Agnes Varda's documentary The Gleaners and I celebrates the notion of "freeganism" or what the French call "gleaners." Unlike the punk antics of activists, gleaning in France is not so much a matter of rebellion but a matter of rite. There is a tradition in France from days of old that allows people to come behind a harvest and pick up any fruit and veggies that weren't elected by the grower to go to market, over-sized or heart shaped potatoes for instances. "This apple is like a stupid ugly woman," says one person of the discards, "zero value." Here, gleaners give new meaning to the phrase "having a field day." (Although gleaning is forbidden in precious Burgundy wine country!) The film moves from these rural gleaners to the urban gleaners as Varda talks with a wide variety of interesting characters: drunks, gypsies, artists, activists, rappers, volunteer teachers... many with a very "lived" look to their faces. Gleaners come from all walks of life and here they include a gourmet chef and a psychoanalyst. Picking a patient's brain is too a form of gleaning as the therapists is in a state of poverty, a state of not knowing.
Varda uses this film as her owns means of self-exploration. It is told in a very self-reflexive style that you will either enjoy or be irritated by. We are subjected to extreme close-ups of her gray hair or her aging liver spotted hands as she says, "we enter in the horror of her hand". The beauty in her choosing to take home a clock with no hands is symbolic of the overall poetic style to this work - "an emotion film." Long shots of her lens cap dancing in the wind, repetitive shots of trucks on the highway, and of course, her fascination with the heart shaped potatoes - food that warms the heart.
There are many words to describe this gleaning behavior: stoopers, pickers, retrievers, recyclers... Some see found objects as dictionaries - helping us to come to an understanding of humankind. Varda has a fascination with old paintings showing gleaners, like Millet's famous Gleaneuses (pictured here), but she unearths many others - from op shops to the storage basement of a museum. Marey, an early innovator of photographer, even gets evoked somehow and the combination of all her elements gives this film a very ethnographic feel.
Varda describes herself as a gleaner of images and she explores this idea in a 60 minute follow-up 2 years on (an extra on the DVD). Here she not only revisits some of the characters in the original documentary but she also meets with new gleaners who flooded her with letters and gifts in response to the release of the first film. She looks at the impact the film had on her and those who participated, the characters who share their "confidence and confidences." The Gleaners and I is a delight to watch on so many levels. It is a meditation on waste, of living on the fringes of society and conversely, what this says about people we don't see in the film: the thoughtless consumers. To me, the film is not only about the discarding of objects, but of the decay and disenfranchising of the aged. Finally, in a subtle way, this film is about self and our relationship to the world through the eyes of a very creative filmmaker for whom low production values equates to high art.
Varda uses this film as her owns means of self-exploration. It is told in a very self-reflexive style that you will either enjoy or be irritated by. We are subjected to extreme close-ups of her gray hair or her aging liver spotted hands as she says, "we enter in the horror of her hand". The beauty in her choosing to take home a clock with no hands is symbolic of the overall poetic style to this work - "an emotion film." Long shots of her lens cap dancing in the wind, repetitive shots of trucks on the highway, and of course, her fascination with the heart shaped potatoes - food that warms the heart.
There are many words to describe this gleaning behavior: stoopers, pickers, retrievers, recyclers... Some see found objects as dictionaries - helping us to come to an understanding of humankind. Varda has a fascination with old paintings showing gleaners, like Millet's famous Gleaneuses (pictured here), but she unearths many others - from op shops to the storage basement of a museum. Marey, an early innovator of photographer, even gets evoked somehow and the combination of all her elements gives this film a very ethnographic feel.
Varda describes herself as a gleaner of images and she explores this idea in a 60 minute follow-up 2 years on (an extra on the DVD). Here she not only revisits some of the characters in the original documentary but she also meets with new gleaners who flooded her with letters and gifts in response to the release of the first film. She looks at the impact the film had on her and those who participated, the characters who share their "confidence and confidences." The Gleaners and I is a delight to watch on so many levels. It is a meditation on waste, of living on the fringes of society and conversely, what this says about people we don't see in the film: the thoughtless consumers. To me, the film is not only about the discarding of objects, but of the decay and disenfranchising of the aged. Finally, in a subtle way, this film is about self and our relationship to the world through the eyes of a very creative filmmaker for whom low production values equates to high art.