Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000) Reviews

• another thought-provoking, humanistic beauty from Agnes Varda

  utzutzutz2001-05-01

  You may remember director Agnès Varda from her 1986 film, VAGABOND. But over the last five decades, the `grandmother of French New Wave' has completed 29 other works, most showing her affection, bemusement, outrage, and wide-ranging curiosity for humanity. Varda's most recent effort-the first filmed with a digital videocamera-focuses on gleaners, those who gather the spoils left after a harvest, as well as those who mine the trash. Some completely exist on the leavings; others turn them into art, exercise their ethics, or simply have fun. The director likens gleaning to her own profession-that of collecting images, stories, fragments of sound, light, and color. In this hybrid of documentary and reflection, Varda raises a number of philosophical questions. Has the bottom line replaced our concern with others' well-being, even on the most essential level of food? What happens to those who opt out of our consumerist society? And even, What constitutes--or reconstitutes--art? Along this road trip, she interviews plenty of French characters. We meet a man who has survived almost completely on trash for 15 years. Though he has a job and other trappings, for him it is `a matter of ethics.' Another, who holds a master's degree in biology, sells newspapers and lives in a homeless shelter, scavenges food from market, and spends his nights teaching African immigrants to read and write. Varda is an old hippie, and her sympathies clearly lie with such characters who choose to live off the grid. She takes our frenetically consuming society to task and suggests that learning how to live more simply is vital to our survival. At times we can almost visualize her clucking and wagging her finger-a tad heavy-handedly advancing her agenda. However, the sheer waste of 25 tons of food at a clip is legitimately something to cluck about. And it is her very willingness to make direct statements and NOT sit on the fence that Varda fans most enjoy, knowing that her indignation is deeply rooted in her love of humanity. The director interjects her playful humor as well-though it's subtle, French humor that differs widely from that of, say, Tom Green. Take the judge in full robes who stands in a cabbage field citing the legality of gleaning chapter and verse. Quirky and exuberant, Varda, 72, is at an age where she's more concerned with having fun with her craft than impressing anyone. With her handheld digital toy, she pans around her house and pauses to appreciate a patch of ceiling mold. When she later forgets to turn off her camera, she films `the dance of the lens cap.' One of the picture's undercurrents is the cycle of life-growth, harvest, decay. She often films her wrinkled hands and speaks directly about her aging process, suggesting that her own mortality is much on her mind. The gleaners pluck the fruits before their decay, as Varda lives life to the fullest, defying the inevitability of death. Toward the movie's end, she salvages a Lucite clock with no hands. As she films her face passing behind it, she notes, `A clock with no hands is my kind of thing.' If you'd be the first to grab a heart-shaped potato from the harvest, or make a pile of discarded dolls into a totem pole, THE GLEANERS is probably your kind of thing.

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• A great film maker examines the role of the artist in society

  dmaxl2001-03-25

  This film is a feast for anyone who loves film, photography or art in general. Agnes Varda takes the viewer along on a very personal exploration about what it means to be an artist. To glean means to gather whatever crops have been left in the field after a harvest and the film is on one level a straight documentary about gleaners in France, exploring the various reasons why they glean - survival, to feed the poor, for fun. But gleaning is revealed to be an apt metaphor for the process of making art, and so, perhaps on a deeper level, Varda is examining her role as a film maker, a "gleaner" of images and life moments. Regardless of why you might watch this film, I recommend it for the playfulness and beauty of the photography, and the complex and personal depth of Varda's narrative.

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• One of the best docs I've ever seen!

  theoscillator_132006-03-22

  Yeah, it was that good. I was introduced to the French New Wave when I was in college and I was instantly a fan. Of course I loved Godard and Truffaut but I was also a always a fan of Varda's work. The one woman allowed run with "the boy's club". Even in her later years in 2000, the mark of the Nouvelle Vague was still evident in her work. Shot on video at a time when things looked like they were shot on video, this movie held true to all of the same ideals that Varda stood for 40 years earlier. There wasn't a lot of time or money spent on lighting and capturing the perfect image but what was lacking was made up for with true cinematography and framing of the shots. Visually the movie is both cheap and no frills and meticulous and artistic. But like any good documentary, Varda's vision and message trumps any superficial aspect of the film-making. The message that there is beauty in every aspect of our existence regardless of how insignificant we think it is resonates throughout the story and will stick with you long after the movie has ended.

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• The gatherers

  jotix1002006-01-02

  Jean Francois Millet, the French painter of the Barbizon school, seems to have been the inspiration for Agnes Varda's interesting documentary "Les glaneurs et la glaneuse". In fact, Ms. Varda makes it a point to take us along to the French countryside where Millet got the inspiration for his masterpiece "Les Glaneurs". Like in his other paintings, Millet comments about the peasantry working the fields in most of his canvases. One can see the poverty in his subjects as they struggle to gather crops for their employers. Ms. Varda takes a humanistic approach to another type of activity in which she bases her story. In fact, the people one sees in the film are perhaps the descendants of the gleaners of Millet's time, except they are bringing whatever is left behind once the machinery takes care of gathering the best of each crop, leaving the rest to rot in the fields. Agnes Varda takes a trip through her native France to show us the inequality of a system that produces such excesses that a part of it has to be dumped because it doesn't meet standards. On the one hand, there is such abundance, and on the other, one sees how some of the poor people showcased in the documentary can't afford to buy the basics and must resort to take it on their own to get whatever has been left in order to survive. With this documentary, Agnes Varda shows an uncanny understanding to the problems most of these people are facing.

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• Filmmaker as gleaner

  kima-62006-03-12

  Agnes Varda's documentary The Gleaners and I celebrates the notion of "freeganism" or what the French call "gleaners." Unlike the punk antics of activists, gleaning in France is not so much a matter of rebellion but a matter of rite. There is a tradition in France from days of old that allows people to come behind a harvest and pick up any fruit and veggies that weren't elected by the grower to go to market, over-sized or heart shaped potatoes for instances. "This apple is like a stupid ugly woman," says one person of the discards, "zero value." Here, gleaners give new meaning to the phrase "having a field day." (Although gleaning is forbidden in precious Burgundy wine country!) The film moves from these rural gleaners to the urban gleaners as Varda talks with a wide variety of interesting characters: drunks, gypsies, artists, activists, rappers, volunteer teachers... many with a very "lived" look to their faces. Gleaners come from all walks of life and here they include a gourmet chef and a psychoanalyst. Picking a patient's brain is too a form of gleaning as the therapists is in a state of poverty, a state of not knowing. Varda uses this film as her owns means of self-exploration. It is told in a very self-reflexive style that you will either enjoy or be irritated by. We are subjected to extreme close-ups of her gray hair or her aging liver spotted hands as she says, "we enter in the horror of her hand". The beauty in her choosing to take home a clock with no hands is symbolic of the overall poetic style to this work - "an emotion film." Long shots of her lens cap dancing in the wind, repetitive shots of trucks on the highway, and of course, her fascination with the heart shaped potatoes - food that warms the heart. There are many words to describe this gleaning behavior: stoopers, pickers, retrievers, recyclers... Some see found objects as dictionaries - helping us to come to an understanding of humankind. Varda has a fascination with old paintings showing gleaners, like Millet's famous Gleaneuses (pictured here), but she unearths many others - from op shops to the storage basement of a museum. Marey, an early innovator of photographer, even gets evoked somehow and the combination of all her elements gives this film a very ethnographic feel. Varda describes herself as a gleaner of images and she explores this idea in a 60 minute follow-up 2 years on (an extra on the DVD). Here she not only revisits some of the characters in the original documentary but she also meets with new gleaners who flooded her with letters and gifts in response to the release of the first film. She looks at the impact the film had on her and those who participated, the characters who share their "confidence and confidences." The Gleaners and I is a delight to watch on so many levels. It is a meditation on waste, of living on the fringes of society and conversely, what this says about people we don't see in the film: the thoughtless consumers. To me, the film is not only about the discarding of objects, but of the decay and disenfranchising of the aged. Finally, in a subtle way, this film is about self and our relationship to the world through the eyes of a very creative filmmaker for whom low production values equates to high art.

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