On The Gleaners and I
By: Matt Wisner
Tags: Agnès Varda, Documentary, Film

To share a lot of ideas–not ideas–emotions, a way of looking at people, a way of looking at life. If it can be shared, it means there is a common denominator (Varda, 2009).

The Gleaners and I (2000) is a personal essay-film, which is just as much about the director Agnes Varda as it is the featured gleaners, the clearer subjects of the film. Gleaners gather the leftovers of a harvest, generally out of necessity, and Varda focuses on this traditional kind of gleaner in the first half of her film. But Varda doesn’t limit her definition of gleaning. She shows a figurative evolution of gleaning over time, connecting the 19th century paintings of Jules Breton and Jean-Francois Millet that depict women gleaning in wheat fields to the modern urban gleaners who salvage vegetables left behind in the market or scrap metal from abandoned televisions. She then depicts herself as a gleaner — a collector of images, stories, and video. Varda routinely includes shots that would conventionally be seen as filming flaws — shadows that could’ve been avoided, crooked camera angles, unintentional darkness. Other filmmakers would have left these shots behind in their harvest, but part of Varda’s gleaning is willingly opting for the scraps, and she makes that explicit while she practices two types of gleaning simultaneously, picking up a misshapen potato in the field with one hand while filming with the other.

The subject of The Gleaners and I is flexible and sometimes obscured. The film is a series of episodes, each one dedicated to a different person and a different approach to or relationship with gleaning. The subject speaks directly to the camera and has the license to tell their story as they want. Varda films each of her subjects closeup and at eye-level, putting herself in conversation with them as equals. The filmmaker-as-subject element isn’t a clear message until the end, but first-person scenes are sprinkled into the film, sporadic clips of Varda herself speaking to the camera, one time eating figs, another time explaining why she has a clock with no hands. It finally becomes clear that Varda views herself as a gleaner when she includes footage of her lens cap dangling in the shot. To any other filmmaker, this accident would be scrapped. But Varda, bearing in mind the core philosophy behind gleaning, insists that nothing be wasted. She adds jazz music, and suddenly the lens cap is dancing. Accident becomes art.

It may be ethically questionable for Varda to view and portray herself as a gleaner. Varda is a renowned filmmaker and woman of wealth, and she includes her personal story alongside those of people who glean rotting and expired food from the trash for survival. The distinction between spectatorship and active participation is blurred for Varda, and while she views herself as a gleaner, she understands that there is no universal gleaning experience. The comparison Varda draws between herself and precarity gleaners is actually a gesture of solidarity, an acknowledgment of universal human experience and her understanding of the mythology behind any notion of deservedness.

The Gleaners and I was shot with a digital video camera when digital video was just beginning to be commonly used in filmmaking. Digital video is both portable and cheap, which allowed Varda to more naturally document people’s lives. She could explore her impulses, travel on foot, and follow people quickly, which allowed her to authentically observe what any grander film operation may neglect: the mundane, the unexpected, and the unnoticed. Digital video minimizes the physical distance between filmmaker and subject, which allows Varda to stand directly in front of the gleaners as though they have equal footing. Digital video allows for and even encourages a fragmented narrative, one that tolerates Varda’s urges and allows a sporadic, nonlinear organization of the film. Varda is famous for this form, even before digital video became available to her. Her 1980 film Mur Murs is also fragmented, following many Los Angeles muralists, constantly switching subjects, never returning to one twice. Varda’s tendency to rely on constant digressions, providing only partial detail about each subject is maybe part of why she rarely finds commercial success, because the common viewer prefers a complete and coherent story. But Gleaners’s central message wouldn’t have been so commanding had Varda opted to include fewer subjects. She uncovers a resemblance among many people who are seemingly unrelated, and her ability to seamlessly transition between interviews, stories, and moods without overwhelming the viewer allows her to show how common and unseen gleaning really is.

The dancing lens cap scene demonstrates the spontaneity and absence of meticulous planning behind the making of Gleaners, which ultimately proves to be one of the film’s greatest merits. Varda actually flaunts her improvisation, particularly in one scene as she affirms digital video as the narrator: “These new small cameras, they are digital, fantastic. Their effects are stroboscopic, narcissistic, and even hyper-realistic.” And later in the film, while on the highway, Varda reflects more on digital video and on her intentions as a filmmaker, imitating a camera with her hands, capturing passing trucks. “To retain the past?” she asks. “No, just to play.”

Agnès Varda came up as a filmmaker during the 1950s and 60s amid the French New Wave, which encouraged experimentation and exploration of unconventional approaches to film. Similar to filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and Jacques Demy, who she later married, Varda’s early films had clear political messages. Loin du Vietnam (1967) protests the Vietnam War. La Pointe Courte (1955) is a class consciousness film and explored the consequences of financial insecurity for romantic relationships. The Gleaners and I retains some of Varda’s staple political motives, but its beauty and power lays in its complexity and resistance of an explicit political or moral prescription. Gleaners subtly condemns the dominant culture on multiple fronts, objecting to a mindless bourgeois consumerism by drawing on elements of both environmental and class consciousness. It’s evident that Varda takes issue with wastefulness, and she offers gleaning as a pragmatic political resistance to the fast-paced, earth-destroying culture of purchasing that we collectively follow in blind faith.

Although she supports gleaning generally, Varda’s ideal gleaner is the last man she follows. She finds him eating parsley from the trash at the market, and he quickly tells her the nutritional value of parsley without questioning where he got it from. To Varda, the ideal gleaner is the working class intellectual who gleans not out of necessity but out of ethical obligation. This man had a Masters degree but decided to sell newspapers for work and travel an hour each day on the train to eat discarded bread from the garbage of a bakery in Paris. At night, he teaches literature to people who live in the same public housing as him. He uses his unique skills to care for his community. Varda’s fascination with her final subject holds an anticapitalist political resonance that some of her other films broadcast more overtly. She sees our common wellbeing as best delivered by a system and culture that values modesty and encourages satisfaction when our needs are met. Varda’s final subject is a symbol for a society she longs for — one that is democratic, eliminates waste, and emphasizes collectivism rather than individualism. This contrast between the world we live in and the world Varda envisions ironically comes out in the translation of her title, which in French is Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, which roughly translates to “the gleaners and the female gleaner.” The English title, The Gleaners and I, implicitly creates a distance between people who glean and Varda herself, and by the end of the film, the viewer is certain that’s a distance Varda never intended to create.