The Gleaners & I

The Gleaners and I (2000) is a French film directed by Agnes Varda. Her films tend to put emphasize on photography and art installations that focus on documentary realism, feminist issues, and social commentary using an participatory style of filmmaking. She is considered to be an “overlooked voice in the modern French cinema” where her career dates back to before the French New Wave. Originally, Agnes took a particular interest in photography, but then had a growing interest in the movement of film. The Gleaners and I, released in 2000, was the first time that Agnes used a digital camera where she follows a series of gleaners, an inquiry way of life for the French. From picking leftover potatoes in the countryside, to subjects who create art through recycled material, the film explores how great things like art can still be created through worthless items labeled as garbage. It is a political and stylist film presented in the poetic and reflexive mode of documentary.

Content And Form

This film is presented by Varda as an actual 'collection of her own gleaning'. It was shot over the course of seven months, in several regions of France, including, Beauce, Jura, Provence, the Pyrenees, and particular suburbs of Paris. She uses a hand-held digital (color) camera to capture each scene, contributing not only significant value to the film itself, but to her own personal sentiment. In an interview with Melissa Andersen, Varda claims, “I had the feeling that this is the camera that would bring me back to the early short films I made in 1957 and 1958. I felt free at that time. With new digital camera, I felt I could film myself, get involved as a filmmaker." Out of the seven months-worth of footage, Varda's film runs about 82 minutes in length. It is very loosely edited, sometimes incorporating accidental footage, like one particular scene she calls "Dance with the lens cap", where she accidentally is shooting footage of a dangling lens cap from her camera. Because of moments like these, the film occasionally strays away from the main point, always managing to find its way back. It is whimsical, and witty, and we see moments of Varda's personal humor, but it has no intention of being a visual beauty. A large part this film (and many of her other films), is that it lacks visual aesthetic and focuses on the "realistic" image of life. There is, in a sense, a poetic aspect, but not in the aesthetically pleasing stigma the audience may expect a poetically filmed documentary to be delivered. Varda often shoots close up grainy shots of art, and parallel the shot of one with her old, wrinkled hand (extremely close up), or her graying, balding hair, paralleling the art. It revolves around the notion that art and life are intertwined, as we see also in the constant comparisons of modern day gleaners in action and historical portraits. Varda often incorporates shots of herself as the main subject, and documents herself gleaning as the film rolls. The very first shot we see this in, is when she films herself holding an unwanted, heart-shaped potato. This film is extremely self-reflexive and participatory, however, the other subjects of the film are weaved together in an unlikely web, and we find that she also takes a observational stance. Although she holds our hand with her scene-by-scene narrations (literally telling us at times what she is about to film) Varda leaves her audience with the task of connecting her subjects. She interviews restaurant owners, whose late relatives had been gleaners, a chef who gleans his own herbs to use for cooking, modern day scavengers (or gypsies), who glean to survive, potato farmers and factory workers, a married couple, a priest, a wealthy farm owner, and a french artist, who gleans unwanted scraps, like dolls and buttons, to make questionable yet intricate sculptures. As noted before, there are several clips of the hands of her subjects, including her own. This accentuates the main concept of the film, gleaning, but also takes the focus off of the camera itself, and into reality, as though we are seeing through Varda's own eyes.

("dance of the lens cap")

Content continued (music) An interesting aspect of this film, was the music. Aside from the pretty few violin solos, there is a french-rap song played, in scenes where Varda captures scavengers in the city. She relates art to life and in one sense, makes gleaning out to be this beautiful thing, that we can still collect and create from unwanted items. Yet, the music played in a few scenes, like shown below, make gleaning out to be, literally, digging through dirty useless garbage. It makes for a very off putting, mixed message, of what point Varda is exactly trying to portray in this film, and completely contradicts the 'beauty' she finds in all other aspects of the subjects and scenarios.

THEMES

Gleaning as Filmmaking

The Gleaners and I makes a connection between the processing of gleaning and the process in which Agnes takes as a filmmaker. She characterizes her film form as gleaning in and of itself as the viewer can see several times throughout the film where Agnes is in front of the camera holding the camera. Agnes believes "filmmaking is not just a matter of passively accumulating but also actively transforming" thus gleaning can be a metaphorical theme throughout the film, which takes on the representation of Agnes' own filmmaking methods. In the film Agnes becomes the gleaner through the camera lens as she “picks up” different images throughout her travel log.

  Relationship Between Art & Life

The film looks at the relationship between art and life and makes the argument that they are definitively intertwined, thus they cannot be separated. The film starts out with Agnes describing the natural realism paintings of female gleaners, which sparks an interest in the subject as Agnes continues to follow art portraying the gleaners throughout the film. As she continues on her journey, the viewer comes to find that gleaning is amongst us in art forms everywhere and it even becomes an art form in and of itself. Gleaners are portrayed in advertisements, printed upon objects, and even topics for amateur artists. Not only are they seen in images but gleaning becomes an art form. We see a gallery of art made from strictly garbage due to artists gleaning through the trash looking for items to create sculptures. The idea of gleaning takes on the image of art and a form of art within society that can not be single handedly stripped out of life because life and art intertwine in a distinct relationship.

Social Commentary on Class

Agnes makes a clear social commentary within her film. At the beginning of the film we see her pick up the socially unacceptable heart shaped potatoes that are to be thrown out. It then cuts to the image of a strange man gleaning over the same potatoes. When Agnes approaches him we come to find that he is homeless. The scene creates a social commentary on class. The thrown out potatoes can symbolize the homeless in a sense that they are both “outcasted” or “othered” from society. Likewise this idea continues to develop when we see the huge trucks on the road in which we know that are transporting perfectly good oval-shaped potatoes to be thrown out. The truck is the key element in wasting perfectly good products where gleaning by the people is the response. Furthermore, the homeless strangers Agnes runs into represent the potatoes that have been labeled as worthless and filming him is the response. This social commentary on class is scene symbolically throughout the film.

  Gleaning & Cinema

The Gleaners and I is not only a reflection of gleaning, but it is a reflection upon cinema. The film shows the process of gleaning and how it has transformed and progressed over the year. In the 19th century gleaning was a common form of harvesting where all woman would get together and glean in the fields. Today it was transformed into an act for the homeless to gather left over food, has become illegal in many parts of France, and the term has even developed into a term that now means “picking up bit by bit” and can be used not only in harvesting food but picking through scraps of garbage. It has even taken on an art form where artists now glean to find left over materials to create art. The film reflects equally on the topic of cinema and how it has mutated in the exact same time period as gleaning. Works of Etienne-Jules Mary filming animals in motion is scene throughout the film and transgresses to Agnes’ also filming objects in motion (people gleaning in everyday life). It makes the comparison between Etienne and Agnes. The Gleaners and I is not only reflective upon the act of gleaning but the history of film.

Scene Analysis http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQIdZM8Kjwc

[1:20-1:45]

This is one of the several scenes where Agnes includes herself in her own footage. At the beginning of the scene we see Agnes portraying a woman gleaner holding a harvest of wheat against a backdrop. It almost looks as if she is one of the woman within the paintings we observed earlier in the film. She then drops the wheat and holds up a video camera. The scene continues on and she holds up a mirror not to see herself staring back at her but a reflection of a drawing. It is a highly reflexive scene that can symbolize not everything that meets the eye is necessarily the full truth, hence why there is a picture of a drawing staring back at her as she looks in the mirror; however, as a filmmaker Agnes is trying to send the message across that she is trying to reveal as much of the truth as possible. As a viewer, we should take note that this is the first film where Agnes used a digital camera. This is highly portrayed within this scene as it is symbolic of the theme of the connection between gleaning and cinema and how they have both progressed throughout the years. The scene can be analytically viewed as Agnes being a gleaner herself with her video camera. Through her camera lens she gleans new information as she captures it on film. 

Conclusion

The film's first screening was through the 2000 Cannes Film festival, and won best french film of 2000 by the French Union of Film Critics (in addition to several other festival honours and awards around the world). The French title for the film, Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse, more literally than the American-given title, translates to “The Gleaners and the Gleaneress”. Varda recognizes herself as gleaner, but not in the historical sense as it is defined, “another kind of gleaning...is artistic gleaning…you pick ideas, you pick images, you pick emotions from other people, and then you make it into a film," (Anderson). The film, unintentionally, has raised some political controversy enveloping debates on reusability and capital excess, bringing an eye to wastefulness. As she has done with several of her past films, Varda captures the relationship between art and life. To her, life should not be wasted, and she discovers that the possibilities and potential for the littlest things in it, are endless. 

Bibliography

Anderson, Melissa. "344 Lecture." 344 Lecture. Cineaste Publishers, Inc., 2001. Web. 25 Oct. 2013.

Ataide, Jesse. "10 Things Gleaned from Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I." Keyframe Explore the World of Film. FANDOR, 26 Sept. 2011. Web. 24 Oct. 2013.

"The Gleaners and I." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 22 Oct. 2013. Web. 25 Oct. 2013.