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The Gleaners and I

 
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The Gleaners and I

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  • Director: Agnès Varda
  • AMG Rating: starstarstarstar
  • Genre: Culture & Society
  • Movie Type: Essay Film, Social History
  • Themes: Work Ethics, Golden Years
  • Release Year: 2000
  • Country: FR
  • Run Time: 82 minutes

Plot

Legendary filmmaker Agnes Varda takes digital camcorder in hand and roams about the French countryside in search of "gleaners." An age-old practice, as depicted in Millet's famous painting, performed traditionally by peasant women, gleaners scavenged the remains of a crop after the harvest. Varda finds their modern-day equivalent collecting rejected potatoes outside of Lyon, fallen apples in Provence, and refuse in the markets of Paris. Along the way, she talks to a man sporting yellow rubber boots who has lived on trash for ten years, a gourmet chef who gleans for his restaurant, a homeless doctorate in biology who teaches literacy courses to immigrants for free, a couple of artists who use trash in their work, and the grandson of early cinema innovator Étienne-Jules Marey. Along the way, Varda discusses heart-shaped potatoes, big trucks on the highway, the waste of consumerism, and the ravages of time. This film was screened at the 2000 Cannes and Toronto Film Festivals. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide

Review

Though Agnes Varda insists that she is far from hanging up her camera, Gleaners and I feels like a summation of her long and varied career. As in Vagabond and Kung Fu Master, this film features a strong female central character who lives at the margins of society and who in fact refuses society's embrace. The only difference is that this central character is Varda herself. In this film, she wanders -- another major Varda motif -- about France encountering scavengers of every strip and color. Of course being a film by Agnes Varda, who coined the term "cinecriture" -- or cine-writing -- to describe her work, Gleaners is less a straight documentary on the enduring practice of gleaning than a complex cinematic essay à la Chris Marker on the metaphoric, artistic, and political meanings behind gleaning. To her great credit, Varda never gets self-indulgent or pedantic. Instead of trotting out warmed over Marxist platitudes when she shows one rich farmer who refuses to let gleaners on his land, she succinctly notes that "some people don't want to be nice." Underlining the film is a rumination about Varda's own mortality. She includes numerous shots of her wrinkled, spotted hands and of her graying hair. She reminisces about her distant childhood and her long life. At the same time, she includes numerous humorous (often at her own expense) detours that keep the film light and engaging. Gleaners and I is a marvelous work that provokes as it entertains. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide

Credit

Agnès Varda - Director, Joanna Bruzdowicz - Composer (Music Score), Agnès Varda - Cinematographer, Didier Rouget - Cinematographer, Stephane Krausz - Cinematographer, Agnès Varda - Producer, Nathalie Vidal - Sound/Sound Designer

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Wikipedia: The Gleaners and I
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Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Wikipedia
The Gleaners and I
Directed by Agnès Varda
Written by Agnès Varda
Starring Bodan Litnanski
François Wertheimer
Release date(s) 2000 (France)
Running time 82 minutes
Country France
Language French
English

The Gleaners and I (French: Les glaneurs et la glaneuse) is a French documentary by Agnès Varda that features the practice of gleaning. It was screened out of competition at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival.[1]

Contents

The Subjects

The film tracks a series of gleaners as they hunt for food, knicknacks, and personal connection. Varda travels French countryside and city to find and film not only field gleaners, but also urban gleaners and those connected to gleaners, including a wealthy restaurant owner whose ancestors were gleaners. The film spends time capturing the many aspects of gleaning and the many people who glean to survive. One such person is the teacher named Alain, an urban gleaner with a master's degree who teaches French to immigrants. Varda's other subjects include artists who incorporate recycled materials into their work, symbols she discovers during her filming (including a clock without hands and a heart-shaped potato), and the French law regarding gleaning. Varda also spends time with Louis Pons, who explains how junk is a "cluster of possibilities".

This film has an unexpected brief interview with the psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche.

Technique

The film is notable for its use of a hand-held camera and for its unusual camera angles and techniques. In one particular scene Varda, the filmmaker, forgets to turn off her camera. As the camera hangs to her side the filming proceeds, and the viewer can see the shifting ground and the dangling lens cap with a jazz music background. Varda calls this shot "The Dance of the Lens Cap".

In The Gleaners and I, Varda films herself combing her newly discovered gray hair, and there are many visuals of her aging hands. She frequently "catches" trucks on the freeway, placing her hand in front of the camera in the ASL sign for "o", with the truck in the center of her hand, then closing in on them as she drives past them.

Much of this footage is woven into the film to show that Varda, as a film maker, is also a gleaner. This concept is made explicit in the French title, Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, which could be translated as "the gleaners and the gleaneress".

References

  1. ^ "Festival de Cannes: The Gleaners and I". festival-cannes.com. http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/archives/ficheFilm/id/10534/year/2000.html. Retrieved 2009-10-17. 

External links

v • d • e
Films directed by Agnès Varda
Feature films
La Pointe Courte (1956) · Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) · Happiness (1965) · The Creatures (1966) · Lions Love (1969) · One Sings, the Other Doesn't (1977) · Documenteur (1981) · Vagabond (1985) · Kung-Fu Master (1988) · Jacquot de Nantes (1991) · A Hundred and One Nights (1995)
Documentaries
Daguerréotypes (1976) · Mural Murals (1981) · Jane B. Par Agnes V. (1988) · The Young Girls Turn 25 (1993) · The Universe of Jacques Demy (1995) · The Gleaners and I (2000) · The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later (2002) · Quelques veuves de Noirmoutier (2006) · The Beaches of Agnès (2008)

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

 
 

 

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