> Mala Leche (2003) by Naomi Uman

'Mala Leche' is a racist/classist/xenophobic POS about a Mexican immigrant
family living in a slum in California.

The film about farming is just ‘Leche’ (1998) a totally romanticized vision
of life on a rural Mexican dairy farm, then the home of the family later
featured in ‘Mala Leche’.
The companion pieces are opposites, ‘Leche’ dreamy-positive; ‘Mala Leche’
fetid-negative, but each, in their own way, ideologically clueless and
corrupt.
______________

A wonderful, unorthodox (if not exactly experimental) farming related short
film: Chuck Statlers ‘Ain’t We Having Fun’ — scenes from the annual turkey
festival in Worthington, MN.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBwYvMcqRmI

Back in the previous decade when I was attending UFVA regularly, I saw
several experimental shorts about animal rights issue in terms of animal
farming and slaughter made by a PhD student than at Kansas named Mark von
Schlemmmer. I just Googled him, and he’s teaching at Central Missouri know.
He has a Youtube page at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=
PL7691C304BAC252F5
As I recall the pieces, what they lack in polish may be made offset for
your purpose by the subject and the passion applied to it.
______________

It seems to me a lot of the requests here for ‘experimental films about
[topic X]’ are for topics not only where few, if any, experimental films
exist, but also, like ‘farming’, the sort of concrete subjects experimental
films rarely if ever actually address or illuminate even when some element
of that topic has been in front of the lens.

That said, ‘farming’ strikes me as a kind of rich but unexplored territory
for inspiration or connection or material for many of the kinds of things
experimental makers do.
It’s certainly true that most makers have lived in and taken images from
cities. When leaving the urban, experimental work has most often been
wrapped up in Romantic concepts of ‘nature’. (I had to laugh at Adam’s
reference to "tilling fields & harvesting crops and working the soil’.)
Farming’ is pretty much marked by taming nature and bending it to a sort of
broad social will, with as much high tech as any big industry. So if an
experimental maker got out to farmland as it actually is, there’d be all
kinds of objects and actions that could serve as ostrananie to city folks,
and be grist for the mill of creative eyes and minds: giant combine
machines and elevators and irrigation systems, de-tasseling brigades…
Someone could do a cool ‘found footage’ piece cu from the TV ads that play
in Iowa, both local spots and big-budget high-production-value campaigns
for hybrid seed brands, fertilizer, herbicides and insecticides…. "Whether
you incorporate you atrazine or add it later, we have the right stuff for
you!"
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