by Joel Bocko
#59 in Best of the 21st Century?, a series counting down the most acclaimed films of the previous decade.
“Again one hand filming the other hand, and more trucks. I’d like to capture them. To retain things passing? No, just to play.”
In Agnes Varda’s documentary The Gleaners & I (a more literal translation from the original French would be “The Gleaners & The Gleaner”, or even “The Gleaneress”) play, investigation, and contemplation are all intricately yet loosely wound together – each element distinct yet forming an unpretentiously ambitious whole, much like the found-object artworks Varda highlights throughout. Her subject, as you might have gathered (no pun intended), is gleaning: in all its forms. We are introduced to the classical gleaners, the peasant women who would follow the harvest by crouching and stooping through the fields, rummaging for leftovers once the more illustrious agricultural bounty was carried off. We see such gleaners in famous French paintings, and meet one or two who reminisce only – it seems that this more traditional form of gleaning has fallen by the wayside: mechanized reaping has become too precise and so few crops are left behind these days. This we learn in the first five minutes of the 90-minute film; what follows is an eager, inquisitive investigation of gleaning in all its latter-day manifestations…
We travel back and forth across France “capturing” passing trucks; shuffle through potato wastelands alongside single mothers and homeless alcoholics; observe running legal commentaries offered by robed justices standing incongruously in vineyards and in trash heaps. We see gleaners in vineyards, along the seashore, on city streets; meet various artists who incorporate abandoned junk into their own work; visit a children’s museum which makes trash shiny and colorful. Finally we discover a post-graduate gleaner who picks through garbage to find food, his eccentricity giving way to erudite pedagogy when it’s revealed that he teaches French to Senegalese immigrants, free of charge, of his own volition. Those are the gleaners – what of “I” (or as the original title puts it, the gleaner – singular)? She’s Varda, of course, perpetually playing peekaboo with her own camera, narrating with a mixture of carefree bravado, pensive reflection, and endless fascination. Much, if not most, of what we see is filmed by her, so even when we aren’t hearing or seeing her, she’s present – the video filters her vision and consciousness, which together filter the outside world for us.
The lo-fi visuals are at once liberating and relatively nondescript – they do not carry the punch of celluloid, the automatic “magic”, but they do convey a quiet, gentle charm, a looseness that is more observational and in some ways more sensitive than traditional filmmaking allows. This highlights the distinction between what is captured and how Varda captures it (the raw material of reality and the way she selects, composes, edits, comments upon, and interacts with what we see). This formal component provides a nice rhyme for the film’s thematic material, in which utilitarian consumer goods are given aesthetic rebirth, waste is turned into food, and trash becomes personalized and beautiful. The aesthetic becomes practical, the practical becomes aesthetic, and the useless finds its uses – or rather has them found for it. Right away, the movie presents an awareness of beauty’s ambiguity, opening not just with footage of gleaners at work, but gleaners glamorized, in the paintings of Millet and Breton. (Following a grim episode focusing on the dire poverty of some gleaners, there’s a moment of reflection in Burgundy for Van der Weyden’s “The Last Judgement”, and briefly the film is haunted by the pitiable writhing of the damned.)
In presenting those works of art that commemorate gleaning, Varda seems aware that such paintings tend to romanticize what can be a very hard way of living – and yet to deny the beauty of these paintings would be absurd, and self-defeating. Varda’s own filmmaking style, an engaging combination of doc and home movie, strikes an ongoing, fragile balance between respect for those she is filming and an almost naive sense of wonder; in both cases, curiosity serves her, and us, best. We draw our own conclusions without feeling that she has concealed her own point of view from us – or, at the same time, that her own point of view is necessarily any more fixed than our own. At times metatextual (but very, very playfully so), the movie – shot on a video camera at the turn-of-the-millennium – seems a synthesis of various documentary traditions, stretching all the way back to Etienne-Jules Marey, whose “chronophotography” was a forerunner of the cinema. (Marey’s great grandson owns a vineyard which Varda visits, examining both his sympathetic treatment of gleaners and curation of a museum honoring his ancestor.)
Indeed, Varda has “gleaned” all the documentary techniques and approaches of the past hundred years: the personal diary, the man-on-the-street interview, the verite observation, the didactic montage, the found footage, the expert fact-finding interview – and all viewpoints are explored, political, personal, social, aesthetic alike. And what frames all of this borrowing, what gives it its own life, is Varda’s use of the video camera – the way she filters all these devices through the humble yet infinitely resonant context of home moviemaking. (She even includes an accidentally-filmed “dance of the lens cap”; while some find such indulgence bizarre and laughable, many of us will find it charming, particularly those who recognize the complex framework within which such proudly amateurish moments are allowed to flourish.) To the extent the film has a “message” – generally it’s more subtle and rich than that – it is an encouragement of this sort of personal gleaning; The Gleaners & I spurs us on to open our eyes and see the potential of society’s refuse, the spiritual in the material, even as we are discouraged from ignoring the darker undertones of prettified consciousness. By the end of the film, encouraged by Varda’s own highly individual, yet “open” perspective, that “I” in the title could be us as well.
Previous film: L’Enfant
Next film: The Lives of Others
“Indeed, Varda has “gleaned” all the documentary techniques and approaches of the past hundred years: the personal diary, the man-on-the-street interview, the verite observation, the didactic montage, the found footage, the expert fact-finding interview – and all viewpoints are explored, political, personal, social, aesthetic alike.”
Aye Joel, this sums up the cumulative nature of her filmmaking, but for some reason – and I can’t say exactly why – I have never warmed to this film, nor to the work of Varda in general, apart from VAGABOND, which reaches me more on an emotional level. This has perplexed me, as I adore her late husband Jacques Demy, for whom Ms. Varda has affoded the most loving tributes for in her work, in interviews and in cinematic emulation. Yet the magic that informed Demy’s work has never carried over to Varda, though there are bright people in our blogosphere, who (if they read this) will go at me with vigour, and perhaps rightly so. There is an odd stagnation in narrative movement in this film, and in its insistence to chronicle the most minite elements of her subject, she loses the poetic vitality that suffused her husband’s films, but seem to have been lost on her. Is it me here? I’m definitely not comfortable with me reactions.
Regardless, this is an extraordinary essay, one that rightfully takes it’s place among your most accomplished work.
You get at a meaty issue here, why do we respond/not respond to a given work? As you’ve noted before, when one is informed, open-minded, and intelligent, differing tastes remain. I’ve noted with you a fondness for bigger-than-life emotional experiences (which is not to say you’re not fond of subtlety – but however muted, the emotions in a Bresson or Ozu are still “big”). This is not that type of film – it reaches the emotions more through an intellectual filter than anything else; in my experience, you’ve less patience with this type of low-key energy, and more of a hunger for something, let’s say, “staggering” ;). Demy certainly fits that bill. Myself, I wouldn’t say I “loved” the film, though I liked it a good deal – essentially I found it charming in exactly that low-key way. I liked Cleo 9 to 5 a good deal, though, but that’s the only other Varda film I’ve seen (unless you count the film-within-a-film starring Godard and Karina).
I find that I have pretty broad, diverse taste yet I’ve got blind spots just like the rest of ’em. Take Bunuel – I respect his work but it hardly ever affects me on the level it’s “supposed” to; I read others’ praise of his subversive power and scratch my head – what did I miss? It’s good to have intelligent people who don’t “get it” around because they can point our attention to something we may have overlooked in our own strong response; ultimately though, the best critiques will come from “inside” for someone who understands the appeal but has compelling reasons for deconstructing it.
This response is a classic!!!!Ah Joel, you have indeed figured out my taste, which goes beyond film to include literature, music and the theatre. However, while it’s true I have little patience for certain intellectually suffused films, especially “mumblecore” I also have a dark side that has always embraced the likes of Bergman, Vlacil, Tarkovsky, Tarr, and Chabrol among others. In literature I favor the likes of Kafka, Beckett, O’Neill, Poe and Faulkner (not to mention the Bard) in art I have a particular eye for Edvard Munch, and in music I have a passion for Mahler, Wagner and Tchaikovsky’s darkest symphony. And I am a lifelong horror film fanatic, which I hope will serve our Scare Maestro Jamie Uhler well enough.
But this thread is hardly the place to discuss Sam Juliano’s likes and dislikes, but rather to gage the reasons why one is attracted or turned off by a particular work that runs against the general concensus.
I am clearly missing something with Varda, yet I am a spectacular fan of Claire Denis, another French female artist, whose appeal is strictly on a cerebral level. Go figure!
No, I definitely see your “dark side” but I think it’s part and parcel with your affection for “big” emotions – certainly Wagner fits that bill! Incidentally, my own instincts are similar (though in the specific we seem to differ somewhat; I think I might trend more toward the tragic than the operatic) but over time I’ve evolved a taste for the likes of Gleaners & I, smaller films that sneak up on you more or less – though as I noted, they are usually not at the top of the top for me. It must be something about that Catholic upbringing – we like ’em ostentatious!
Aye Joel, I completely agree with everything you say here on this latest response. LOL on that Catholic upbringing! How true!
The main thrust of the film centerson those who glean from the soil, dumpster and tree, the poor (mostly) who gain sustenance from the leavings of farmers, vintners, supermarkets and restaurants. Though there is certainly an underlying scorn, even outrage, against the waste in society and the few provisions made for the poor when there could easily be more, the director is amazingly even-handed and unsentimental in her portraits both of those on society’s margins and those who might be numbered amongst the wasters. The same attitude prevails when she is dealing with the art, artists, and collectors who take the castoff physical properties of the ownership society and transform them into other things often beautiful as well as useful. Though it is only expressed obliquely, the attitude present throughout the film seems to be, why have we come to this pass? Why are we so careless as a species, throwing away useful items and usable foods, treating everything in the world as disposable, treating life and each other as just things to use until we don’t need them or care about them anymore. It’s a poetic film that rates as one of the finest modern-day documentaries.
…She even includes an accidentally-filmed “dance of the lens cap”; while some find such indulgence bizarre and laughable, many of us will find it charming, particularly those who recognize the complex framework within which such proudly amateurish moments are allowed to flourish…..
Personally, I favor such tactics, as it shows a spontaneity that isn’t corrupted by self-importance.
Great essay Mr. Bocko!
I have an interest in this kind of thing, so I do believe I’d like this. Great writing, Joel Bocko.
Thanks, Maria – hope you do catch it. That’s the kind of praise a writer likes to hear!
Thanks, all. Bill, I recognized and respected the same evenhandedness, which does not come off as wishy-washy but rather, as you put it, “unsentimental”. The only characters in the film who got under my skin were the kids tossing around the trashcans, as they seemed to be doing it just for kicks and leaving other people (namely the low-paid store employees) to clean it up. Everyone else seemed to, as Renoir once put it, “have their reasons” – not that this is a justification of stinginess or selfishness, but behavior in this film often seems to be a weird (and truthful) mix of compulsion, choice, and circumstance, to varying degrees. Varda recognizes this in herself as well as her subjects. (Incidentally, I’m sure the street kids have their reasons too but Varda doesn’t quite get to them here – I also may have misunderstood their motives in messing around with the trashcans, but it seemed as presented as if they were not gleaning but just goofing around.)
David, I agree – many of my favorite movies allow for both a sense of control and discipline and a freedom of expression which includes accidents, improvisations, discoveries…
One man’s refuse is another’s object of beauty.
Was that Santayana?
A google search turns up no answers, although it does bring up stories about squirrel-eating drug dealers and Dungeons & Dragons…
he he!! I’m off the track! But someone did make that analogy, one that I agree with as far as this film is concerned.
I second Sam here – this is a subtle and accomplished review. Joel has infused his essay with the same detachment and even-handedness he sees in the film. I will seek this out.
There is a flip-side to gleaning, and that is the reluctance to throw things out. I am a compulsive hoarder of what is designed to be treated as waste: packaging and other odds and ends that I consider may have some utility at some point. I am a classic hacker, building and repairing household fixtures and items using detritus. Most of the stuff I hoard does eventually find a useful purpose.
I suppose the compulsion comes from growing up in relative poverty and being taught that waste is a ‘sin’. There is almost an ethical compulsion at play.
There is the deeper socio-economic issue of course of waste as a symptom of what US economist and gadfly JK Galbraith over 50 years ago described as “private affluence and public squalor”. A market economy externalizes the cost of waste, and as well as a carbon tax, we should be discussing a waste tax.
God, are you good Tony! real good. This is a fantastic comment, but you really don’t need me to tell you that. A superb consideration of waste, selective hoarding and the value of something that is enhanced by the personal experience of squalor and deprivation.
Sam, tell my old lady 😉
Ditto the hoarding observance. One fellow in the film takes Varda to his private stash of junk (much of which he turns into art or decoration) and protests that he’s moving towards nothingness or at least (with a twinkle in his eye) lessness. Hoarding runs strong on both sides of my family – both grandmothers live in houses cluttered with the refuse of their past, and while my mother has developed a compulsive tendency to throw things away, my father more than compensates. He’s a consummate rummager of the “swap shop” – the room at the local dump where people bring things they no longer need but don’t want to throw away. When cleaning out the garage recently, he found multiple cross-country skis, none of which he had paid for, all of which he had found at the swap shop over the years…something like 30 pairs! (Needless to say, he had never used any of them.)
Of course, hoarding/gleaning has its benefits as well. When I moved into my own apartment a year ago, after living with other people (and their furniture and goods) for a while, I should have had to buy a new couch, desk, TV, bed, shelves etc. but between my roommates’ castoffs and the junk my folks had sitting around from the 70s I didn’t need to buy a thing! Of course, it doesn’t make the most glamorous bachelor pad, but…
At any rate, rumor has it Sam is quite the hoarder as well, at least to hear Allan & Dennis describe it 😉
As for the more serious points, how would a waste tax work? Is it a tax on trash – and would it apply to industry or individuals? Would it apply above a certain level per week or would it be a charge on the bag? (Not a fan of the latter measure, which they enact in my town, an onerous tax if ever there was one…)
After my initial post, an article I read at the height of the mortgage foreclosures in the US in 2008 came to mind. I can’t recall who wrote it and where it was published, but the essay was very affecting.
A young Hispanic journalist for reasons I have forgotten, returned to a big southern US city for a stint working with his father and uncles in a team contracted by banks to prepare foreclosed houses for auction. This involved removing all the detritus left behind by the owners, many of whom just walked away from the homes they could no longer afford.
In those abandoned homes they left all sort of private stuff that was mute testimony to their shattered dreams and the desperation of their leave-taking…
A tax on waste I suppose is placing a price on waste, so that the creator of the waste has to bear the the cost of disposal. For example, a manufacturer whose packaging is totally recyclable would pay a lower tax than one who uses styrofoam.
Tony, there is a really powerful experimental/documentary work by a British filmmaker – name of film and director both escape me at the moment – which uses close-ups of homes being demolished (to make way for a freeway or something, if I’m not mistaken) with a looping narration composed of the residents’ memories. It’s one of the most haunting portraits of loss I’ve ever seen. (Wish I could remember the title!)
The film is “Blight” by John Smith.
Descriptions here & here:
http://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/john_smith/blight.html
http://glasstire.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4050#jc_writeComment
His other films sound fascinating as well.
Speaking of waste, this reminds me of a movie theater I went to a few years ago. I got a big bucket of popcorn, and asked for it without butter. When they soaked it in the goopy, synthetic stuff, I mentioned that I’d rather have it plain, but maybe they could put that one aside for the next person who… Without waiting for me to finish my sentence, the girl behind the counter calmly turned the bucket over and dumped it in the trash, with half of the kernels rolling all over the floor. In the back of my mind, all I could think was “this is why they hate us…”
But I guess that’s what you get for ordering movie popcorn…
P.S. Tony – I’ll definitely be interested in your take on the film. Have you seen any other Vardas & what did you think if so?
This is an exceptionally well-written review by Mr. Bocko. You know, there is a strong similarity with an Egyptian/American documentary I recently saw as a result of urgings here called “Garbage Dreams”.
Thanks, Frank. I think I remember hearing about that one – maybe from Sam’s Monday Morning Diary?
We happened to have rented this last year and meant to write it down to get a copy. An amazing and worthwhile viewing!
……….and made me think, although I can’t remember the name of it, of the documentary of the people living in a closed portion of a subway in NYC, at least until someone found out and closed that section out and dispersed the people living there.
Dark Days!
I can’t believe I forgot to mention that in the review – this film instantly reminded me of that, and I was going to bring it in…thanks for belatedly introducing it. That is indeed an excellent film, with stark, grainy b&w footage (the “mole people,” as they are sometimes called – though not in this film – helped set up the numerous lights in the underground abode which Mark Singer, the director, needed to photograph them) and a score by DJ Shadow (Shadow received a tape from Singer, who wanted permission to use some of the artist’s existing tracks, and he was so impressed he produced some new pieces as well, free of charge I believe).
Along with this and that British short (whose name I still can’t recall) I concur with Coffee Messiah and highly recommend Dark Days.
By the way, the sidebar looks fantastic! (Tony, I presume?)
Aye, Joel. His work has been magnificent here.
Yeah, the Chicago and Mulholland Dr. pics in particular really pop.
I quite agree there Joel!
[…] film: The Gleaners & I Next film: A Serious […]