Gleaners & I

Dir. Agnes Varda

This research project will focus on one of Agnes Varda’s documentary: “Gleaners &
I” analysing how, why and with what effect, real-life stories and situations are used as the
basis of the film. The following critical and theoretical approaches used for this are: Modes
of documentary, discussed by Bill Nichols and essay film theory discussed by Tim Corrrigan
and Laura Rascoli will be employed.
Born in 1928 and tragically passed away in 2019, Agnes Varda was the sole female
director affiliated with the French New Wave and has managed to remain more accurate to its
true essence than many of her male counterparts. In the French New Wave era, Varda was
among the few filmmakers to incorporate the movement with documentary. Tim Corrigan
depicts her films to „provide an almost unique map of the historical movement of the essay
film from its association with French cinema of the 1950s through its continued growth and
expansion into the digital present” (Corrigan 2011:70). Gleaners and I (2000) is a film about
inhabitants who are pathologically individualistic, but despite all of its charming approach to
the social real events, it possesses a wistfulness for a time when agriculture was the most
humble and valuable crafts, not the largest of industries, similarly as a sense of nostalgia for
the kind of handheld, modest filmmaking that the New Wave filmmakers used as their
trademark. Additionally, it is a political film that demonstrates Varda's perspective, that
undermines our preconceptions of documentaries and raises questions about the prevailing
sources of knowledge. Cinematic artistry ceased to be considered an elitist profession with the
development of portable digital cameras; becoming now a widespread and inexpensive
hobby.

For the aforementioned film, The Gleaners and I, Agnes is not merely the director, but
moreover a cinematographer and voice-over narrator, hence the movie takes on the first-
person documentary approach. In this analysis I am claiming that the movie reviewed enters
the category of a reflexive documentary, as given in Bill Nichols’, Modes of Documentary. He
elaborates „this mode as rather than attend to a spoken commentary about the historical world
or follow the filmmaker in his or her engagement with other social actors, we now attend to
the filmmaker’s engagement with us, speaking not only about the historical world but also
about the problems and issues of representing it. This intensified level of reflection on what
representing the world involves distinguishes the reflexive mode from the other modes.” To
commence addressing this, I'd choose to examine the film's title. Agnes is displaying herself
as well, with the use of the personal pronoun "I", becoming a subject of the film in the same
way that the gleaners are. Agnes says in an interview with Mellisa Anderson as “another kind
of gleaning…is artistic gleaning…you pick ideas, you pick images, you pick emotions from
other people, and then you make it into a film,” (Anderson, 2001:25). Corrigan also
comments on the real-life matters shown in Varda's film: “The Gleaners and I is not, then,
simply an essay film about a community of individuals who live off the refuse and leavings of
society; rather, it quickly becomes also a subtle, sophisticated reflexive meditation on the
terms of the essayistic and its filmic practice. In this case, essayism becomes about the
struggles to think of the self within a field of death and passing, where images of self are
redeemed only as gleaned excess from the world.” (Corrigan 2011:72). She exploits the
metaphor of being a gleaner of pictures with a video recorder, associating herself to gleaners
in opposition to farmers and people employed in large film production firms. This subtle
comparison provides a comment on the film industry. The filmmaker in this case is not only
acknowledged and present in the filmic text, it is a cinematic essay with a very vivid self-
portrait that goes beyond mere signature style.

Another distinguishing feature of the reflexive mode is the documentary's

manufactured aspect, which emphasises to spectators that this is not inherently actuality but a
restructuring of it. The documentary's pretence is revealed when the spectator becomes
mindful of editing, sound recording, and so forth. It periodically discloses aspects that aren't
always readily visible. It is frequently designed to provoke people into reconsidering their
beliefs about the actual world and to add credibility to the film's constructed-assembly. This
foreshadows the film's proclivity for another reflexive mode attribute: realism representation,
which disregards the formal method of depicting the reality as well as societal preconceptions
about the nature of the world. The audience can see multiple times during the documentary
where Agnes stands in front of the camera, filming.
The viewers are initially faced with the filmmaker recreating a triumphant stance of
the gleaning lady from the original Breton artwork at the Musèe D'Arras, The Gleaner (1877),
in which she poses with a bale of wheat over her shoulder, then lowers it to the ground it to
pick up her camera. She is connected with both Breton and his proud gleaner. But she does it
with a modern twist: her digital camera, which has taken the role of both wheat and
paintbrush. "These new little cameras, they are digital, amazing. They have stroboscopic,
egotistical, and even hyper-realistic effects" (The Gleaners and I, 2000). Her gesture, on the
other hand, does not so much proclaim the dominance of the symbol over the object, or the
digital over the analogue, as it does simply offer an opinion on the actuality of evolution.

Corrigan also says „the idea of gleaning expands and contracts through the film as it
triggers other associations, concepts, and debates. In the heritage of its literary and cinematic
predecessors, the film proceeds digressively, spinning and turning the experience of gleaning
as an idea that moves from the agricultural and the psychoanalytic to the aesthetic and
political”. (Corrigan:70) The sociopolitical ramifications of this principle of diversity cannot
be overstated, since it subtly compels us to prioritise progressive ways of being. These
consequences are clearly displayed in The Gleaners and I in the scene about Alain, a guy who
survives off abandoned food and bread from the outdoor market and devotes his time to teach
literacy lessons to immigrants living in a housing project on the outskirts of Paris. The
incursion of immigrants to the town, the mastering of a foreign language are initial,
rejuvenating occurrences. Varda glorifies these individuals and proposes that such acts and
methods of living have significance not simply for the preservation of natural resources but
also for a greater lifestyle with a much larger set of socio-political circumstances. Varda's
preferred strategy of filming exemplifies the change she desires to bring to the society through
her documentary: less wasteful and more mindful to the individuals around
us.-------------------------------------------

The scenes where Varda reflects on her old age, the waning century, loss, and the
ephemerality of objects, are important aspects of this
late film in Varda's career. All of these are suggested
by what Hannah Arendt calls "natality" (Arendt,
1998:180) "My hair and my hands keep telling me that
the end is near," (The Gleaners and I, 2000)she
confides at one point. Harrod, 2009:1 says “Finding
one’s identity as a woman is a difficult thing: in
society, in private life, in one’s body. This search for
identity has a certain meaning for a woman filmmaker: it is also a search for a way of filming
as a woman [filmer en femme].” Varda starts off the documentary with a sense of the feminist
cinema: at the start of her film, reminding us that once upon a time, there were only female
glâneuses, not male glâneurs, because gathering society's leftovers was considered women's
labor — but this is a type of labor with which Varda proudly identifies her own filmmaking.
A phenomenological cinema: the film is about the world of concrete, mundane matters
experienced through the senses, not a timeless world of abstract Platonic ideals. And finally, a
political cinema: Varda and her gleaners are enmeshed in what Arendt calls "the web of
human relations — in networks of individuals who help each other to think, create, and
survive, and who are in fact defined by these reciprocal acts” (Arendt, 1998:183).

Throughout her career Varda’s interest in a specifically feminine cinema has been a
constant. She told Cinema in 1961 ‘A feminine universe. I feel this occasionally in that I am
inspired by a certain number of attractions, subjects which always draw me rather than they
would if I were a man’. Instead, she sees the recovery of the gleaning tradition as an
opportunity to ruminate on the paradoxes of little people trying to carve little spaces for
themselves out of a world that has given itself over to hugeness. No shots more exemplify the
coming together of these two traditions more than those in which the filmmaker shots her own
hands. "This film is a documentary woven from various strands: from emotions I felt when
confronted with precariousness; from the possibilities offered by the new small digital
cameras; and from the desire to film what I can see of myself--my aging hands and my gray
hair. I also wanted to express my love for painting. I had to piece it together and make sense
out of it all in the film, without betraying the social issue that I had set out to address--waste
and trash: who finds a use for it? How can one live on the leftovers of others?"
 Considering the documentary an essay film, Laura Rascaroli characterizes it as „an
experimental, hybrid form sited at the cross-roads of documentary, experimental cinema, and
art film, and is thus likely to cross boundaries between fictional and nonfictional approaches
to film-making; second, it is a highly self-reflexive genre, which asks questions on the
relationship between film and reality; and third, it is characterized by interpellation and the
direct address to the spectator.” Varda
often shoots close up grainy shots of art,
and parallel the shot of one with her old,
wrinkled hand (extremely close up), or her
graying, balding hair, paralleling the art.
Varda's self-introduction gets very intimate
and self- reflective: there is a shot in slow
motion of her lying on her sofa-bed
looking a bit concerned, a lengthy close-up
shot of her face with stroboscopic effects,
and, afterwards, a close-up of her combing thickening hair and a voice-over of her talking
about aging: “my hair and my hands keep telling me that the end is near”(Varda, 2000).
Varda shares her feelings about aging, while filming extreme close-ups of her wrinkled hands.
Such personal observations about oneself informs viewers about the filmmaker’s state of
mind and concerns during the production time, as well as provokes emotional response. In an
interview with Melissa Andersen, Varda claims, “I had the feeling that this is the camera that
would bring me back to the early short films I made in 1957 and 1958. I felt free at that time.
With new digital camera, I felt I could film myself, get involved as a filmmaker.” She also
says „ I mean I have an attitude as a filmmaker, this is not a woman who will say “can you
give me cream for my little hands because I never wear gloves. I go in the garden, I put my
hands directly in the earth, I did that all my life. Now could I do something for my poor
hands?” That has nothing to do with this, this is a
filmmaker filming herself, and seeing a kind of beauty
of the skin, because I think it has a shape, it has lines,
it’s just like a painter. I’m not into fishing for
compliments, I don’t care. And women say things like
“you’re brave.” And I say I’m not brave. I mean I enjoy
the shape of things, and the shape of things including
yourself, the wrinkles, the lines, the veins, this is the
beauty, the same thing you look at on a tree and you see how you know an old tree has these
incredible shapes. And you say “Ah, what a wonderful olive tree.” Why couldn’t you say
“What a wonderful hand”?”It revolves around the notion that art and life are intertwined, as
we see also in the constant comparisons of modern day gleaners in action and historical
portraits.

Alexandre Astruc(1968:17-48) admits that “the

cinema is quite simply becoming a means of expression: just as the other arts have done
before it, and in particular painting and the novel...it is gradually becoming a language. By
language, I mean a form in which and by which the artist can express his thoughts, however
abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary essay
or novel. That is why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of camera- stylo
(camera-pen). By it I mean that the cinema will gradually break free from... the immediate
and concrete demands of the narrative to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle
as written language”. The Gleaners is a perfect example of Millet's profound respect for the
timeless dignity of human labor. It depicts three peasant women each involved in one of the
three aspects of gleaning: searching for ears of corn, picking them up and tying them together
in a sheaf. The task was arduous but made an important contribution to the diet of rural
workers, and was one of the main tasks undertaken by French peasants at the time. The
painting's focus on the lowest ranks of rural society attracted considerable opposition from the
upper classes, who were upset by its artistic pretentiousness and its social radicalism, and
linked it with the growing Socialist movement. Furthermore, these figures, bent double and
toiling in the darkened foreground, are set against a warm pastoral background scene of
harvesters - with their haystacks, cart and sheaves of wheat - reaping a rich harvest in the corn
fields. The entire composition is in fact a commentary on the social classes of France.

Agnes makes a clear social commentary within her film. The very first shot we see
this in, is when she films herself holding an unwanted, heart-shaped potato, which will
become an important aspect in an art installation that I will discuss further on. (fig 6) It then
cuts to the image of a man gleaning over the
same potatoes. The scene creates a social
commentary on class. The thrown out potatoes
can symbolize the homeless in a sense that they
are both “outcasted” or “othered” from society
being seen as worthless. Likewise this idea
continues to develop when we see the huge
trucks on the road in which we know that are
transporting perfectly good oval-shaped potatoes
to be thrown out. The truck is the key element in wasting perfectly good products where
gleaning by the people is the response. This social commentary on class is seen symbolically
throughout the film. Here, Varda shows us real
commodities inside a real truck grasped by a real
hand (fig 5), all of which are stored in a digital
container. But they are no less tangible for so
being, and this is a key trope of Varda's film.

As already mentioned Varda often

incorporates shots of herself as the main subject,
and documents herself gleaning as the film rolls.
This film is extremely self-reflexive, however, the other subjects of the film are weaved
together in an unlikely web, and we find that she also takes an observational stance. Although
she holds our hand with her scene-by-scene narrations Varda leaves her audience with the
task of connecting her subjects.
 Drawing attention to how time and space may be manipulated by systems of
continuity or discontinuity is also a reflexive documentary particularity. On a night-time trash
collecting expedition, Varda gleans a lucite clock
with no hands, which she takes home and installs on
her mantle. She says that this handless clock will
help her to forget the passage of time, to paper it
over, and forget her increasing age. But Varda's
gesture is a mixed one, for we could instead say that
it is the hands of a clock that distract us from the
passage of time, because they avoid subjective time,
its raw experience.

Performance and performativity are key to the essay film, because the essay form
typically reflects on its own coming into being”. In one sequence, returning home after a trip
to Japan, Varda notices the growth of familiar mold stains on the ceiling. And once again, we
see hands: she shows us her aging fingers in close-up. This scene forms one of the film's
hearts. Varda films as she unpacks her souvenirs, and pauses with some postcards of a
Rembrandt self-portrait that she found on the top floor of a department store in Tokyo. Here,
the souvenir — in French, literally "the remembering" — becomes an occasion for self-
reflection in the film's present. Varda's self portrait comes to her from afar, by way of both the
seventeenth century Netherlands of Rembrandt, and contemporary Japan. The ethics of
gleaning, this scene helps us to understand, is not limited to ecology and environmentalism,
although these are obviously important aspects of it. Gleaning is not simply about saving
objects (or ourselves) from the onslaught of time. Neither is it a straightforward preservation
of beauty for history or posterity.

—------------------------

Varda takes viewers into her house at one point in the film, showing a vintage interior,
drippings in the ceiling, and mildew. This rather candour, combined with Varda's overall
imaginative and unique approach to the world. The "horrors of her hand up close" (Gleaners
and I, 2000) she finds extraordinary, and mould on the roof she equates to abstract artworks,
lead to her perception as a sympathetic host. This affects the overall ambiance of the
documentary, as well as viewers' reactions to her vocal statements, and obscures the movie's
self-reflexivity.

The documentary culminates with Varda making a visit to see another painting of
gleaners, Hédouin's Gleaners Fleeing the Storm (1852). She shows the artwork set against a
wall after it has been recovered from storage, and the canvas buckles in the wind. The picture
is protected from harm in storage, where it is shielded from both tangible and metaphorical
storms. With this aspect, storage is antithetical to waste; it promises to be an environmentally
wise option. Nonetheless, a piece in storage is unnoticed, undamaged, and out of motion.
Taking an art piece out of an archive is a method of resurrecting it into reality – of giving it a
new beginning. Hence, Varda's delight at seeing this precious artwork exposed to the
elements is understandable, as its release from the storage, marks a type of rebirth into the
world.

Considering the movie's consumption, different metaphors, symbols, weaker discourse

intelligibility, and poetry improvisations permit for limitless perspectives, thus the audience
must therefore "glean" for the meaning. The film premiered at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival
and was named best French film of the year by the French Union of Film Critics (in addition
to several other festival honours and awards around the world). The French title, Les
Glaneurs et la Glaneuse, translates to "The Gleaners and the Gleaneress," which is more
accurate than the American term. Inadvertently, the film has ignited political debates over
reusability and capital excess, casting a critical eye on waste. Varda explores the interplay
between art and life, as she has in numerous of her previous works. Life, she believes, should
not be squandered, and she realises that the possibilities and potential for the smallest things
in it are limitless.
 The Gleaners and I (2000) premiered on television, garnered a large audience, and
generated heated conversations about the topics it addressed. Nonetheless, almost fourteen
years after the film's publication, the European Commission announced 2014 to be a year
combating food waste in Europe, formally emphasising the situation on a higher level.
According to the European Commission, over 100 million tonnes of food are wasted in the
EU each year (as of 2014), with the figure predicted to rise. In France that year, the grocery
operator Intermarché introduced the 'Inglorious Fruits & Vegetables' promotion, which sold
misshapen fruits and roots at a lower price in supermarkets. Varda was so much more
involved with principles and individual lives than with capitalism. As a consequence, she
depended on facts and storylines that elicited powerful emotional reactions. She addressed
people who the audience saw on the streets every day and revealed their narratives, civilising
them. Varda produces a low-budget film that does not fail to be close to the people and their
issues in a country with one of the most distinguished movie theatres in the world, where
there are numerous governmental programmes that fund films and shows (“Avance sur
recettes” by Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée was one of the main fund
sources for the French new wave filmmakers).

Finally, I would like to mention Agnes Varda's final period of her profession, which
corresponded with a diagnosis of macular degeneration, when she transformed herself as a
visual artist. This would have been her third life, she said (after her first as a photographer and
later as a filmmaker). She enjoyed telling people that she was no longer an ageing filmmaker,
but instead a youthful visual artist. In reality, she continued producing movies while
conceptualising her art installations.
 Patatutopia, a three-screen video installation, was Agnès's first showing as a visual
artist at the 2003 Venice Biennale. Close-up video footage of blown-up potatoes in various
states of degradation have been included. The focal picture depicts an enormous heart-shaped
potato that has proceeded to vanish and sprout. Agnès created her first work of art using heart-
shaped potatoes in 1953, through her photograph Pomme de terre coeur. She was overjoyed
to uncover them in a field, thrown off as deformed, while producing The Gleaners and I
(2000). She considered them a portrayal of her inner self.

She helps to bring the heart-shaped potato to life in the Venice Biennale's centre of the
composition. It contracts and relaxes like any live creature's cardiac muscle. The music in the
background tries to emulate the sound of breathing. A video of additional blown-up, heart-
shaped potatoes is displayed in the left panel. They're creased more than the one in the
installation's centrepiece. Longer, greener sprouts crawl along the edges of potatoes, an
inexorable process of life and death. The right screen displays a video of potatoes in a later
phase of maturation / decomposition. Bulbs have grown into extended roots that encircle and
appear to drag the potatoes into another dimension. It conjures death so profoundly that it's
unsettling. In front of the screen panel, 1,500 pounds of potatoes are scattered across the floor.
In accordance with the concept, Agnès donned a potato costume to the premiere.
Biography:

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998.

Anderson, M. & Varda, A. (2001). The Modest Gesture of the Filmmaker: An

Interview with Agnès Varda. Cinéaste, 26(4), 24–27.

Asrenjuk, L. (2016) ‘to speak, to hold, to live by the image’: Notes in the Margins of the New
Videographic Tendency in Papazian, E, & Eades, C (eds) 2016, The Essay Film : Dialogue,
Politics, Utopia, Columbia University Press, New York.

Alexandre Astruc, The Birth of a New Avant- Garde: La Caméra-Stylo (1948) quoted in
Graham (1968:17-18)

Breton, J. (1877) The Gleaner. [Oil on canvas] Arras: Museum of Fine Arts

Callenbach, Ernest. "The Gleaners and I." Film Quarterly 56:2 (Winter 2002): 46-49.

Corrigan, T. (2011), The Essay Film : From Montaigne, aner Marker, in History of the Essay
Film Oxford University Press

Gleaners and I (2000) Directed by Varda, A. [DVD] France: Cinè-tamaris

Harrod, Mary (2009) Revisiting the French New Wave. The Left Bank National Film Theatre,
London
Hèdouin, P. E. (1852) Gleaners Fleeing Before the Storm. [Oil on canvas] Villefranche:
Museum of Villefranche-sur-Saône

Kline, TJ (ed.) 2013, Agnes Varda : Interviews, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson.
Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [6 December 2022].

Millet, J (1857) The Gleaners. [Oil on canvas] Paris: Musée D’Orsay

Nichols, Bill (2017) Introduction to Documentary, Third Edition. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press. 

Rascaroli, L. (2016) ‘The Idea of the Essay Film’, in Papazian, E, & Eades, C (eds) 2016, The
Essay Film : Dialogue, Politics, Utopia, Columbia University Press, New York

Rascaroli, Laura (2009) ‘Performance in and of the Essay film: Jean-Luc Godard plays Jean-
Luc Godard in Notre musique’ Studies in French Cinema, 9:1, 49-61

List of illustrations: