Review by Pavel Mikoloski

In the 60's and 70's, quite a number of East Coast preppies migrated to liberal arts colleges across the country. I was one of them and ended up at Beloit College, a beautiful ivy-encrusted gem sitting atop a hill in an industrial town surrounded by the endless panoply of Midwestern cornfields. The farm culture was almost unknown to me and many of the other city and suburbanites at Beloit College, which was a stronghold for 60's radicalism and progressive intellectual pursuits. And yet the train to the college passed though farm after farm on the flat Midwestern landscape which stretched out to the horizon with nary a hill in sight.

Some of the children of these farmers ended up at Beloit and one of those was John Peterson, who as a freshman in 1968 ran a dairy and vegetable farm while taking a full course load at Beloit. John was blessed with an extensive archive of home movies, thanks to his mother's gift of a camera and a love for filming her family that was to become a documentation of the Midwestern farm culture from the 50's onward and right up to the farm crisis of the early 80's. Beloit opened John's eyes to his own creative nature and he now had two great loves: farming and a life long devotion to the power of art and free expression.

Although I never attended one of the many parties at John's farm while at Beloit, I do remember students saying that the neighboring farmers whispered that the goings on at John's farm were those of some kind of a ritualistic cult. I laughed when I heard this, since the prep school I had attended which was based on character development (now quite standard in many schools) was also labeled a cult. It wasn't a laughing matter, however. This hulking, corn-fed Midwesterner received threats, his farm was vandalized, and later, an artist's studio he had built under a patch of oak trees was burnt to the ground. The artist-in-residence lost years of her work.

I got to the college in 1976, a good four years after John graduated and a year before Taggart Siegel showed up on the scene. Taggart, also from the East Coast, had spent time at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, studying film with Donald Spoto, one of the world's top film teachers, critics, and historians. Taggart pieced together a film major at Beloit, a college that didn't have even have a film department. I acted in two of Taggart's first attempts at film, one of them a tragedy in black and white about a love triangle involving two dancers and an artist living in an industrial town among the cornfields. I don't remember much of the plot, but I do remember Taggart's eye for the poetic. Some of his imagery from these films still sticks in my mind — especially the contrast of the bleak industrial backdrop; a railroad trestle or a stone water tower contrasted with the beauty of dancers at the barre in their dance studio.

Taggart had a passion for film, and it was only a matter of time until he crossed paths with the affable Peterson who had been in front of the movie camera since age one. From these home movie archives, he fashioned the basis for Real Dirt while John wrote the script and voiced the narration. I remember years ago talking to Taggart about his film projects including a story about Laotian refugees who were pipe-bombed in Rockford, Illinois, and one on shamanism that did quite well on the film festival circuit. There was always this other film in the background… being added to, improved upon, and finally completed 15 years after their partnership began.

Although I was not one of the "artists, farmers, hippies, seekers, and future monks" who hung out at the Peterson farm, I was part of the milieu of the time. And what a time-capsule Real Dirt is! These two friends have created a great American epic documentary about a subject matter very few Americans know anything about. "The basic story was the rise of the American family farm, its collapse, and resurrection," Says Siegel. "It's a redemption saga of a farmer who went broke, suffered in the wilderness, and returned triumphant with an utterly different form of farming."¹ This documentary is not one to miss.

Real Dirt is now available on DVD.

¹ The Beloit College Magazine, Fall/Winter 2005 in Home Ground: Farmer John Gets Down to the Real Dirt by David Tenenbaum, Pg 19.