The Gleaners and I

Synopsis: Gleaning is the practice of collecting what is left after the harvest. Agnes Varda examines the notion of gleaning on many levels, including the way in which many homeless city dwellers "glean" food from dumpsters.

Reality television has provided us with a new way of viewing "the real world". At one extreme it satisfies our natural curiosity, and at the other distorts our sense of what "reality"is. In this time of deconstructing text and image, we are all now pretty much clear that what is presented as "reality" is at best merely one point of view. In The Gleaners and I, Agnes Varda presents a view of her chosen subject in a way that is respectful and yet at the same time unafraid to break the rules.

Her inspiration is Les Glaneuses (1867) a painting by Jean-Francois Millet in which three women collect leftover wheat from a freshly harvested field. This image is enough to lead Varda on a journey across France as she searches out the remnants of gleaners from the old world, and their contemporary counterparts. With her digital video recorder in hand, she takes advantage of being able to film unobtrusively. There is a sense that the way in which the film unfolds for the audience, matching the way in which Varda came across the many gleaners she meets on her way. It is this sense of spontaneity that causes us to become completely enthralled in her personal response. One moment she sets up an almost absurd scene of a lawyer dressed in robes standing in the middle of a bed of cabbages, and in the next includes footage from when she forgot to turn off the camera.

Although the people interviewed are in themselves enough to hold our attention, it is the combination of personal essay and political statement that offer the audience so much more than the majority of documentaries. As members of a consumer society we listen and watch as potato farmers discard potatoes that are too large or too small for the supermarket clientele, and corner stores throw out food a day or two after their use-by date. She asks one man why he scavenges for food when he can afford to buy his own. He answers that as long as there is so much waste in the world, he will continue to search garbage bins.

Varda goes so far as to suggest the making of her film is a type of gleaning, providing the viewer with a multi-layered look at a world rarely explored. It's surprising how a film about waste and leftovers can be so inspiring and heart-warming. I suspect it has something to do with the calibre of the person behind the camera.

FYI: After the international success of the film, Varda made a sequel in 2002, Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse... Deux Ans Après in which she returned to some of her original characters.

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