The Gleaners and I
Les glaneurs et la glaneuse
Agnès Varda (2000)
By coincidence, I saw The Gleaners and I immediately after La grande bouffe. Agnès Varda’s documentary was a restorative. Unlike the suicidal gourmandisers of Marco Ferreri’s film, the people who feature in Varda’s are often have-nots, at least in material terms. The chief characteristics of Varda’s style and outlook in The Gleaners and I – humanity, economy, imagination – are also the polar opposite of those expressed in the direction of La grande bouffe. The subjects of Varda’s film are just as the title indicates but the gleaners in evidence are remarkably various. The work is beautifully structured yet it’s also a continuing journey of discovery for the film-maker – and her audience.
Varda includes a range of cultural reference points but The Gleaners and I never feels remotely academic. An elderly winegrower quotes the sixteenth-century poet Joachim du Bellay (‘Like the gleaner who, walking step by step, gathers the remains of what falls behind the harvester’) and Varda applauds the man’s knowing Du Bellay’s words by heart. Most of the references are art-historical (or to art of the present day – in the work of contemporary artists whose compositions incorporate recycled materials). Key paintings include Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners (1857), Edmond Hédouin’s Gleaners Fleeing the Storm (also 1857) and Jules Breton’s The Gleaner (1879). These nineteenth-century paintings afford a natural point of comparison with Varda’s images of present-day countryside gleaning of corn and root vegetables but she visits vineyards and seashores and the city too. (The hauls include, inter alia, grapes, clams and oysters at low tide, perishable goods rejected by supermarkets, fridges and ovens.) The Breton painting allows a different comparison. The picture is unusual, in an art history context, in depicting the gleaner as a lone figure rather than as one of a group. This enables Varda to contrast traditional rural gleaning with rooting through litter bins etc at the end of the twentieth century – a normally solitary occupation. And while gleaners on the walls of art galleries are nearly always women, urban gleaning has now become a unisex activity. There’s a crucial reference to the history of cinema too. Varda is keen to interview a winegrower known for his particularly enlightened approach towards the gleaners of his produce. He turns out to be a descendant of Etienne-Jules Marey, the inventor of ‘chronophotography’, and the connection seems to eclipse what we thought was Varda’s original interest in his relative. (She is delighted by the possibilities of the lightweight digital camera that she used to make this film. There’s an amusing moment comprising accidental footage – the result of forgetting to turn the camera off – which she accompanies with a jazz score and calls ‘the dance of the lens cap’.)
Marey’s descendant is a good example of how this film takes Agnès Varda in unexpected directions. (Jean Laplanche, a viticulturist who was also a well-known psychoanalyst, is another.) Varda is fascinated by people and their appearance in The Gleaners and I is rarely subjugated to the director’s preconceived idea of their role in the story she’s telling. It’s not a surprise that a left-wing film-maker gives a sympathetic hearing to gypsies, the unemployed and environmental activists, all of whom provide compelling interviews. What’s more striking about Varda’s approach is that, when she goes into a two-star Michelin restaurant, you’re primed – and she persuades you that she too is primed – to deplore excess and waste. She finds instead that the head chef, a still young man who went gleaning as a boy, forages daily for ingredients and takes care not to waste a thing. Of three lawyers who appear in the film, two are genial and Varda acknowledges that the third, in laying down the law, seems not unreasonable. The two genial ones are a middle-aged man and a younger woman. He stands in a field, she in a city street. Each wears a red gown and is armed with a red book – the penal code that enshrines the laws regarding gleaning and – an important distinction, as the female lawyer notes – the taking possession of discarded objects.
Varda asks the male lawyer if he think it’s right that the relatively affluent, who don’t need to glean, are allowed, provided that they observe the rules that also govern the genuinely indigent, to do so as a leisure activity. His reply is that, if these better off people want to glean, they have some kind of need to glean. Whether Varda’s silence indicates acceptance of what the lawyer says may be arguable – but we don’t hear her argue with him. She naturally likes people: there are those in The Gleaners and I who don’t make a major contribution to any kind of political argument but who are simply delightful interviewees – like a middle-aged couple who now run a bar and who describe their first date. Although her commentary includes disparaging remarks about, say, fruit-growers who forbid gleaning on their land, Varda is warm and friendly towards most of the people she actually meets – or, at least, those whom she has appear and talk on camera.
She concludes with what she describes as two particular highlights for her – a choice that seems up to sum up the humanist breadth and the cultural aspect of her film-making. One of the highlights is an urban gleaner – a man who looks to be in his thirties. Varda observes his daily routine, which strikes her as particularly systematic. It turns out that the man is a science graduate, very knowledgeable about the dietary benefits of the discarded food that he selects on the streets of Paris. He’s opted for this way of life. He has a job albeit one that earns him very little, selling papers outside the Gare de Montparnasse. He lives in a hostel. At the end of his working day, he returns there and spends several hours each evening giving French lessons, for free, to Malian and Senegalese immigrants in the hostel. Varda is impressed, not to say humbled, by his moral integrity. The second highlight is her visit to an art gallery, to watch two of its staff bringing out of long-time storage the original of Hédouin’s Gleaners Fleeing the Storm.
Varda has an admirably light touch and doesn’t push the environmental apocalypse theme obviously (except, perhaps, in the contribution of two French rappers on the soundtrack). But Hédouin’s painting naturally shows a threatening sky and there is in this turn-of-the-millennium film, as well as a lot of humanity and humour, a quality of ominousness – perhaps this quality registers more strongly now than it did in 2000. The analogy between documentarian and gleaner is obvious enough, especially given Varda’s method here, but the end-of-the-world element of the piece also relates at a more personal level to the glaneuse. (It’s a pity the autobiographical element is so much more obvious in the English title of the film but I can’t see how that could been avoided in translating the French.) It’s essential to Varda’s purpose that we are always aware of her identity – an identity transmitted through images that include, and words that refer to, her own home and her own person.
Gleaners collect what’s left when the best bits have been harvested or consumed and Varda is acutely aware of her advancing years. (She had just turned seventy when she made this film, the best part of a decade before The Beaches of Agnès.) One of the rejected objects that she picks up in her own urban gleaning is a clock without hands. It appeals to her for its eccentricity and because it arrests the passage of time. The clock becomes another ornament in her home. She’s clearly attached to the place (and her cats); she’s also drawn to observing – and cherishing – its signs of structural wear and tear and shabby decor. When she films her own hair and, especially, her hands, she’s appalled as the person whose body they’re part of but fascinated by them as an artist. The words ‘hand-held camera’ take on a new meaning in The Gleaners and I.
15 July 2015