2023-08-09 03:11:00
Farrebique in 1946. Biquefarre in 1983. If there is one aspect of cinema that has marked Aveyron forever, it is this unique diptych in French cinema by Georges Rouquier. 38 years apart, the filmmaker came to film the daily life of this hamlet which is home to his father’s farm. Peasant France.
Farrebic. This film, by its originality and its subject, which makes nature the main star, shakes up French cinema, and gives a name to Georges Rouquier. He was 29 years old when, with a small team, he filmed the story of the Rouquiers, in this farm nestled a few meters from Goutrens. The young director will follow the rhythm of the seasons to give all the weight of authenticity to this film, which is described as a barely fictionalized documentary. Georges Rouquier is still unaware of the repercussions that are preparing.
Cannes, Venice, Paris
Noticed by the Cannes festival of 1946, Grand Prix of French cinema that same year, selected at the Venice Film Festival, Farrebique remains a cinematographic “phenomenon”. Filmed moreover with the peasants of the hamlet in their own role. This film is a kind of snapshot of life in the French countryside following the Second World War.
Forty years later, Biquefarre. At the beginning of the 1980s, Georges Rouquier undertook to do the counterpart of Farrebique. He turns Biquefarre and puts the whole village in tune once more. It is thanks to the Americans, for whom Farrebique remains a monument of French film, that Rouquier will find the necessary funds for this Biquefarre shoot. A slightly larger team with eight to ten technicians, a slightly more fictionalized story, tight filming over seven or eight weeks, but always local actors. Result, at the dawn of the 80s: the success is brilliant for Biquefarre. And Farrebique his inseparable.
“On March 26, 1984, at the Rignac village hall, there were nearly 700 people to see the world premiere, slips Jean-Claude Trebosc, co-president of the association which manages the Georges Rouquier space in Goutrens The chairman of the Department, the bishop and even the American producer were present.”
The next day, Biquefarre is on all the big screens. He will stay three months in Rodez and will register more than 25,000 spectators. He won the special grand jury prize at the Venice Film Festival. Definitively inscribing this diptych in the history of French cinema.
By creating the Georges Roquier space in the village of Goutrens, the inhabitants continue to bring Farrebique and Biquefarre to life. “We owed that to Georges,” says André Benaben, the other co-president of the association. “Without his films, the cinema would have been orphaned of something.”
Visiting Costa Gavras
With Jean-Claude Trébosc, they are among the many inhabitants who played a role in the realization of Biquefare. Jean-Claude at the management and André on the set. He was thirty and like and found himself in front of the camera. “It’s a great memory. Especially since Georges and his team made us all very comfortable. They wanted us to stay natural”, remembers André Benaben. “It was a chance that we were given to shoot in this film. It was quite impressive too, especially when we see each other followingwards on the big cinema screen. At first, I did not see the film. I I especially saw everything that was around”, says André Benaben.
Jean-Claude Trebosc also measures this chance with the friendship he has forged over time with Costa Gavras, a great friend of Georges Rouquier. The director of “Z” or “Missing” also made the trip to Goutrens, in 2018, to visit the space dedicated to the Aveyron filmmaker. “We are still in contact, and every time I see him, he asks me how things are going in the country!” smiles the co-president. “For him, Farrebique spoke to him of his youth in the Peloponnese”.
This friendship between Rouquier and Gavras underlines the dimension of Georges Rouquier in the world of cinema. Author of many films, including one with Jean Marais (“SOS Noronha”), Lourdes and its miracles or “Malgovert”, even today Georges Rouquier, if he is not in the box office of the general public, is taught in film schools.
The Georges Rouquier space, in the very heart of the village, reveals all this in a very accessible scenography. “We are also organizing outdoor screenings of Farrebique and Biquefarre, at the request of people. At the beginning of July, in Bournazel, eighty people had made the trip to Farrebique. And on August 9, at 9:30 p.m. in Goutrens, we will screen Biquefarre in the presence of William Gilcher, one of the film’s co-producers. Then we will start once more next summer”, explains Jean-Claude Trébosc.
Almost 80 years following the shooting of Farrebique, 40 years following that of Biquefarre, Goutrens is truly the guardian of the work of the child of the country…
To do. Visit the Espace Georges-Rouquier and walk in the footsteps of the filming of Farrebique and Biquefarre
The Georges-Rouquier space, opened in the heart of the village of Goutrens in 2011, highlights all of the filmmaker’s work. Through a well-orchestrated scenography, we follow the director’s life from the filming of Farrebique to that of Biquefarre.
Currently a temporary exhibition is on view until September: “Biquefarre 40 years” (then at the Rignac Media Library in November).
The village also offers an eight-kilometre walk, with very little elevation, connecting the important filming sites of the two films, with, what is more, passages on sites where the view is truly breathtaking.
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