A Life on the Farm: ‘Getting Koo Stark in the film was the weirdest conversation ever’

Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher began collecting found videotapes in 1991 after happening upon an unintentionally hilarious McDonald’s training video called Inside and Outside Custodial Duties at their local branch of the fast-food chain in Wisconsin. Since then they have assembled the world’s largest collection of video oddities, a collection that has blossomed into the Found Footage Festival. So when these self-professed weirdos say a video called A Life on the Farm is by far the weirdest one they’ve seen, it’s reason to take notice.

The seeds of this quirky new documentary were sown in 2006, when the documentary’s director, Oscar Harding, was 10 years old and in the remote Somerset village of Huish Champflower, in southwest England, for the funeral of his grandfather John Harding. As the family sorted through Harding snr’s belongings, Oscar’s aunt found on an old videotape containing a feature-length movie devised by, shot by and starring their neighbour Charles Carson.

It was a singular piece of work. Somewhere between its shots of a poignant pet funeral in an orchard and of a calf placenta, Oscar’s father decided it wasn’t appropriate viewing. But the tape stayed with those who saw it, especially Oscar. His quirky A Life on the Farm is a years-in-the-making investigation of Carson’s life and outsider art, a film that fits beautifully alongside such oddball classics as Grey Gardens and American Movie.

“I grew up in Bristol and went to secondary school down in a Somerset town called Taunton,” Harding says. “I was making silly little zombie films there and action films at school. At university I met my producing partners on this film. We would just make funny little ads and commercials for local companies. We always planned to develop a production company and a narrative feature. I always liked documentaries, but I felt you need a particular type of skill set and story. And then this film just fell into our laps.”

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A Life on the Farm gathers together Somerset neighbours and found-footage specialists to gab about its subject. Carson’s original film, which Harding aptly describes as Monty Python meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, depicts comic skits, hat-eating horses and various locals, including Harding’s grandmother, the area’s district nurse.

We had to jog a lot of memories. People who worked with Charles at agricultural college in Northumberland had no idea he was making films. Some people had no idea about this amazing rich life he led

“My grandfather was the church warden, so we had a lot of goodwill already,” Harding says. “I’m coming a little bit as an outsider, but that family connection helped. People knew that I was coming at it from a genuine, personal place. Where it got incredibly tricky was trying to develop those relationships in 2020, because we were attempting to schedule interviews between multiple lockdowns.

“I had moved to the US, and there was the travel ban right up until late 2021, by which point we’d finished production. I would be talking to locals on the phone for hours. And then I would have to tell them: I’m not going to be there; you’re going to meet my two partners. This whole thing was built on all these creators, and these talking heads, trusting each other. I think we got really lucky with how coherent the film turned out to be, because it was a bit of a Frankenstein project.”

Carson’s film-within-the-film remains a fascinating document. Its staged pratfalls with joke-shop skeletons and humorously captioned photo collages have proven a hit on YouTube, particularly among the found-footage community, who are variously represented in Harding’s documentary by contributors to Everything Is Terrible and TV Carnage. Carson’s film work had already been admired by the editorial staff of the long-defunct Camcorder User magazine. Unexpectedly, Prince Andrew’s former girlfriend Koo Stark, who once awarded Carson a prize for a photo collage, also movingly recalls how his work spoke to her.

“We had to jog a lot of memories,” Harding says. “People who worked with Charles at agricultural college in Northumberland had no idea he was making films. They only knew he was taking photos when he was a lecturer there. Some people never met him and knew him only through his work. Some people had no idea about this amazing rich life he led. And then getting Koo Stark in the film was the weirdest conversation ever. She’s understandably very careful who she talks to. And I’m calling to say, ‘You don’t know who I am. You are not going to remember who I’m talking about. Do you remember 20 years ago, you did one competition and picked a winner?”

Much of the film’s appeal lies in what Pickett and Prueher call Carson’s “dark, but friendly dark” sensibility. Embodying what is now voguishly termed death positivity, Carson photographs his dead mother as he wheels her out to greet the cows that knew her. One US talking head evokes Ed Gein, the serial killer who inspired Psycho, but Carson repeatedly insists that death is simply part of “life on the farm”.

“I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler here, but it was the death aspect that immediately stuck out,” Harding says. “When you first watch Charles’ footage, it’s funny. We intentionally leaned into that. At the start of the film, you are inclined to laugh at it because there is no context, especially if you didn’t grow up in a rural area. When people have seen the film in Wisconsin and Minnesota, they shrug their shoulders. They don’t know what the big deal is.”

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Carson carefully personalised his films for his neighbours and continually asked them for feedback. That doubled as a crucial permission for Harding and his team.

“Our first worry was from an ethical standpoint,” he says. “Should this be seen? And from everything we heard: absolutely.” Carson “distributed these two- and three-hour home movies across the village. He wanted people to see the films. He was an outsider artist. If TikTok had been a thing in the early 2000s he would have been doing it. We’ve screened his work in Antarctica, the Philippines and Brazil. I’m just so happy that we’ve been able to get so many audiences in different languages and that they all love him.”

A Life on the Farm opens on Friday September 8. Oscar Harding will participate in a Q&A at the Light House Cinema in Dublin on Saturday September 9th