The Gleaners and I
Table of contents
At a glance...
- Directed by Agnès Varda
- Released in 2000
- Runtime 82 minutes
- Watched at home
- Final feelings: I am in love!
Gleaning Agnès
You might be like me, and watch this film for the first time to learn what gleaning actually means. Yes, as it turns out, gleaning is not just an abstract synonym for learning or discovering something. To glean is to engage in a physical and historical act, to take from bounty, to skim from surplus, to reclaim from what is left over. Humankind's first experience with bounty was from the earth itself, so it makes sense that our classical western depictions of gleaning are paintings of women pulling leftover sheafs of wheat from the remains of the harvest in the fields. The Gleaners and I is deeply interested in drawing from this historical thread to the present day, and in doing so begging several questions. Are there modern-day gleaners? Does global capital have room for such a taking from the earth? And what other excesses of our technological future might there be a bounty waiting to be reclaimed?
Inversely, I am left pondering a few unanswerable questions myself at the conclusion of the film. Something I am struck by is the perfect timing of The Gleaners and I, which released at the turn of the millenium. By filming a documentary with consumer handicam technology, Agnès is inexplicably signposting a huge turning point in our relationship to cameras, media, surveillance, and technology. She is right in that sweet spot where digitization has started dramatically improving the accessibility of filmmaking and photography, but before the great forces in our world have fully exploited that technology to insidiously invade every moment of our private lives. Did Agnès know the future? Could she see how the year 2000 might imminently precede an inflection point for criminality and securitization in western society1? Could she guess that such a change would have been uniquely enabled by the very technology she held in her right hand throughout this movie?
I'll never know for sure, but I have a suspicion Agnès was not the type of woman to arbitrarily express herself through novelty. Watching the film, I get the impression from her narration that she must have been an art curator, or otherwise formally educated in fine art. Several times during this film, she recognizes and recalls artwork from the canon of art history and uses that knowledge, which is perhaps likely to be esoteric to the audience, to elevate the deeply humble handicam footage we are watching. At the same time, I get the impression that she must have been a fine still photographer herself. The way she declares formally the separation between herself behind the camera and her limbs and vision in front of it is the kind of sense one can only get from practiced photography.2 Ah, there it is, a quick check of Wikipedia shows both suspicions are true.
Contradictory Forms
The Gleaners and I is a perfect title for this film because it encompasses both axes that motivate Varga. We are floating through layers of memoir and essay in this piece. It is informational, yes, but always returning to the creator herself and her relationship to the unavoidable forces of age, decay, and death. Today we might call this a video essay à la travel vlog, and categorizing it that way might make this seem mundane. But what Varda constructs here is a magical little contradiction. Portable digital video recording technology was just starting to take off in the late 90s and early 2000s. My family took all our home videos on a camcorder just like the one she uses here. In contrast, we're all carrying around machines in our pockets that record video footage in orders of magnitude higher resolution with infinitely larger storage capacities. And so from this standpoint, I watch this movie and feel deep inspiration. I already have all the tools at my disposal to make a movie like this. I could do this! I've got things to say, I've got a camera beyond the wildest dreams of Agnès in 2000, I should get out of my house and start filming right now!
But at the same time, there are some really beautiful and moving images here, images which do not simply fall into the lap of anyone behind a camera. And the editing in this surprised me and often delighted me. The lens cap sequence is so silly, it really is Agnès gleaning from her own wasted footage. The rap voice-overs are both funny and pointed. There is an overall sense of composition in the image and the edit that makes this flow3. Gleaners is a well constructed piece of cinema, and it's deeply personal, which means it is truly one-of-a-kind. It is more aspirational than inspirational because underneath its certain lo-fi veneer is the foundation of monumental artistry, of which there can be no substituting with novelty or aesthetic when making one's own imitation. I actually think a great point of comparison here is with the character Thierry from Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop, who inversely has such an abundance of amazing footage of street artists in France, shot in the exact same time period on a similarly cheap medium. But there is obviously no comparison between Thierry and Agnès Fucking Varda, who with 1/1000th the amount of taped footage is able to actually build something astonishingly beautiful. A poser like Thierry can only con his way through advertisement, and as I noted in my review of that film a while back, the rest of Exit feels appropriately shallow in relation.
Gleaning and me
And what of the gleaners, you might ask me. Well, I'm happy to report that although this movie is too beautifully personal to truly feel like an achievable point of inspiration4, the information you learn about gleaning as a whole and its relationship to industry and excess is downright exhilarating. I have always had a bone to pick with modern thrifting culture and its transition into yet another source of untapped value for capital extraction (think of those infuriating furniture flippers, think about how every Goodwill sucks now and all the good stuff goes up for auction on eBay to maximize revenue, think about how you're paying markups on stuff people got rid of for free)5. So much of the anti-consumption culture in my life has been fundamentally reformist in nature, and upon closer inspection obviously fails to meet its own aspirations. "Reduce, reuse, recycle", sin taxes on plastic bags, recycling as a concept in general have all completely failed to actually deliver on substantially reducing waste, decreasing consumption, or any other goal in service of "saving the planet". It's just like the plastic reuse exhibit at the children's museum in the film itself. In the status quo, we do not have the imagination required to meaningfully relate to our own waste. Even our recycled trash must first be curated, polished, and refined before it is fit to be seen by children and families. Can we say that any of those plastics are even trash anymore?
Learning about gleaning and its expressions in modern day dumpster-diving, salvaging, reclamation and street hauling therefore feels like a breath of fresh air. The radical break lies in the refusal to ask permission. Instead, it is enough to simply pick, pluck, and take from excess, whether that's food dumped in a field or produce tossed in the dumpster. Whether it's rotting floorboards repurposed for art or broken refrigerators hauled in and repaired from the street, in all cases, the bounty is intended to rot and decay, its continued existence as an acceptable Object is impermissible. To glean today is thus to awaken from the mirage of scarcity. Critically, it is Varga's genius to produce these images in such a vernacular form that compels the viewer to place herself amongst these beautiful people. Indeed, Agnès opens by positing that gleaning comes from the pose, the very physical stance of stooping over to grasp from the ground. This posture replicates itself through paintings both beloved and forgotten, and then continues through generations forward to these strange and carefree acts of repossession. How could I not think of myself, my own gleanings past, my own future defiant bend at the waist and reach of the arm?
As the credits rolled I was reminded of this past summer when my parents took a big trip to Japan and China. Before they left, my mom insisted I send her a gift wishlist, and I, feeling clever, asked her to send me her ticket stubs. That way she could save her money and spend it on herself to go visit places, and I would get a little memento in exchange. I was thrilled that this idea satisfied her and waited expectantly. Imagine my surprise when I received a letter in the mail several weeks later containing a bunch of paper receipts from 7-11's, train stations, and grocery stores. Instead of romantic stubs that could go in a scrapbook, I got faded thermal paper scraps that looked like they belonged in the trash.
In retrospect, maybe I should have clarified on what a ticket stub meant, or maybe the plight of digital-only ticketing has hit Japan as well. I laughed then and I laugh now, only now I see that this, too, is something my mother has gleaned for me. Perhaps my father's insistence on buying cheap film SLRs at garage sales is a form of gleaning. Perhaps, when I rummage and pack some of those cameras in my suitcase to take home, I am gleaning from the end of his harvest. My heart swells with a feeling of connection to this gesture, this pose, this act, which has always been there for me. There is always something within reach to be gleaned, and that is a beautiful thing to learn.
Now that you've read this, have you gleaned something from me?
Maybe this is a place where my Americentrism shows up, I don't actually know the extent of how 9/11 and the War on Terror changed France the way it changed the United States. But I know that all these nations share intelligence and all their mainstream political parties champion similar kinds of securitization. So, I think it's fair to say that the date of this film does still carry significance, and that watching this film now might elicit similar feelings in a French audience that it does to this American viewer.
All traditional photography involves some kind of self-alienation. Probably until the advent of selfies and fully-articulating LCD back-panels, photography has traditionally meant the loss of one's self in one form or another. Any good street photographer will tell you that you can't take good photos while moving self-consciously through a public space. If you consider the form of the large format camera or the film SLR, there is no way to take a portrait of yourself that both lets you see behind the viewfinder and in front of the lens at the same time. Even if you take a picture in front of a mirror, you either obscure your face with the camera, or abandon its viewpoint completely by guessing while holding it at your waist. Even with a waist-level viewfinder, you still need to choose where to look at the decisive moment the shutter is fired. Try as you might, you necessarily gain a sense of your self-outside-yourself behind the camera. Every shot of Agnès filming her left hand while holding the camera up to her eye with her right feel so deeply photographic in essence. She may be experiencing a digital novelty, but she is expressing a fundamental anxiety that comes from the production of the Image.
This seems to be as good a place as any to just say that both this film and Fat Girl have sequences about driving around big rig trucks on the freeway, but in this film we are left to distantly empathize with the plight of the driver as a worker, while in Fat Girl we are meant to see the truck as an intrusion of domineering patriarchy into the very roads we drive on. Both interesting ideas, though I know which sequence and which idea I enjoyed watching more.
Here I go contradicting myself because obviously this film inspired me deeply. I started drafting a zine about this movie, I'm launching this site and announcing it on letterboxd because of the review for this movie. But also at the beginning of this film I had a sense of, "I could make a movie like this", and by the end my thought was, "this movie is so profoundly beautiful it is inimitable", and that is what I am trying to highlight most here.
Buy Nothing groups seem better on instinct, but in my experience it depends heavily on the established culture within the group. In groups coming from already well-resourced and well-connected networks, the buy nothing group functions really well. People are eager to both give and take from the group. In my case, most groups I can access are either so big that there is too much overhead to easily give and take from the group, or the groups are small but don't have an existing established culture of connection. I have stopped posting in buy nothing groups altogether because too many times the unpaid nature of the exchange means people have no commitment to actually following through. In any case, my narrow experience so far indicates that something like buy nothing only reifies the existing communal character of the group that is engaging in it. It also bears mentioning that these groups being exclusively online exclude people in a way that something like gleaning inherently does not.