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The Gleaners and I
Apr. 15th, 2019 06:54 pmAgnes Varda died earlier this month, so in commemoration of her death I watched another one of her movies: The Gleaners and I, a documentary about, well, gleaners. Not just historical gleaners like in Millet’s famous painting, but modern-day gleaners, who glean not only from the fields but from the garbage cans behind restaurants and the trash left behind after a market, and also more metaphorical gleaners, people who scavenge the trash for objects to use and repair or to transform into art - and indeed Varda herself, using her new hand-held digital camera to glean images from the teeming bounty that the world offers.
It’s an unexpectedly fascinating movie. A few highlights:
1. The winery where the French chronophotographer Etienne-Jules Marey built a small stone tower in which to hide his camera so he could use it to take time-lapse photographs of passing animals and study their movements. “He built a photography castle,” Julie commented. We agreed that seemed like a peak French moment.
...but probably not as French as the moment when Varda returns home from a trip to discover a that a leak in her ceiling has spread mold over the corner of one room, and she starts photographing it and comparing the patterns of the mold to the work of certain modern artists.
2. The gleaners gathering the oysters after a storm has ripped them from their beds and washed them onto the beach, and each one Varda interviews has a different understanding about the law that governs how much they’re allowed to take and how close they can get to the oyster beds.
3. The lawyer Varda interviews about the French law of gleaning, standing in a field with his red law book and his black law robe with its white scarf, declaiming the laws about gleaning as he gleans tomatoes from the ground.
The whole documentary is just full of fascinating moments like this. I was surprised when it came to an end, and indeed rather disappointed that it ended so soon. Couldn't it just keep going?
It’s an unexpectedly fascinating movie. A few highlights:
1. The winery where the French chronophotographer Etienne-Jules Marey built a small stone tower in which to hide his camera so he could use it to take time-lapse photographs of passing animals and study their movements. “He built a photography castle,” Julie commented. We agreed that seemed like a peak French moment.
...but probably not as French as the moment when Varda returns home from a trip to discover a that a leak in her ceiling has spread mold over the corner of one room, and she starts photographing it and comparing the patterns of the mold to the work of certain modern artists.
2. The gleaners gathering the oysters after a storm has ripped them from their beds and washed them onto the beach, and each one Varda interviews has a different understanding about the law that governs how much they’re allowed to take and how close they can get to the oyster beds.
3. The lawyer Varda interviews about the French law of gleaning, standing in a field with his red law book and his black law robe with its white scarf, declaiming the laws about gleaning as he gleans tomatoes from the ground.
The whole documentary is just full of fascinating moments like this. I was surprised when it came to an end, and indeed rather disappointed that it ended so soon. Couldn't it just keep going?
