Faro Document (1969)

Unrated.  I think that one thing that I've learned from watching too many Criterion releases is that you have to get used to watching real animals getting slaughtered from start to finish without the camera moving.  Because this is about a farming community, you watch a lot of slaughter and a lot of lambs being born.  Like, so much.  At one point, I got desensitized and then REsensitized.  I don't think that's ever happened to me.  It's a lot.  Oh, my six-year-old walked in on one of the slaughters, but she didn't notice.

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman

This is how serious I am about completing everything.  You know that if I was a fly-by-night Bergman viewer, I would probably avoid the Faro Documents.  They are small, lightly political films about the farming community of his small island that he started living on.  Now, some people live for this stuff.  I tend to go into these movies with trepidation, but end up liking them when the whole thing.

Yeah, I liked it.  I didn't love it.  But I liked it.  Part of it comes from the fact that it is only 58 minutes long.  I probably could even excuse myself from writing about this when it's only got a 58 minute runtime.  But Bergman considered it a movie.  Thus, I too must consider it a movie.  And maybe this isn't the best selling point, but it felt way longer than 58 minutes. It does feel like I get to know the people of Faro Island pretty quickly, along with their frustrations with the way that the world is turning.  In many ways, the story is just the one of rural living fighting against the ever frustrating turn of progress.

I do love that this is a political movie.  I had no idea.  Honestly, when that conclusion to the movie pops up, where Ingmar Bergman tells how this is a movie talking about the benefits of Democratic Socialism, that's what got me.  Okay, the movie is fine up to that point. It feels very cinema verite documentary, something like the Sayleses would have made but in Swedish.  But beyond that, it felt like we were just getting a brutal look at what it meant to be a farmer on an isolated island.  But then there's that conclusion!  That conclusion is the most intense "I'm doing this for a reason" ending that came out of nowhere.  I mean, it's not shocking.  If you are going to pop in Faro Document to be floored by the end, that's not going to happen.  But it makes sense when placing Bergman in the context of his era.  He sees this small farming community and understands their plight. 

Yeah, they're a little backwards.  The movie almost embraces the notion that the previous generation will always vote against their own self-interests because that's the way that things have always been done.  I mean, the shattering smash cut between the black and white talking heads of old ladies (one that doesn't have a leg!) to the bright colored rock scored school bus full of children is telling about who this doc is meant for.  But it's a story Bergman probably hearing the complaints that this island has been holding onto since he fell in love with Faro and being proactive about the whole thing.  I don't know if he's being forthwith about his intentions to get a Democratic Socialist government in place.  But the movie looks at these grounded complaints and how just small electoral changes would revolutionize this tiny island.

I talked a little bit about the brutal parts of the movie in the MPAA section.  I know why he's doing it, but I have to wonder if there's a secondary point. So, because this is mostly a story of farming, especially when it comes to livestock.  Faro is known for their sheep and sheep processing.  One of the big points that Bergman touches on is the idea that, despite all of these sheep farmers, there's only one processing plant in driving distance.  As such, it talks about the monopoly that the slaughterhouse has over these people and how it all makes them miserable.  Now, I'm trying to be as open-minded as possible with the sheep slaughtering and the lamb birthing sequences.  They aren't short.  If anything, Bergman is mildly obsessed with segmenting his film into long sequences.  His interviews are as long as these slaughtering and birthing sequences.  In my mind, it's Bergman showing what the life of a livestock farmer is like.  He really wants to get in there, especially when the residents of Faro see this documentary that they are in.  But, do you think, even a little bit, that Bergman is also trying to gross me out?

I want to scale back for a second.  While this is a documentary for the people of Faro, first and foremost, this was shown on Swedish television as far as I understand.  These sequences are not easy to watch.  Part of the entire narrative of the documentary is that it is very hard to be a farmer, especially in a place as desolate as it is.  As much as it has a summer tourism business, Bergman seems to be trying to distance the summer vacations from what it really means to be a resident of Faro.  As part of that, he's almost Clockwork Oranging us (the second time I've used that description in the past couple days.  I lose all creativity when I have to mass produce these blogs).  He wants people to see that life is hard enough as it is without having to deal with this stuff.  The funny thing is that the farmers understand that both life and death on a farm are just part of what it means to be a farmer.  There's something entirely philosophical that loses all of its meaning when dealing with the real world practicality of slaughtering and birthing.

I probably need to close this up because I've started watching Faro Document 1979 and I really don't want the two movies bleeding together.  My big takeaway is that I kind of see Bergman without the pretense of being Ingmar Bergman is like.  My frustration with a lot of the Bergman box is that he gets so lost in talking about having affairs and intellectual monstrosity that he kind of forgets what it means to be a regular person.  If there's one thing that Faro Document absolutely nails is what it is like to be a normal person.  Listen, I'm always going to lean hard into art because I worry about a world without art.  But these are stories of real people dealing with real problems.  And Bergman, while we get little of him as documentarian in the actual film, seems to abandon any sense of class difference.  These people are his neighbors and he treats them as such.   He sees their suffering and how often their little worlds are immensely huge to them.  That's touching.  Maybe it's just a nice break from the constant reappearing of people being obsessed with books over human feelings that gets me with Faro Document.  

​Still, the movie works more than it doesn't.