The Gleaners and I | Bodan Litnanski, François Wertheimer | This filmed changed my perspective of...

The Gleaners and I | Bodan Litnanski, François Wertheimer | heart-shaped potatoes

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The Gleaners and I

	The Gleaners and I Bodan Litnanski, François Wertheimer Zeitgeist Films, 2002 average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Agnès Varda, Grande Dame of the French New Wave, has made 2001's most acclaimed non-fiction film-a self-described "wandering-road documentary." Beginning with the famous Jean-François Millet painting of women gathering wheat left over from a harvest, she focuses her ever-seeking eye on gleaners: those who scour already-reaped fields for the odd potato or turnip. Her investigation leads us from forgotten corners of the French countryside to off-hours at the green markets of Paris, following those who insist on finding a use for that which society has cast off, whether out of necessity or activism. Varda's own ruminations on her life as a filmmaker (a gleaner of sorts) give her a connection to her subjects that creates a touching human portrait that the L.A. Weekly deemed "a protest film that's part social critique, part travelogue, but always an unsentimental celebration of human resilience." This Edition features the 60-minute follow-up film GLEANERS: TWO YEARS LATER.

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This filmed changed my perspective of today's gleaners

I "gleaned" this French jewel from the shelves of our library DVD collection. And I'm glad I did.

This film is rich in texture, deep in multiple meanings, provides a variety of real characters, a visual feast of various regions of France and how the act of gleaning is as alive today as when the famous paintings were made centuries ago.

It has given me a new appreciation for the "scrounging" that I, and others I know, have done over the years. I think from now on I'll always refer to it as "gleaning."

People and situations will look different to me because I've seen this film. The gleaners are all around us. Now they are no longer invisible.

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heart-shaped potatoes

Director: Agnes Varda
Duration: 82 minutes

When I was young I would go with my grandparents to my uncle's farm to pick fresh vegetables. The main vegetable that I remember picking is okra. Armed with my pocket knife, I was informed by my grandmother to only gather the medium sized okra pods because they were the best ones to eat. I was a bit bothered by this because I felt that the other ones would go to waste. I am not sure what my uncle did with remaining vegetables, but I assume they were often left to rot in his fields without serving their purpose to feed the populace.

Varda's film The Gleaners and I is a documentary depicting her travels throughout the countryside of France in her pursuit to find individuals who live off of the items cast off by others. Gleaning used to be a normal activity of woman in the countryside who gathered the remaining grain in the fields after the harvest came to an end, but this practice almost ceased to be after heavy machinery came to gather the food. Now, gleaners are quite often the destitute who gather the leftovers of the harvest in order to add to their meager diets. However, there are also those who glean because the activity was passed down in their blood or it is something they enjoy doing.

Traveling from vineyards to potato fields, apple orchards to the urban sprawl, and the seaside to museums, Varda's documentary encompasses the waste that is common in capitalist societies and how many farmers, winemakers, store owners prefer the excess to rot, spoil, and be thrown away instead of being used to help the down and out. However, the mood of the film is not entirely dark, because Varda does a wonderful job of depicting the beauty of castoff items and how some individuals, the castoffs of society, make due in a society that would prefer them just to disappear.

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Somber, elegiac...

Enjoyed this very much. Again, this is one of those films that won't work for you if you've only grown up on typical Hollywood fair. This has it's own tempo and visual language. It's best viewed with an open mind. Trust the filmaker and relax and enjoy/learn from this documentary. At times its touching, sad, enlightening. This isn't just about people surviving as scavengers. That's some of it, but it's also about people making art from left objects/trash, and some have philosophical views on the waste our society produces. Also, I really enjoyed the asides about the filmakers aging. There is an elegiac thread woven through this, a homage to aging which is both somber and clear-eyed. I highly recommend it.

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Artistically done

At one point in this unusual and very interesting documentary by French New Wave director Agnes Varda (born, 1928!) she ties it together by showing art made from "gleaned" articles--that is, trash thrown away and made into objects of art by artists.

Of course it is trite to recall that "one man's trash is another man's treasure," but it is so. How dearly archeologists love ancient midden sites, and how much we can learn about the ancients from their trash. But Varda is here to show us that we can also learn a lot about modern people from what they throw away, and from what is gleaned, and from the gleaners themselves. I thought the guy who ate (grazed almost) as he went through the market place after closing was interesting. Clearly going through the trash is something instinctive with humans: no doubt it comes from our prehistoric past when we were hunters and gatherers.

The main focus here is on gleaning fruits and vegetables left behind by mechanized pickers. It is interesting to note that there are laws going back hundreds of years that regulate gleaners. (Varda puts a French lawyer on camera to quote some relevant law.) I was fascinated to see that there are dumpster divers in France. In America dumpster diving has been a big deal since at least the sixties. Today there are Web sites devoted to dumpster diving, and I personally know some people who dumpster dive for fun and profit. It was also interesting to see just which fruits and vegetable are gleaned from the ground and from the trees and vines and plants left after the harvest, and to hear from the people who do the gleaning. Varda shows mounds of potatoes left behind, and we learn that both potatoes too small and potatoes too big are discarded by the producers. (In America, large potatoes are not only not discarded, they bring a higher price.) Interesting too were her interviews with French gypsies and others who derive a good part of their subsistence from gleaning.

I enjoyed seeing parts of France not normally seen on the screen or by tourists. In fact in some ways this documentary could serve as a kind of travelog so widely does Varda and her camera travel about the French countryside and cities.

See this for the Grande Dame of French cinema, Agnes Varda, auteur of the innovative documentary Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961) and other films who is now 77 years old and still going strong.

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While picking through the DVD bins...

"Le glanage," French for gleaning, is more or less of a lost art. The sight of armies of bare-armed peasant women, meticulously stripping fields bare after the harvesters have passed, is surely a foregone sight, limited to romantic paintings of the 18th century.

Or is it?

Film maker Agnes Varda turns her camera lenses toward modern day gleaners--the poor, the dispossessed, the ecologically aware and the alienated--to paint a new but still somewhat romantic image of those follow along behind the parade of life, picking through its remains. TGAI might have become a tiresome anti-consumerist, anti-Big Agriculture anti-waste diatribe. But Varda has no illusions that her subjects depend for their very existence on the leavings of modern society and its mechanized agriculture. Indeed, even the laws in France, extensions of ancient law from an agricultural era, are quite friendly toward gleaners. A group of hippie anarchists who had vandalized a gleaner-unfriendly supermarket were basically let off with a warning in spite of their angry courtroom theatrics.

Varda introduces us to those who stalk the streets after dark, searching for discarded appliances to repair and resell. We meet artists whose material is junk from the trash heap, vineyard owners who justify their anti-gleaning stance as a way to maintain product integrity and profits.

And we meet Varda, who inserts herself into her film at every opportunity. Sometimes she comments on her aging, sometimes (as when she filmed herself "catching" passing trucks in her circled fingers) she seems goofily playful. This is a very French movie by a very French artist, which may be a delight or a distraction depending on your tastes.

TGAI is not a must see, but it does offer an interesting and fun look at a collection of real people who don't often earn time in front of a camera. And if you are *really* interested, which regretfully I was not, the DVD offers a one-hour sequel on the subject.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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