Far from the Madding Crowd

I was very happy to watch the classic 1967 film of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd on TCM last night. The closest I had been to Hardy in recent years was the 2011 film of Posy Simmonds' cartoon strip heroine Tamara Drewe (characters and story inspired by Far from the Madding Crowd), entertaining in its own way, but with none of the raw passion and drama of Hardy's novel.

Besides the grand scale of the story and the excellence of the four principal actors, John Schlesinger's direction and Nicolas Roeg's wonderful cinematography and use of the Dorset countryside make the film a joy to watch. Its slow pace and intensity of emotion, especially in Boldwood's tragic obsession with Bathsheba, made me appreciate the extent to which the breakneck speed and special effect of modern cinema is destroying it as an artform.

I was also very interested in the depiction of late 19th century agriculture in England. Many scenes from the film are very reminiscent of the manual farming techniques used by the vast majority of African smallholder farmers, except that oxen and heavy horses appear to have been used much more for soil tillage. Experts estimate that less than 10% of agricultural land in Africa is tilled using animals. Given the widespread ownership of cattle in East Africa, it used to baffle me why the use of animal traction is not more common. Recently, I found a plausible explanation in John Reader's excellent history, Africa: Biography of a Continent. He attributes this apparent mystery to the harshness of the East and Southern African environment. As temperatures increase during the dry season, both forage and water for cattle become harder to find. Cattle therefore are at their weakest when the planting season begins at the onset of the rains, and simply do not have the strength to provide enough power to till the rock-hard ground. Contrast this with the pre-mechanical era in Northern Europe, where fields could be ploughed at the beginning of winter using well-fed animals, ready to be manually sowed in springtime.