73) The Gleaners and I

Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000)

Director: Agnes Varda

Starring: Agnes Varda, Bodan Litnanski, Francois Wertheimer


This is the final week of semester for Introduction to Cinema and to finish our unit on documentaries we watched Agnes Varda's multi-award winning documentary The Gleaners and I.

The ancient practice of gleaning involves going through after the harvest to salvage any grain or fruit which has been missed first time round. Since 1554 the right to glean has been protected by the French constitution. Agnes Varda meditates on the place of gleaning in todays society, exploring the different shapes it takes; people who eat left over foods they find in dumpsters either because they are too poor to get food any other way or because they are morally offended by the amount of food wasted, artists who create works from found materials, filmmakers doing the same.

In his review of The Gleaners and I Roger Ebert says that the film "appears to be a documentary". I like this description of the film because I think it sums up perfectly the way in which this film is not quite what we expect. The Gleaners and I is not an exposee on the place of gleaning in modern society, rather it is more Varda's personal meditiation on what it is to glean. This film is more of a personal essay than a traditional documentary, with Varda and her musings being so central to the film.

Not being a typical documentary means that Varda is not so concerned with telling us what to think about the topic. There are moments in the film where her exploration takes a more traditional documentary bent; when she draws attention to 25 tonnes of potatoes dumped in France each season because they are larger than the two to four inch diameter deemed most marketable, or when she briefly interviews both sides and the magistrate invovled in a dispute where a group of dumpster divers had vandalised a shops garbage bins in response to the owner dousing all of his rubbish in bleach to deter gleaners, but largely the film is more concerned with musing about the concept of gleaning.

Varda is known as the grandmother of the French New Wave. She made her first film, La Pointe-Courte, in 1955 and while not being a part of the Cahiers du cinema group she was an important part of the French New Wave movement. She is the only female director associated with that influential cinematic movement. I love this quote from her explaining how she got started in such a male dominated industry: "You have to be strong to be a carpenter, maybe, but the director of a film doesn't need to have muscles. This is why I didn't know why I couldn't do it." Being a part of the French New Wave movement, and remaining much truer to her roots than a number of her male counterparts have since the movement finished, means that Varda's documentaries are very art cinema inspired and this is very much the case in The Gleaners and I.

Varda is very interested in the notion of beauty, so includes a number of shots and images in her film which she considers beautiful or visually interesting, but that don't necessarily build on the intellectual ideas being explored. One such example is the 'dance of the lens cap'. Varda filmed the documentary on a handheld Sony DV Cam, a piece of equipment she was very excited about and made sure to draw the viewers attention to. At one point she explains that she forgot to switch it off before slinging it over her shoulder and thus ended up taking a few minutes of footage of the ground as she walked with the lens cap swinging in and out of shot. She found something beautiful about this footage so opted to include it in the film. The scene is designed to draw an emotional response rather than the intellectual response we are used to documentaries seeking. The inclusion of the scene is also part of Varda's use of gleaning as a metaphor for her filmmaking. Here we have a piece of footage which to most people is rubbish, but Varda finds value in it.

I've seen this film a few times now and personally I find it difficult to get excited about. There are bits and pieces in it that are interesting, but I struggle to engage with Varda's meandering style. The fact that I was reasonably drowsy when I went to the screening this time probably didn't help. It's not a bad film, I just don't think I'm a fan of that personal essay style of filmmaking. If you can handle the lack of a central informative thread, and are happy to go with Varda on her digressions and tangents then you may well find something to love in this film, but for a lot of people I think The Gleaners and I is a confusing and frustrating film.