These and other short films which followed affirmed Rouquier's interest in showing men who expressed themselves in their accumulated traditional skills, drawn from an integrated rural way of life.

[1][2] In 1944 Rouquier embarked on his first feature-length film, Farrebique, and spent 18 months living with a peasant farming family at Goutrens in Aveyron to document their way of life and their surroundings.

[4] He produced from this a lyrical chronicle of rural life, structured around the four seasons, at a time when the traditional vision of agriculture was about to vanish with the introduction of mechanised production methods.

[6] However, 38 years later when he was 74, Rouquier finally had the chance to film his contrasting look at the same location in Biquefarre (1983), in which he applied the same detailed attention to a transformed way of life.

[3] Rouquier continued to make commissioned short films on a variety of subjects, including portraits of the biologist and chemist Louis Pasteur (1947) and the composer Arthur Honegger (1955).