Phayvanh Luekhamhan
By Phayvanh Luekhamhan
Screening at the Savoy Theater for the third time this fall and early winter on Friday, Dec. 13, at 7 p.m. is Charles Light’s newest documentary “Far Out: Live On and After the Commune” about the Packer Corners (Vermont) and Montague (Massachusetts) communes. It is an interesting artifact to emerge in the era of individual broadcast and curated-content creation. It combines the washed out warmth of Instagram filters and off-the-cuff performative live streams of TikTok lifestyle vloggers with a measured reflection that only age and time provides.
Fifty years in the making, it is intended to be Light’s opus — his final installment to the collected works of the communes. A discussion with the filmmaker follows the screening.
The movie is a compilation of video footage from the farmers/activists, newly digitized and stitched with recent interviews that serve as the primary narrative. Unfolding like chapters of a memory book, the overall tale is a peek into two urban-flight communes in their political heyday of the 1970s. These homegrown pieces are augmented with archival news footage and clips from previous films produced by Light’s production company, Green Mountain Post.
We meet the disaffected college grads in their mid twenties as they are about to splinter off of the Liberation News Service (LNS), a leftist publication they founded in New York City that was on the edge of disaster. To avoid what they believed to be an ouster of their friend, they absconded with the printing press and headed north. A group settled in Massachusetts and began Montague Farms. The rest began anew with Total Loss Farm at Packer Corners, Guilford, Vermont.
Ray Mungo, whose book about the LNS was optioned for film by Robert Redford, claims the objective was to turn away from the cauldron of societal unrest. Together, they would discover a different kind of life. “I wasn’t really brought up to live in my body,” said Veranda Porche, a New Jersey native who settled at Packer Corners.
“Our whole idea of moving to the farm was to get away from the cities, to get away from politics, to get away from the news,” Mungo says. For us living in the era of information overload, this rings true — the impulse to detox from the incessant ache of a world falling apart. For them, part of the adventure was “being exposed to nature and its glories for the first time.”
They were naive about farming but eager to learn. It’s clear the journalistic quest to know and synthesize the world around them was never far. This took the form of learning tractor mechanics, bovine husbandry, and weathering Vermont winters.
One gets the sense that their stories have been told many times, to the joy of both the tellers and listeners. Lithe, beautiful, and energetic, they were open to the possibilities of an unmapped life. After the film option stalled, they turned the cameras on themselves. In this way, these hippies distinguished themselves from Vermont’s approximately 75 other communes.
According to the Vermont Historical Society, “Total Loss Farm in Guilford is one of the enduring communes and perhaps the most successful. Established in 1968, the commune survived the difficult early years with money earned from writing.” Mungo, Porche, and others, produced numerous books. Interest in Mungo’s film options also kept income flowing.
Charles Light, later joined by Dan Keller and Howard Wasserman, were the main film documentarians. Light produced many films, including “Lovejoy’s Nuclear War” (1975), which documented a return to activism with the gusto of their LNS days.
The crew had cut their journalistic teeth at the LNS. They were primed to make the most of newsworthy moments, and their latent skills rose to the challenge. They were the media. They were the message. And according to Wasserman, “We were the content.” For cohabitants who didn’t have a stated common cause, this gave those who needed it a unifying rally call.
Sam Lovejoy found himself helming a coalition and producing fundraising concerts featuring Bruce Springsteen and other rock and rollers. They found themselves in national publications. Off-farm, they found that it was “exciting to pretend to be someone else.” While a faction enjoyed the thrill of movement-making, the rest kept the home fires burning and the cows milked.
This on-farm/off-farm tension was one of many that they had to deal with. Well educated and guided by an innate if undefined moral compass, tensions arose when unequal farmwork manifested along gendered roles. They also navigated gay identity, orgies, communal child-rearing; what never seemed to waver was the sense that this was an experience to relish together.
For a movie meant to capture an insular cohort defying the fleet of time, it often mirrors today’s realities. During the pandemic, Vermont experienced an in-migration of city-dwellers retreating to our mountains. Today we have a culture of persistent self-documentation. Instead of waiting 50 years for the world’s reaction, we have social media’s instantaneous feedback. In addition to physical enclaves, the internet allows us to form bonds with like-minded folks regardless of location. As with the Total Loss farmers, some of us are earning enough from our content to support our lifestyles.
When one of their own was on trial, the Total Loss cohort put up the 96-acre farm to secure her bail. It was a moving demonstration of togetherness. The modern-day equivalent would be a GoFundMe page. We are not that different from the communards afterall.
When asked in an interview earlier this month why people aren’t trying to live communally nowadays, Light replied, “I think because the bent of things is more towards a community than a commune.” Some members today have joined their local selectboards or are otherwise active in local politics.
This is where the movie ultimately falls far from the promise of the subtitle: life on and off the commune is captured, but not the after. Although the film spans 50 years, there is no archival footage after the 1970s to consider. Interviews slowed after 2010. Perhaps social media’s penetration into everyone’s inner lives was yet another thing to oppose.
The Montague compound no longer exists, and the Guilford group remains in a much smaller iteration. It is no longer an active farm.
As the final piece to the collected communal works, the movie follows the rule of the commune as Porche explains it: “You climb the hill; you don’t look back till you reach the top. Then you look over to this self-involved little valley.” To them, “it looked like the only place in the world.”
The movie has been touring the festival circuit, completing a five-week run at the Latchis Theater in Brattleboro. It plays as part of the Vermont International Film Festival in Burlington this weekend and will be screened at the Savoy in Montpelier on Friday, Oct. 18, at 7 p.m. with the filmmaker present.
—
Phayvanh Luekhamhan is a freelance writer who grew up in Brattleboro and knew some of the folks in the film. She was festival director for the 2024 Green Mountain Film Festival and continues to administer the project. She lives in Barre.
