Agnès Varda’s film essay on gleaning explores the many implications of this ancient practice.
Gleaning—gathering food left on the fields after harvest—is an ancient tradition in Europe. In France, as we learn in the great Agnès Varda’s endearingly personal film from 2000, The Gleaners and I, gleaning is protected by law, although the laws vary in different provinces, and with different crops. Varda was intrigued not only with this practice, but with all its echoes and implications—our attitudes and policies towards waste; our ideas about property, labor and sustenance; the dumpster-diving of the homeless in the cities; artwork based on “found” objects; our relationship to objects and their utility (or lack of); and even the act of filmmaking itself, conceived as a gleaning of images from the passing, mortal world.
All these ideas spring from and lead back to the personal life and sensibility of the director herself, the only woman member of the original French “New Wave,” who died in 2019, and was in her seventies when she made this film, completely at ease in her mastery of the medium. I was going to say “in command of her art,” except that Varda’s art was all about openness, letting go, and letting the manifold aspects of life—even the accidental ones—enter and enliven the work. She spent a year touring France with her handheld camera, interviewing many gleaners, pickers, farmers and other property owners, urban scavengers, provocateurs and eccentrics, all the while seasoning her film with her own comments on art, feelings, travel, gleaning, and the increasing sense of her own mortality. It’s a film of great humor, beauty, and tenderness—a record of life that in its seemingly formless method enchants the heart and mind.
The film begins, appropriately, with Millet’s famous painting “The Gleaners.” This leads to reflections on the past that glide into portraits of the present day. When people arrive in their cars to pick up piles of potatoes—the farmers are only selling potatoes of certain shapes and sizes—Varda finds a heart-shaped one. We also see vineyards where pickers harvest the “second crop” of berries that arrive after harvest.
A lawyer is consulted. He stands in a field, the weeds coming up past the hem of his black robe, and explains the intricacies of gleaning law, dating back to the Middle Ages. After the harvest is done in France, people have the right to take what they want, even from a greenhouse. Later we meet farmers who either allow the practice or not, depending, it would seem, on their temperament. From there it is but a short leap to the survival of the homeless of the cities by living on the discarded food and objects of others.
Varda plays games of image perspective with her hands and the trucks which are passing her as she drives on the highway. At one point she forgets to turn the camera off, and ends up with footage of the lens cap waving around above the ground as she walks. Does she throw the footage away? No: in the spirit of her subject, she leaves it in the film. It’s the “dance of the lens cap.” Nothing is insignificant, nothing is too important, life is short and sad and sweet, and everything has its time in the sun, or on film.
In our time movies have come to mean massive undertakings involving millions of dollars, but in The Gleaners and I, Agnès Varda created a profoundly spiritual film, using little more than a handheld camera, a tank of gas, and….
Her genius.
