A Life on the Farm

The video footage is demented, hysterically funny, and supremely dark. In presenting Carson’s antics and dissecting his style as a presenter, A Life on the Farm provides a horror-tinged giggle fest.

Harding’s film proves movingly open-minded on the subject of the strange things isolation can do, but as a neighbour he might have been nosier. English reserve seems to have prevented further prying into the circumstances that created this English eccentric.

For the most part...A Life on the Farm is a warm-hearted celebration of an oddity for the ages.

For all its convention, Oscar Harding’s A Life on the Farm remains an elegy for amateur filmmaking, while also allowing for the survival of Carson’s work, which though brilliant, remained undiscovered and unrecognized until now.

The documentary’s director, Oscar Harding, explains that his grandfather was a neighbour of Carson’s in the wonderfully named village of Huish Champflower, and he was first shown A Life on the Farm age six. Stretching this curiosity of a man and his work into a full-length documentary is perhaps pushing it.

It is ironic that a documentary all about the creativity of an avant-garde artist has no creativity in its own construction.